Katherin Rogers

If Christ, a single member of the human race, can pay the debt of sin for all of us, then there must be some principle uniting all humanity. Some scholarssuggest that, in Anselm’s theory of the atonement, the unity in question is similar to that of a corporation or that it derives from our shared participation in humannature. Neither of these proposals can be supported from Anselm’s text. Rather, there is considerable evidence that Anselm held that all the “children of Adam”belong to the same literal, biological family, and it is this which grounds the unity required for the efficacy of Christ’s work. If we understand family to be a naturalhuman institution, the concept of family unity is persuasive.

Katherin A. Rogers presents a new theory of free will, based on the thought of Anselm of Canterbury. We did not originally produce ourselves. Yet, according to Anselm, we can engage in self-creation, freely and responsibly forming our characters by choosing 'from ourselves' (a se) between open options. Anselm introduces a new, agent-causal libertarianism which is parsimonious in that, unlike other agent-causal theories, it does not appeal to any unique and mysterious powers to explain how the free agent chooses. After setting out Anselm's original theory, Rogers defends and develops it by addressing a series of standard problems levelled against libertarianism. Finally, as a theory about self-creation, Anselmian Libertarianism must defend the tracing thesis, the claim that an agent can be responsible for character-determined choices, if he, himself, formed his character through earlier a se choices. Throughout, Rogers defends and exemplifies a new methodological suggestion: someone debating free will ought to make his background world view explicit. In the on-going debate over the possibility of human freedom and responsibility, Anselmian Libertarianism constitutes a new and plausible approach.

This work argues that Anselm was a Christian neoplatonist of the Augustinian variety, and that thus he was the inheritor of a powerful and systematic metaphysics and epistemology. The view that the world is an image of the divine mind and its ideas, a fragmented and temporal copy of of the perfect, eternal unity which is God, led Anselm to a strong exemplarism on the doctrine of the universals, and ultimately to a theistic idealism. This discussion concludes with a neoplatonic interpretation and defence of his work, the Proslogion, proof for the existence of God.

That being than which a greater cannot be conceived.' This was the way in which the living God of biblical tradition was described by the great Medieval philosophers such as Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas.Contemporary philosophers find much to question, criticise and reject in the traditional analysis of that description. Some hold that the attributes traditionally ascribed to God - simplicity, necessity, immutability, eternity, omniscience, omnipotence, creativity and goodness - are inherently incoherent individually, or mutually inconsistent. Others argue that the divinity described by philosophers cannot be the same as the providential God of revelation.In Perfect Being Theology Katherin A. Rogers defends the traditional approach, considering contemporary criticisms but concluding that the most adequate account of the nature of God should build upon the foundation laid by the Medieval philosophers.Written in a lively and accessible style and offering an important historical perspective, this book covers key areas of contention and many of the major ideas and thinkers from all sides of the debate are included.

Anselm of Canterbury is the first Christian philosopher, perhaps the first philosopher, to offer a systematic analysis of libertarian freedom. His work prefigures that of Robert Kane, and looking at the two philosophers together is helpful in understanding and appreciating the work of each of them. In this paper I show how Anselm adopts a view of choice that foreshadows Kane’s doctrine of ‘plural voluntary control.’ Kane proposes this doctrine as an attempt to answer the ‘luck’ problem. Alfred Mele criticizes this approach, arguing that, unless the agent’s competing desires ultimately originate with the agent himself, he cannotbe considered autonomous. It is true that on both Kane’s and Anselm’s analysis, agents have only a limited area of autonomy. However, an appreciation of theradical implications of this limited autonomy in Anselm’s system shows that plural voluntary control gives the agent significant freedom.

The Council of Chalcedon insisted that God Incarnate is one person with two natures, one divine and one human. Recently critics have rightly argued that God Incarnate cannot be a composite person. In the present paper I defend a new composite theory using the analogy of a boy playing a video game. The analogy suggests that the Incarnation is God doing something. The Incarnation is what I label an “action composite” and is a state of affairs, constituted by one divine person assuming human nature. This solves a number of puzzles, conforms to Chalcedon, and is logically and metaphysically consistent

Incompatibilists hold that, in order for you to be responsible, your choices must come from yourself; thus, determinism is incompatible with responsibility. One way of defending this claim is the Controller Argument: You are not responsible if your choices are caused by a controller, and natural determinism is relevantly similar to such control, therefore... Q.E.D. Compatibilists dispute both of these premises, insisting upon a relevant dissimilarity, or allowing, in a tollens move, that since we can be determined and responsible, we can be controlled and responsible. Positing a divine controller strengthens the argument against these two responses.

