William F. Vallicella

This review article summarizes and in part criticizes Hugh J. McCann’s detailed elaboration of the consequences of the idea that God is absolutely sovereign and thus unlimited in knowledge and power in his 2012 Creation and the Sovereignty of God. While there is much to agree with in McCann’s treatment, it is argued that divine sovereignty cannot extend as far as he would like to extend it. The absolute lord of the natural and moral orders cannot be absolutely sovereign over the conceptual and modal orders

This paper examines a famous argument for the Buddhist doctrine of anatta ("no self) according to which nothing possesses self-nature or substantial reality. The argument unfolds during a debate between the monk Nagasena and King Milinda (Menandros). Nagasena's challenge to the King is that he demonstrate the substantial reality of the chariot in which he arrived at their meeting when said chariot is (i) not identical to any one of its proper parts, (ii) not identical to the mereological sum of its proper parts, and (iii) not identical to anything wholly distinct from its parts. After presenting the argument and defending it against a plausible objection, I argue that it cannot be taken to show that persons lack self-nature.

One sort of cosmological argument for the existence of God starts from the fact that the universe exists and argues to a transcendent cause of this fact. According to the Hume-Edwards objection to this sort of cosmological argument, if every member of the universe is caused by a preceding member, then the universe has an intemal causal explanation in such a way as to obviate the need for a transcendent cause. The Hume-Edwards objection has recently come under attack by atheists and theists alike; if I am right, however, the real flaw in this objection lies deep and has yet to be isolated. This paper accordingly divides into two main parts. The fírst discusses three recent failed critiques of the objection. The second presents the beginnings of what I hope is a sound critique. I argue that there is no extant theory of causation according to which it could be true both that (i) each state of the universe is caused by a preceding state, and that (ii) each state is caused to exist by a preceding state. Here we go only part of the way in substantiating this ambitious thesis: we argue that no nomological theory of causation satisfies both (i) and (ii).

Is there room for a metaphysics of existence above and beyond the logic of ‘exists’? This paper defends an affirmative answer. It takes its point of departure from a recent polemic of Paul Edwards against Heidegger. According to Edwards, following Frege and Russell, Heidegger mistakenly assumes that existence belongs to individuals. I argue that although Heidegger does indeed make this assumption, he is not mistaken in so doing. My main concern, however, is neither to defend Heidegger nor to reply to Edwards; it is to vindicate the metaphysics of existence against the most damaging objection it faces.

Suppose we say that a deductive argument is probative just in case it is valid in point of logical form, possesses true premises, and is free of informal fallacy. We can then say that an argument is normatively persuasive for a person if and only if it is both probative and has premises that can be accepted, without any breach of epistemic propriety, by the person in question. If the premises of a probative argument would be accepted by any reasonable person, I will call such an argument demonstrative

According to Quine, the ontological question can be posed in three Anglo-Saxon monosyllables: “What is there?” But if we call this the ontological question, what shall we call the logically prior question: “What is it for an item to be there?” Peter van Inwagen has recently suggested that this be called the meta-ontological question, and more importantly, has endorsed Quine’s answer to it. Ingredient in this Quinean answer to the meta-ontological question are several theses, among them, “Being is the same as existence”; “Being is univocal”; and “The single sense of being or existence is adequately captured by the existential quantifier of formal logic.” This articleexamines the last of these theses, which van Inwagen claims “ought to be uncontroversial.” But far from having this deontic property, the thesis in question ought to be not only controverted, but rejected.

The characteristic claim of Christianity, as codified at Chalcedon, is that God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, is numerically the same person as Jesus of Nazareth. This article raises three questions that appear to threaten the coherence of orthodox Chalcedonian incarnationalism. First, how can one person exemplify seemingly incompatible natures? Second, how can one person exemplify seemingly incompatible non-nature properties? Third, how can there be one person if the concept of incarnation implies that one person incarnates himself as another person? The attempts of C. S. Lewis and T. V. Morris to deal with these difficulties are examined and found inconclusive.

The interest and longevity of philosophical positions and arguments often seem to be an inverse function of the clarity with which these positions and arguments are articulated. Frequently, the most interesting positions are those pregnant with ambiguity and ever teetering on the brink of incoherence. Examples are not hard to find in the history of philosophy. Kant’s philosophy is full of them: the role and status of the Ding an sich; the proof-structure of the transcendental deduction of the categories; the nature and function of the transcendental unity of apperception. Or recall the endless controversies over the unity of Aristotle’s metaphysics. Relativism seems no exception: its interest seems the greater the more obvious its flirtation with absurdity, and the more promiscuous its connection with other claims in the neighborhood.

