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58Review of William Rowe, Can God Be Free? (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2005 (4). 2005.Consider the idea of God in classical philosophical theology. God is a personal being perfect in every way: absolutely independent of everything, such that nothing exists apart from God's willing it to be so; unlimited in power and knowledge; perfectly blissful, lacking in nothing needed or desired; morally perfect. If such a being were to create, on what basis would He choose? Let us assume (as perfect being theologians generally do) that there is an objective, degreed property of intrinsic goo…Read more
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28Review of Paul Pietroski, Causing Actions (review)Philosophical Review 111 (2): 291-294. 2002.The following assumptions are necessary to get the contemporary problem of mental causation off the ground
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12Metaphysics (review)Philosophical Review 104 (2): 314-317. 1995.Book review of Peter van Inwagen's Metaphysics
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245Emergent individualsPhilosophical Quarterly 53 (213): 540-555. 2003.We explain the thesis that human mental states are ontologically emergent aspects of a fundamentally biological organism. We then explore the consequences of this thesis for the identity of a human person over time. As these consequences are not obviously independent of one's general ontology of objects and their properties, we consider four such accounts: transcendent universals, kind-Aristotelianism, immanent universals, and tropes. We suggest there are reasons for emergentists to favor the l…Read more
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168A Companion to the Philosophy of Action (edited book)Wiley-Blackwell. 2010.A Companion to the Philosophy of Action offers a comprehensive overview of the issues and problems central to the philosophy of action. The first volume to survey the entire field of philosophy of action (the central issues and processes relating to human actions). Brings together specially commissioned chapters from international experts. Discusses a range of ideas and doctrines, including rationality, free will and determinism, virtuous action, criminal responsibility, Attribution Theory, and …Read more
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309Reasons Explanation And Agent Control: In Search Of An Integrated AccountPhilosophical Topics 32 (1): 241-256. 2004.Many philosophers judge that typical agent-causal accounts of freedom improperly sacrifice the possibility of rational explanation of the action for the sake of securing control, while others judge that the reverse shortcoming plagues typical event causal accounts. (Of course, many philosophers make both these judgments.) After briefly rehearsing the reasons for these verdicts on the two traditional strategies, we undertake an extended examination of Randolph Clarke's recent attempt to meet the …Read more
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146The impossibility of middle knowledgePhilosophical Studies 66 (2). 1992.A good deal of attention has been given in recent philosophy of religion to the question of whether we can sensibly attribute to God a form of knowledge which the 16th-century Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina termed "middle knowledge". Interest in the doctrine has been spurred by a recognition of its intimate connection to certain conceptions of providence, prophecy, and response to petitionary prayer. According to defenders of the doctrine, which I will call "Molinism", the objects of middle kn…Read more
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136Probability and Freedom: A Reply to VicensRes Philosophica 93 (1): 289-293. 2016.I have argued elsewhere that human free action is governed by objective probabilities. This view, I suggested, is strongly supported by our experience of motivated decision-making and by our having emerged from probabilistically-governed physical causes. Leigh Vicens (2016) criticizes these arguments. She also argues that an account of human freedom as probabilisticallyunstructured indeterminacy is less vulnerable to challenges to the plausibility of libertarian views of freedom. In this article…Read more
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239Freedom With a Human FaceMidwest Studies in Philosophy 29 (1): 207-227. 2005.As good a definition as any of a _philosophical_ conundrum is a problem all of whose possible solutions are unsatisfactory. The problem of understanding the springs of action for morally responsible agents is commonly recognized to be such a problem. The origin, nature, and explanation of freely-willed actions puzzle us today as they did the ancients Greeks, and for much the same reasons. However, one can carry this ‘perennial-puzzle’ sentiment too far. The unsatisfactory nature of philosophical…Read more
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63Incarnation and the MultiverseIn Klaas Kraay (ed.), God and the Multiverse: Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Perspectives, Routledge. pp. 227-241. 2014.Timothy O’Connor and Philip Woodward defend a version of a compositional theory, according to which an incarnate deity has two natures, each of which is a distinct component of its being. They then extend this model to permit multiple incarnations. Finally, they consider an objection to this model based on the theological idea that Christ’s work is necessary for ushering in a united community of all divine-image-bearing creatures. In response, they speculate that no such all-encompassing communi…Read more
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87Conscious Willing and the Emerging Sciences of Brain and BehaviorIn Nancey Murphy, George Ellis, O. ’Connor F. R. & Timothy (eds.), Downward Causation and the Neurobiology of Free Will, Springer Verlag. pp. 173--186. 2009.Recent studies within neuroscience and cognitive psychology have explored the place of conscious willing in the generation of purposive action. Some have argued that certain findings indicate that the commonsensical view that we control many of our actions through conscious willing is largely or wholly illusory. I rebut such arguments, contending that they typically rest on a conflation of distinct phenomena. Nevertheless, I also suggest that traditional philosophical accounts of the will need t…Read more
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55On a Complex Theory of a Simple God (review)Faith and Philosophy 9 (4): 526-535. 1992.Review of On a COlllplex Theory of a Simple God: An Investigation in Aquinas' Philosophical Theology, by Christopher M. Hughes.