If God is the cause of everything that has any sort of existence at all, where is there room in the universe for rational creatures to have freedom of will? Isn’t a choice made by a created agent a sort of thing, and hence made by God? But if God causes our choices, how are we responsible such that we can be appropriately praised and blamed? Call this the dilemma of created freedom and divine omnipotence. Anselm solves the dilemma by proposing a description of free choice in which what is contributed by the created agent is not any new thing at all. In addition to the historical case, I argue that this move is a philosophically viable solution to the puzzle. I end by noting that this move has important implications for current philosophical work on the question of freedom of the will.

The possibility of cloning human beings raises the difficult question: Which human lives have value and deserve legal protection? Current cloning legislation tries to hide the problem by illegitimately renaming the entities and processes in question. The Delaware cloning bill, (SB55 2003/2004) for example, permits and protects the creation of human embryos by cloning, as long as they will be destroyed for research and therapeutic purposes, but it adopts terminology which renders its import unclear. I show that, in the case of cloning legislation, the burden of proof is on those who would adopt new terminology, and it has not been met.

In 1981 Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann published a landmark article aimed at exploring the classical concept of divine eternity. 1 Taking Boethius as the primary spokesman for the traditional view, they analyse God's eternity as timeless yet as possessing duration. More recently Brian Leftow has seconded Stump and Kretzmann's interpretation of the medieval position and attempted to defend the notion of a durational eternity as a useful way of expressing the sort of life God leads. 2 However, there are good reasons to reject the idea that divine timelessness should be thought of as having duration. The medievals probably did not accept it, as it contradicts a principle of classical metaphysics even more fundamental than the atemporality of the divine. In any case, it is not possible to express the notion of durational eternity in even a minimally coherent way, and the attempt to salvage the concept by appealing to the Thomistic doctrine of analogy is unsuccessful. The best analogy for God's eternity is still the one proposed by Augustine at the end of the fourth century. God lives in a timeless ‘present’, unextended like our temporal present, but immutable and encompassing all time

Human beings can have “strongly certain” beliefs—indubitable, veridical beliefs with a unique phenomenology—about necessarily true propositions like 2+2=4. On the plausible assumption that mathematical entities are platonic abstracta, naturalist theories fail to provide an adequate causal explanation for such beliefs because they cannot show how the propositional content of the causally inert abstracta can figure in a chain of physical causes. Theories which explain such beliefs as “corresponding” to the abstracta, but without any causal relationship, entail impossibilities. God, or a very god-like being, provides the best causal explanation for such beliefs.

According to David Hume our idea of a necessary connection between what we call cause and effect is produced when repeated observation of the conjunction of two events determines the mind to consider one upon the appearance of the other. No matter how we interpret Hume's theory of causation this explanation of the genesis of the idea of necessity is fraught with difficulty. I hope to show, looking at the three major interpretations of Hume's causal theory, that his account is contradictory, plainly wrong, or inherently impossible to verify

Anselm holds that God is timeless, time is tenseless, and humans have libertarian freedom. This combination of commitments is largely undefended incontemporary philosophy of religion. Here I explain Anselmian eternalism with its entailment of tenseless time, offer reasons for accepting it, and defend it against criticisms from William Hasker and other Open Theists. I argue that the tenseless view is coherent, that God’s eternal omniscience is consistent with libertarian freedom, that being eternal greatly enhances divine sovereignty, and that the Anselmian view supports the contention that the Bible is relevant today far better than does Open Theism.

Following Anselm of Canterbury I argue against Hugh McCann’s claim that a traditional, classical theist understanding of God’s relationship to creation entails that God is the cause of our choices, including our choice to sin. I explain Anselm’s thesis that God causes all that has ontological status, yet does not cause sin. Then I show that McCann’s God, if not a sinner, must nonetheless be an unloving deceiver, McCann’s theodicy fails on its own terms, his proposed requirements for moral authenticity are insufficient, and his suggestion that his universe is “safer” than Anselm’s is misguided.

In analysing Augustine's views on freedom it is standard to draw two distinctions; one between an earlier emphasis on human freedom and a later insistence that God alone governs human destiny, and another between pre-lapsarian and post-lapsarian freedom. These distinctions are real and important, but underlying them is a more fundamental consistency. Augustine is a compatibilist from his earliest work on freedom through his final anti-Pelagian writings, and the freedom possessed by the un-fallen and the fallen will is a compatibilist freedom. This leaves Augustine open to the charge that he makes God the ultimate cause of sin.

It is often argued that the eternalist solution to the freedom/foreknowledge dilemma fails. If God's knowledge of your choices is eternally fixed, your choices are necessary and cannot be free. Anselm of Canterbury proposes an eternalist view which entails that all of time is equally real and truly present to God. God's knowledge of your choices entails only a ‘consequent’ necessity which does not conflict with libertarian freedom. I argue this by showing that if consequent necessity does conflict with libertarian freedom then God's knowledge in the present would conflict with the freedom of a present choice. Absurd. (Published Online January 15 2007).