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52Anselm's Perfect GodIn Jeanine Diller & Asa Kasher (eds.), Models of God and Alternative Ultimate Realities, Springer. pp. 133--140. 2013.
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51Anselm and His Islamic Contempories on Divine Necessity and EternityAmerican Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 81 (3): 373-393. 2007.Anselm holds that God is simple, eternal, and immutable, and that He creates “necessarily”—He “must” create this world. Avicenna and Averroes made the same claims, and derived as entailments that God neither knows singulars nor interacts with the spatio-temporal universe. I argue that Anselm avoids these unpalatableconsequences by being the first philosopher to adopt, clearly and consciously, a four-dimensionalist understanding of time, in which all of time is genuinely present to divine eternit…Read more
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50Eternity has no Duration: Katherin A. RogersReligious Studies 30 (1): 1-16. 1994.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…Read more
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46Anselm Against McCann On God and Sin (review)Faith and Philosophy 28 (4): 397-415. 2011.Hugh McCann argues that God wills human sin, that humans are nonetheless significantly free, and that his position provides a satisfying theodicy of sin. I defend an Anselmian view: Although God causes the existence of all that exists, He does not produce sin. Human beings are the ultimate sources of their sinning, which sinning should not happen. McCann rejoins that my position is incoherent and that my criticisms are not well taken. I respond, clarifying Anselm’s understanding of human freedom…Read more
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45Personhood, potentiality, and the temporarily comatose patientPublic Affairs Quarterly 6 (2): 245-254. 1992.
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44Peter van Inwagen (ed.) Christian Faith and The Problem of Evil. (Grand Rapids MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2004). Pp. xiv+316. ISBN 0 8028 2697 0 (review)Religious Studies 42 (1): 111-116. 2006.
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44Saving Eternity (and Divine Foreknowledge and Free Will): A Reply to HaskerRoczniki Filozoficzne 70 (1): 79-89. 2022.William Hasker and I disagree over whether or not appealing to a particular understanding of divine eternity can reconcile divine foreknowledge with libertarian human freedom. Hasker argues that if God had foreknowledge of a particular future choice, that choice cannot be free with libertarian freedom. I hold, to the contrary, that, given a certain theory of time—the view that all times exist equally—it is possible to reconcile divine foreknowledge with libertarian freedom. In a recent article, …Read more
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39Christ Our BrotherAmerican Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 86 (2): 223-236. 2012.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 li…Read more
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37St. Anselm of Canterbury on God and MoralityThe Monist 105 (3): 309-320. 2022.Anselm of Canterbury, as a classical theist, does not hold that there is a moral, or value, order independent of God. What is good, indeed what is necessary and possible, depends on the will of God. But Anselm’s development of this claim does not succumb to the problems entailed by divine-command theory. One such problem addresses the question of whether or not the moral order is available to reason, bracketing Scripture and Church teaching. Anselm holds that to be just is to conform to God’s wi…Read more
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36David O'Connor God and inscrutable evil: In defence of theism and atheism. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998). Pp. XIII+273. £53 hbk, £19.95 pbk (review)Religious Studies 35 (2): 229-240. 1999.
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36Libertarianism in Kane and AnselmProceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 81 279-290. 2007.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 M…Read more
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34Freedom, Will, and NatureProceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 81 279-290. 2007.
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34Perfect Being TheologyEdinburgh University Press. 2019.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 i…Read more
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32This 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…Read more
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31The medieval approach to aardvarks, escalators, and GodJournal of Value Inquiry 27 (1): 63-68. 1993.
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30The Experimental Approach to Free Will: Freedom in the LaboratoryRoutledge. 2022.Rogers canvases the literature critical of recent experiments, adding new criticisms of her own. She argues these experiments should not undermine belief in human freedom and lists ethical and practical problems facing the attempt to study free will experimentally.
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26Freedom and Self Creation: Anselmian LibertarianismOxford University Press UK. 2015.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' 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 agen…Read more
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25A Medieval Approach to Keith Ward’s Christ and the CosmosPhilosophia Christi 18 (2): 323-332. 2016.In Christ and the Cosmos Keith Ward hopes to “reformulate” the conciliar statements of the Trinity and Incarnation since they cannot serve our post-Enlightenment, scientific age. I dispute Ward’s motivation, noting that the differences in perspective to which he points may not be as radical as he supposes. And his “reformulation” has worrisome consequences. I am especially concerned at his point that Jesus, while very special and perfectly good, is only human. This undermines free will theodicy,…Read more
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21Back to EternalismFaith and Philosophy 26 (3): 320-338. 2009.Against my interpretation, Brian Leftow argues that Anselm of Canterbury held a presentist theory of time, and that presentism can be reconciled with Anselm’s commitments concerning divine omnipotence and omniscience. I respond, focusing mainly on two issues. First, it is difficult to understand the presentist theory which Leftow attributes to Anselm. I articulate my puzzlement in a way that I hope moves the discussion forward. Second, Leftow’s examples to demonstrate that presentism can be reco…Read more
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20Anselm and His Islamic Contempories on Divine Necessity and EternityAmerican Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 81 (3): 373-393. 2007.Anselm holds that God is simple, eternal, and immutable, and that He creates “necessarily”—He “must” create this world. Avicenna and Averroes made the same claims, and derived as entailments that God neither knows singulars nor interacts with the spatio-temporal universe. I argue that Anselm avoids these unpalatableconsequences by being the first philosopher to adopt, clearly and consciously, a four-dimensionalist understanding of time, in which all of time is genuinely present to divine eternit…Read more
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19A Defense of Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo ArgumentProceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 74 187-200. 2000.
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15Christ Our BrotherAmerican Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 86 (2): 223-236. 2012.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 li…Read more
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14Anselm on FreedomOxford University Press. 2008.Can human beings be free and responsible if there is an all-powerful God? Anselm of Canterbury offers viable answers to questions which have plagued religious people for at least two thousand years. Katherin Rogers examines Anselm's reconciliation of human free will and divine omnipotence in the context of current philosophical debates.
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13The Anselmian Approach to God and CreationEdwin Mellen Press. 1997.In this series of essays, the author sets out the traditional, Anselmian views on certain questions in the philosophy of religion, and aims to defend these views in the contemporary idiom.
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9Retribution, Forgiveness, and the Character Creation Theory of PunishmentSocial Theory and Practice 33 (1): 75-103. 2007.
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7Defending Boethius: Two Case Studies in Charitable InterpretationInternational Philosophical Quarterly 51 (2): 241-257. 2011.Among those who study medieval philosophy there is a divide between historians and philosophers. Sometimes the historians chide the philosophers for failing to appreciate the historical factors at work in understanding a text, a philosopher, a school, or a system. But sometimes the philosopher may justly criticize the historian for failing to engage the past philosopher adequately as a philosopher. Here I defend a philosophically charitable methodology and offer two examples, taken from John Mar…Read more