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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
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"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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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 ˜.
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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
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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
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147Time without Creation?Faith and Philosophy 31 (4): 401-411. 2014.We introduce three arguments for the thesis that time cannot exist prior to an original creation event. In the first argument, we seek to show that if time doesn’t depend upon creation, then time is infinite in the backwards direction, which is incompatible with arguments for a finite past. In the second and third arguments, we allow for the possibility of backwards-infinite time but argue that God could not have a sufficiently good reason to refrain from creating for infinitely many moments—eit…Read more
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7Presentation of the Aquinas MedalProceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 81 25-27. 2007.
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26Plantinga starts by outlining an apparent conflict between certain claims of methodologically naturalist science and Christian faith. The conflict is not a logical contradiction, at least not once we are dealing with the more cautious “minus” versions of the doctrines, but some weaker relation such as the rational impossibility of believing both. 2. Scepticism about Simonian science..