-
5Assume for simplicity that human mental states are constituted by brain states (if dualism holds, copying of brain states may need to be replaced with copying of soul states). According to psychological continuity theories of personal identity, if the personality and memories of a human person A were copied into the brain of B while the brain of A were destroyed, and no other copies were made, then A would survive in the B-body and would be identical with the post-operative person occupying the …Read more
-
23One Body: OverviewRoczniki Filozoficzne 63 (3): 7-19. 2015.I offer a reading of my book One Body on Christian sexual ethics as an application of Inference to Best Explanation based on theological and philosophical data.
-
498Agodelian ontological argument improved even moreIn Miroslaw Szatkowski (ed.), Ontological Proofs Today, Ontos Verlag. pp. 50--203. 2012.
-
50The Cosmos as a Work of ArtProceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 94 205-213. 2020.I shall defend Augustine’s holistic aesthetic response to the problem of evil by considering the variety of ways in which our vision of the cosmos is limited and how this is similar to the kinds of limitations on viewing a work of art that would make negative criticism unreasonable. At the same time, I identify an interesting asymmetry: we may be justified in making positive, but not negative, judgments about the creator’s skill on the basis of a mere partial perception.
-
41In simplified form, the argument that I am defending holds that the incompatibility of our freedom with determinism follows from the conjunction of (1) a plausible supervenience claim which says that whether a human agent is free depends only on what happens during the agent’s life and (2) a freedom-cancellation principle of Richard Gale which says that an agent is not free if all of her actions are intentionally brought about by another agent. Improved versions of (1) and (2) are also considere…Read more
-
20Let S be the set of all entities that exist (or have existed). Define the relation <= on S by saying that x<=y if and only y is a cause of x. By verbal fiat we will define x to be a cause of x for all x in S (if we do not accept this definition, our assumptions will be slightly different; however, it is clear that the existence of x is necessary and sufficient for the existence of x, and that the existence of x is never strictly temporally posterior to that of x, so calling x a cause of itself i…Read more
-
152A Deflationary Theory Of Diachronic IdentityAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 90 (1). 2012.Substantive theories of diachronic identity have been offered for different kinds of entities. The kind of entity whose diachronic identity has received the most attention in the literature is person, where such theories as the psychological theory, the body theory, the soul theory, and animalism have been defended. At the same time, Wittgenstein's remark that ?to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing at …Read more
-
17In the first chapter of Romans, Paul tells us that the power and deity of God are evident from what he has created. One reading of this is that there is an argument from the content of what has been created. Thus, the Book of Wisdom, which may well have been the source of Paul’s ideas here, says that “from the greatness and beauty of created things their original author, by analogy, is seen” (13:5, NAB). This is a kind of teleological or design argument. But one might also argue instead from gen…Read more
-
4614 Ex nihilo nihil fit: Arguments New and Old for the Principle of Sufficient ReasonIn Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O'Rourke & Harry Silverstein (eds.), Causation and Explanation, Bradford. pp. 4--291. 2007.
-
45Lies 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
-
510A new cosmological argumentReligious Studies 35 (4): 461-476. 1999.We will give a new cosmological argument for the existence of a being who, although not proved to be the absolutely perfect God of the great Medieval theists, also is capable of playing the role in the lives of working theists of a being that is a suitable object of worship, adoration, love, respect, and obedience. Unlike the absolutely perfect God, the God whose necessary existence is established by our argument will not be shown to essentially have the divine perfections of omnipotence, omnisc…Read more
-
46A 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..
