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264From First Efficient Cause to God: Scotus on the Identification Stage of the Cosmological ArgumentIn Ludger Honnefelder, Rega Wood & Mechthild Dreyer (eds.), John Duns Scotus: metaphysics and ethics, E.j. Brill. 1996.In this paper, I examine some main threads of the identification stage of Scotus's project in the fourth chapter of De Primo, where he tries to show that a first efficient cause must have the attributes of simplicity, intellect, will, and infinity. Many philosophers are favorably disposed towards one or another argument such as Scotus's (e.g., the cosmological argument from contingency) purporting to show that there is an absolutely first efficient cause. How far can Scotus take us from this sta…Read more
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267Persons and Causes: The Metaphysics of Free WillOxford University Press USA. 2000.This provocative book refurbishes the traditional account of freedom of will as reasons-guided "agent" causation, situating its account within a general metaphysics. O'Connor's discussion of the general concept of causation and of ontological reductionism v. emergence will specially interest metaphysicians and philosophers of mind.
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288Indeterminism and free agency: Three recent viewsPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (3): 499-26. 1993.It is a commonplace of philosophy that the notion of free will is a hard nut to crack. A simple, compelling argument can be made to show that behavior for which an agent is morally responsible cannot be the outcome of prior determining causal factors.1 Yet the smug satisfaction with which we incompatibilists are prone to trot out this argument has a tendency to turn to embarrassment when we're asked to explain just how it is that morally responsible action might obtain under the assumption of in…Read more
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322Causality, mind, and free willNoûs 34 (s14): 105-117. 2000.One familiar affirmative answer to this question holds that these facts suffice to entail that Descartes' picture of the human mind must be mistaken. On Descartes' view, our mind or soul (the only essential part of ourselves) has no spatial location. Yet it directly interacts with but one physical object, the brain of that body with which it is, 'as it were, intermingled,' so as to 'form one unit.' The radical disparity posited between a nonspatial mind, whose intentional and conscious propertie…Read more
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55Understanding free will: Might we double-think? (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 67 (1): 222-229. 2003.Philosophers have been offering competing accounts of the will and its mysterious freedom for quite a while now, yet few seem wholly satisfied with any particular one of them. Witness the pronounced tendency in recent times for thinkers to have several goes at it, accompanied by the universal philosophical practice, when handling weak points in one’s own position, of loudly reminding your reader of the truly desperate tactics of the opposition, whose sincerity surely may be doubted. Now consider…Read more
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484Emergent individuals and the resurrectionEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 2 (2). 2010.We present an original emergent individuals view of human persons, on which persons are substantial biological unities that exemplify metaphysically emergent mental states. We argue that this view allows for a coherent model of identity-preserving resurrection from the dead consistent with orthodox Christian doctrine, one that improves upon alternatives accounts recently proposed by a number of authors. Our model is a variant of the “falling elevator” model advanced by Dean Zimmerman that, unlik…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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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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12Metaphysics (review)Philosophical Review 104 (2): 314-317. 1995.Book review of Peter van Inwagen's Metaphysics
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202Emergent 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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73A 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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165Reasons 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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148The 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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160Freedom 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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100Probability 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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64Incarnation and the MultiverseIn Klaas J. 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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88Conscious Willing and the Emerging Sciences of Brain and BehaviorIn Nancey Murphy, George Ellis & Timothy O'Connor (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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70Causing ActionsPhilosophical Review 111 (2): 291-294. 2002.Review of Paul Pietroski, Causing Actions
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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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37Review of Timothy Cleveland, Trying Without Willing (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61 (1): 242-244. 2000.
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137Scotus 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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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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74Nonreductive physicalism or emergent dualism : The argument from mental causationIn Robert C. Koons & George Bealer (eds.), The waning of materialism, Oxford University Press. 2010.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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Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Religion |