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233Causing ActionsPhilosophical Review 111 (2): 291-294. 2002.Review of Paul Pietroski, Causing Actions
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135Scotus on the existence of a first efficient causeInternational Journal for Philosophy of Religion 33 (1). 1993.A lengthy argument for the existence of a being possessing most of the attributes ascribed to God in traditional philosophical theology is set forth by John Duns Scotus in the final two chapters of his Tractatus De Primo Principio.1 In 3.1-19, Scotus tries to establish the core of his proof, viz., that "an absolutely first effective is actually existent." It is an ingenious blend of elements that figure in standard versions of the cosmological and ontological arguments. However, while the reader…Read more
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37Review of Timothy Cleveland, Trying Without Willing (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61 (1): 242-244. 2000.
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74Nonreductive physicalism or emergent dualism : The argument from mental causationIn Robert C. Koons & George Bealer (eds.), The Waning of Materialism: New Essays, Oxford University Press. 2009.Throughout the 1990s, Jaegwon Kim developed a line of argument that what purport to be nonreductive forms of physicalism are ultimately untenable, since they cannot accommodate the causal efficacy of mental states. We argue that, while the argument needs some tweaking, its basic thrust is sound. In what follows, we lay out our preferred version of the argument and highlight its essential dependence on a causal-powers metaphysic, a dependence that Kim does not acknowledge in his official presenta…Read more
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87A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand: Plantinga on the Self-Defeat of Evolutionary NaturalismIn James K. Beilby (ed.), Naturalism defeated?: essays on Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism, Cornell University Press. 2002.This paper raises objections to Alvin Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism.
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335Emergent propertiesAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 31 (2): 91-104. 1994.All organised bodies are composed of parts, similar to those composing inorganic nature, and which have even themselves existed in an inorganic state; but the phenomena of life, which result from the juxtaposition of those parts in a certain manner, bear no analogy to any of the effects which would be produced by the action of the component substances considered as mere physical agents. To whatever degree we might imagine our knowledge of the properties of the several ingredients of a living bod…Read more
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218Agent-causal powerIn Toby Handfield (ed.), Dispositions and Causes, Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press ;. 2009.In what follows, I shall presuppose the ecumenical core of the causal powers metaphysics. The argument of this paper concerns what may appear at first to be a wholly unrelated matter, the metaphysics of free will. However, an adequate account of freedom requires, in my judgment, a notion of a distinctive variety of causal power, one which tradition dubs ‘agent-causal power’. I will first develop this notion and clarify its relationship to other notions. I will then respond to a number of objecti…Read more
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32Emergence in science and philosophy (edited book)Routledge. 2010.The concept of emergence has seen a significant resurgence in philosophy and the sciences, yet debates regarding emergentist and reductionist visions of the natural world continue to be hampered by imprecision or ambiguity. Emergent phenomena are said to arise out of and be sustained by more basic phenomena, while at the same time exerting a "top-down" control upon those very sustaining processes. To some critics, this has the air of magic, as it seems to suggest a kind of circular causality. Ot…Read more
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348The metaphysics of emergenceNoûs 39 (4): 658-678. 2005.The objective probability of every physical event is fixed by prior physical events and laws alone. (This thesis is sometimes expressed in terms of explanation: In tracing the causal history of any physical event, one need not advert to any non-physical events or laws. To the extent that there is any explanation available for a physical event, there is a complete explanation available couched entirely in physical vocabulary. We prefer the probability formulation, as it should be acceptable to an…Read more
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24Review of George Molnar, Powers: A Study in Metaphysics (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2004 (2). 2004.
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15Is Free Will Just Another Chaotic Process? (Review of Three Books)Times Literary Supplement (Dec.5). 1997.Review of Richard Double, Metaphilosophy and Free Will; Thomas Pink, The Psychology of Freedom; and Robert Kane, The Significance of Free Will,
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