-
57Problems with pluralsOxford Studies in Metaphysics 9. 2015.Plural quantification, often used to evade Russell paradoxes, will lead back to them, given certain assumptions about propositions. This chapter provides a more generalized version of the path to paradox by showing that any theory that makes possible the construction of an appropriate packaging relation falls prey to a Russell paradox. It gives examples of widely-held metaphysical theories that require such a relation. It shows that the paradoxes that can result from plural quantification are mo…Read more
-
184Possibility is not consistencyPhilosophical Studies 172 (9): 2341-2348. 2015.We shall use Gödel’s Second Incompleteness Theorem to show that consistency is not possibility, and then argue that the argument does serious damage to some theories of modality where consistency plays a major but not exclusive role
-
30“We are always already thrown into concrete factual circumstances, facing possibilities that we need to come to grips with. By choosing some we exclude others, thus making them no longer possible. What we are thrown into is the past and present, and the possibilities loom ahead of us, though we may try to turn our back on them. The future is the home of the possibilities while the present and past define the circumstances in which we make our choices, circumstances we can no longer affect.”…Read more
-
34Toner 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
-
144Infinite Lotteries, Perfectly Thin Darts and InfinitesimalsThought: A Journal of Philosophy 1 (2): 81-89. 2012.One of the problems that Bayesian regularity, the thesis that all contingent propositions should be given probabilities strictly between zero and one, faces is the possibility of random processes that randomly and uniformly choose a number between zero and one. According to classical probability theory, the probability that such a process picks a particular number in the range is zero, but of course any number in the range can indeed be picked. There is a solution to this particular problem on t…Read more
-
10Philosophy and LanguageProceedings 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
-
91A response to Almeida and JudischInternational Journal for Philosophy of Religion 53 (2): 65-72. 2003.Our new cosmological argument for the existence of God weakens the usual Principle of Sufficient Reason premise that every contingent true proposition has an explanation to a weaker principle (WPSR) that every such proposition could have an explanation. Almeida and Judisch have criticized the premises of our argument for leading to a contradiction. We show that their argument fails, but along the way we are led to clarify the nature of the conclusion of our argument. Moreover, we discuss an argu…Read more
-
"The evidential argument from evil: a second look Extracts from Religion in the Public Square [Liberal democracy and the place of religion in politics] Divine foreknowledge and human freedom are compatible Extract from Religion in the Public Square [Audi on religion9 politics, and liberal democracy] Why we should reject what liberalism tells us about speaking and acting in public for religious reasons Extract from" The Molinist account of providence'A new cosmological argument The being that knew too ...In William J. Wainwright (ed.), Philosophy of Religion, Routledge. pp. 1. 2009.
-
8Freedom, Will, and NatureProceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 81 25-27. 2007.
-
141Null probability, dominance and rotationAnalysis 73 (4): 682-685. 2013.New arguments against Bayesian regularity and an otherwise plausible domination principle are offered on the basis of rotational symmetry. The arguments against Bayesian regularity work in very general settings
-
125A new free-will defenceReligious Studies 39 (2): 211-223. 2003.This paper argues that if creatures are to have significant free will, then God's essential omni-benevolence and essential omnipotence cannot logically preclude Him from creating a world containing a moral evil. The paper maintains that this traditional conclusion does not need to rest on reliance on subjunctive conditionals of free will. It can be grounded in several independent ways based on premises that many will accept.
-
167The accomplishment of plans: a new version of the principle of double effectPhilosophical Studies 165 (1): 49-69. 2013.The classical principle of double effect offers permissibility conditions for actions foreseen to lead to evil outcomes. I shall argue that certain kinds of closeness cases, as well as general heuristic considerations about the order of explanation, lead us to replace the intensional concept of intention with the extensional concept of accomplishment in double effect
-
18I argue that standard functionalism leads to absurd conclusions as to the number of minds that would exist in the universe if persons were duplicated
-
1Leibniz's Approach to Individuation and Strawson's CriticismsStudia Leibnitiana 30 (1): 116-123. 1998.P. F. Strawson a critiqué le compte de Leibniz de 1'individuation, en demandant pourquoi il est métaphysiquement impossible pour qu'il y ait des consciences indiscernables mais distincts. L'analogie entre la conscience et la monade est centrale pour Leibniz, et done la critique de Strawson met en question la nécessité métaphysique du principe de l'identité des indiscernables . Par un examen de quelques questions dans le système ontologique de Leibniz, nous défendrons la nécessité métaphysique du…Read more
-
43We give a comparison inequality that allows one to estimate the tail probabilities of sums of independent Banach space valued random variables in terms of those of independent identically distributed random variables. More precisely, let X1, . . . , Xn be independent Banach-valued random variables. Let I be a random variable independent of X1, . . . , Xn and uniformly distributed over {1, . . . , n}. Put ˜.
-
58Regular probability comparisons imply the Banach–Tarski ParadoxSynthese 191 (15): 3525-3540. 2014.Consider the regularity thesis that each possible event has non-zero probability. Hájek challenges this in two ways: there can be nonmeasurable events that have no probability at all and on a large enough sample space, some probabilities will have to be zero. But arguments for the existence of nonmeasurable events depend on the axiom of choice. We shall show that the existence of anything like regular probabilities is by itself enough to imply a weak version of AC sufficient to prove the Banach–…Read more
-
20Suppose that one initiates a causal sequence leading to a basically evil state of affairs, but does not intend the evil effect, and the good effects of the action are proportionate to the bad. A state of affairs is a “basic evil” provided it is evil in virtue of itself and not in virtue of its connection with other states of affairs. The classic form of the Principle of Double Effect (PDE) can be taken to state that then the action that initiated the causal sequence is not wrong on account of th…Read more