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84“Ex nihilo nihil fit,” goes the classic adage: nothing comes from nothing. Parmenides used the Principle of Sufficient Reason to argue that there was no such thing as change: If there was change, why did it happen when it happened rather than earlier or later? “Nothing happens in vain, but everything for a reason and under necessitation,” claimed Leucippus. Saint Thomas insisted in the.
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609Nestes Modes, ’Qua’ and the IncarnationEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 6 (2): 65--80. 2014.A nested mode ontology allows one to make sense of apparently contradictory Christological claims such as that Christ knows everything and there are some things Christ does not know.
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84A recombinationist like the earlier Armstrong (1989) claims that logically possible worlds are recombinations of items found in the actual world, with some items reduplicated if need be and others deleted. An immediate consequence of this is that if an alien property is a property that could only be defined in terms of fundamental properties that are actually uninstantiated, then it is logically impossible that an alien property be instantiated as no recombination of the items in the actual wor…Read more
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50SpinozaÂ’s God is a being with infinite attributes, each of which expresses infinite essence. Does this mean that God has infinitely many attributes, each of which expresses infinite essence, or does God simply have attributes, each of which is infinite and expresses infinite essence? SpinozaÂ’s argumentation in Letter 9 and the Scholium to Prop. I.10 clearly indicates that it is not just each individual attribute that is infinite, but there are in some sense infinitely many of them. This would seem …Read more
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13Lies and Dishonest EndorsementsProceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 84 213-222. 2010.I shall discuss the problem of the definition of lying and the formulation of the duty of truthtelling. I shall argue that the morality of assertion is a special case of the morality of endorsement, and that a criterion of adequacy for an account of lying is that it handles certain cases of dishonest endorsement as well. Standardviews of lying fail to do so. I shall offer an account of the duty of honest endorsement in terms of the intention to avoid falsehood. But, in the end, we may simplyhave…Read more
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297A response to Oppy, and to Davey and CliftonReligious Studies 38 (1): 89-99. 2002.Our paper ‘A new cosmological argument’ gave an argument for the existence of God making use of the weak Principle of Sufficient Reason (W-PSR) which states that for every proposition p, if p is true, then it is possible that there is an explanation for p. Recently, Graham Oppy, as well as Kevin Davey and Rob Clifton, have criticized the argument. We reply to these criticisms. The most interesting kind of criticism in both papers alleges that the W-PSR can be justifiably denied by the atheist, a…Read more
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58Conjunctions, Disjunctions and Lewisian Semantics for CounterfactualsSynthese 156 (1): 33-52. 2007.Consider the reasonable axioms of subjunctive conditionals if p → q1 and p → q2 at some world, then p → at that world, and if p1 → q and p2 → q at some world, then → q at that world, where p → q is the subjunctive conditional. I show that a Lewis-style semantics for subjunctive conditionals satisfies these axioms if and only if one makes a certain technical assumption about the closeness relation, an assumption that is probably false. I will then show how Lewisian semantics can be modified so as…Read more
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14Toner on Judgment and EternalismFaith and Philosophy 25 (3): 317-321. 2008.Patrick Toner has argued that eternalism, the doctrine that all times are ontologically on par, conflicts with the Catholic view of judgment as based on the state of the soul at death. For, he holds, it is arbitrary that judgment should be based on what happened at some particular time, unless, as presentism holds, that time is the only that really exists. I shall argue that his argument fails because the eternalist can say that judgment is simultaneous with the state of soul that is being judge…Read more
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284Incompatibilism provedCanadian Journal of Philosophy 43 (4): 430-437. 2013.(2013). Incompatibilism proved. Canadian Journal of Philosophy. ???aop.label???
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37Professor Lucas' second epistemic wayInternational Journal for Philosophy of Religion 45 (3): 189-194. 1999.
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177Another Step in Divine Command DialecticsFaith and Philosophy 26 (4): 432-439. 2009.Consider the following three-step dialectics. (1) Even if God (consistently) commanded torture of the innocent, it would still be wrong. Therefore Divine Command Metaethics (DCM) is false. (2) No: for it is impossible for God to command torture of the innocent. (3) Even if it is impossible, there is a non-trivially true per impossibile counterfactual that even if God (consistently) commanded torture of the innocent, it would still be wrong, and this counterfactual is incompatible with DCM. I s…Read more
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131The essential divine-perfection objection to the free-will defenceReligious Studies 44 (4): 433-444. 2008.The free-will defence (FWD) holds that the value of significant free will is so great that God is justified in creating significantly free creatures even if there is a risk or certainty that these creatures will sin. A difficulty for the FWD, developed carefully by Quentin Smith, is that God is unable to do evil, and yet surely lacks no genuinely valuable kind of freedom. Smith argues that the kind of freedom that God has can be had by creatures, without a risk of creatures doing evil. I shall s…Read more
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31It is widely accepted that divine creation of human beings is compatible with evolutionary theory, except perhaps in regard of the human soul, and that neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory provides an explanation of speciation and of complex features of organisms that undercuts Paley-style teleological arguments, whether or not the evolutionary mechanisms are truly random or deterministic. I will argue that a plausible understanding of the doctrine of creation of human beings is either logically or…Read more
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7Maritain Society Group Meeting, Eastern APA, 2006.