Current debates in the analytic mainstream about the existence of God have often an air of the fantastic about them. Discussions of the God question typically begin with an inventory of properties definitive of the disputed entity and then proceed to a consideration of the question whether there is anything that answers to the definition. The theist adduces arguments to show, not so much that God actually exists—an enterprise much to bold for anyone laboring in the shadow of the Kantian Critiques—but that the divine existence is logically possible, or at best, of some degree of probability. His opponent presents arguments designed to impugn the rationality of belief in God by showing either that the existence of God is improbable or even logically impossible. Of course, theist and atheist also each work at discrediting the other’s positive arguments. Now all of this makes for a lively and instructive exchange, except that an important assumption common to both partners in the dialogue is seldom mentioned, let alone defended. This assumption, which is responsible for the aura of the fantastic mentioned above, is that God, if he exists, is a being among beings, albeit the highest being. It may seem that this assumption is so unproblematic as neither to require nor be capable of defense. If the affirmation of God is not the affirmation of a being, what could it be? Surely, if God is anything at all, God is a being. Or so it will seem to many. But as I shall argue, the assumption, far from being obvious, is in fact false: God is not an existent among other existents, but existence itself.

Central to Buddhist thought and practice is the anattā doctrine. In its unrestricted form the doctrine amounts to the claim that nothing at all possesses self-nature. This article examines an early Buddhist argument for the doctrine. The argument, roughly, is that (i) if anything were a self, it would be both unchanging and self-determining; (ii) nothing has both of these properties; therefore, (iii) nothing is a self. The thesis of this article is that, despite the appearance of formal validity, the truth of (i) is inconsistent with the truth of (iii).

Since physicalism is fashionable nowadays, one should perhaps not be too surprised to find a growing number of theistic philosophers bent on combining theism with physicalism. I shall be arguing that this is an innovation we have good reason to resist. I begin by distinguishing global physicalism (physicalism about everything) from local physicalism (physicalism about human beings). I then present the theist who would be a physicalist with a challenge: Articulate a version of local physicalism that allows some minds to be purely material and others to be purely immaterial. After examining the main versions of local physicalism currently on offer, among them, type-type identity theory, supervenientism, emergentism and functionalism, I conclude that none of them can meet the challenge.

This article responds to Quentin Smith's, ‘The Reason the Universe Exists is that it Caused Itself to Exist’, Philosophy 74 (1999), 579–586. My rejoinder makes three main points. The first is that Smith's argument for a finitely old, but causally self-explanatory, universe fails from probative overkill: if sound, it also shows that all manner of paltry event-sequences are causally self-explanatory.The second point is that the refutation of Smith's argument extends to Hume's argument for an infinitely old causally self-explanatory universe, as well as to Smith's two ‘causal loop’ arguments. The problem with all four arguments is their reliance on Hume's principle that to explain the members of a collection is ipso facto to explain the collection. This principle succumbs to counterexamples. The third point is that, even if Hume's principle were true, Smith's argument could not succeed without the aid of a theory of causation according to which causation is production (causation of existence).

The doctrine that there are no logically necessary connections in nature can be used to support both occasionalism, according to which God alone can be a cause, and 'anti-occasionalism', according to which God cannot be a cause. Quentin Smith has recently invoked the 'no logically necessary connections in nature' doctrine in support of the latter. I bring two main objections against his thesis that God (logically) cannot be a cause. The first is that there are good reasons to think that there are irreducible dispositions in nature, and that where such dispositions are manifested, there are logically necessary causal connections. The second objection is that even if the 'no logically necessary connections in nature' doctrine is true, one is not forced to deny causal efficacy to God: with no breach in logical propriety, one may embrace occasionalism

On traditional theism, God is not only a creator but also a conserver. The doctrine of conservation, however, appears to face a dilemma. Either conservation is continuous re-creation with consequences inimical to diachronic identity, or conservation is an operation upon a pre-existent entity, which, because it is pre-existent, is in no clear need of conservation. This article first makes a case for the dilemma, and then proposes a way between its horns. Safe passage is possible if we adopt presentist four-dimensionalism, i.e. the conjunction of presentism, according to which temporally present items alone exist, and four-dimensionalism, the doctrine that individuals are not continuants but wholes of temporal parts.