David Efird

(1974 - 2020)

We argue that Armstrong's Combinatorialism allows for the possibility of nothing by giving a Combinatorial account of the empty world and show that such an account is consistent with the ontological and conceptual aims of the theory. We then suggest that the Combinatorialist should allow for this possibility given some methodological considerations. Consequently, rather than being 'spoils for the victor', as Armstrong maintains, deciding whether there might have been nothing helps to determine which metaphysics of modality is to be preferred.

We argue that genuine modal realism can be extended, rather than modified, so as to allow for the possibility of nothing concrete, a possibility we term ‘metaphysical nihilism’. The issue should be important to the genuine modal realist because, not only is metaphysical nihilism itself intuitively plausible, but also it is supported by an argument with pre-theoretically credible premises, namely, the subtraction argument. Given the soundness of the subtraction argument, we show that there are two ways that the genuine modal realist can accommodate metaphysical nihilism: (i) by allowing for worlds containing only spatiotemporal points and (ii) by allowing for a world containing nothing but the null individual. On methodological grounds, we argue that the genuine modal realist should reject the former way but embrace the latter way.

In her widely acclaimed Wandering in Darkness, Stump argues that the suffering of mentally fully functioning adult humans can be explained by God's love for them, a love which consists of a twofold desire for their good and for union with them. This love, then, constitutes a morally sufficient reason for God's allowing suffering, even horrendous suffering, and so serves either as a defence against the evidential problem of evil or a theodicy, depending on whether one takes the conditions described in the account to be either actual or merely possible. (Adopting the weaker assumption, we will take Stump's account to be a defence, though nothing hangs on this.) In what follows, we will summarize Stump's defence, what we take to be the strongest objection to it, namely, Draper's objection concerning the role of consent in suffering for some future benefit, and how she might reply to it. We will conclude with what we take to be the lessons of the debate, namely, lessons concerning the processes of justification and of sanctification and their limits.

Suppose nothing exists. Then it is true that nothing exists. What makes that true? Nothing! So it seems that if nothing existed, then the principle that every truth is made true by something (the truthmaker principle) would be false. So if it is possible that nothing exists, a claim often called 'metaphysical nihilism', then the truthmaker principle is not necessary. This paper explores various ways to resolve this conflict without restricting metaphysical nihilism in such a way that it would become trivial and uninteresting.

We present a new understanding of Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist on the model of Stump’s account of God’s omnipresence and Green and Quan’s account of experiencing God in Scripture. On this understanding, Christ is derivatively, rather than fundamentally, located in the consecrated bread and wine, such that Christ is present to the believer through the consecrated bread and wine, thereby making available to the believer a second-person experience of Christ, where the consecrated bread and wine are the way in which she shares attention with him. The consecrated bread and wine are then, in a sense, icons of Christ.

In response to John Bishop's (2007) account of passionally caused believing, Dan-Johan Eklund (2014) argues that conscious non-evidential believing is (conceptually) impossible, that is, it's (conceptually) impossible consciously to believe that p whilst acknowledging that the relevant evidence doesn't support p's being true, for it conflicts with belief being a truth-oriented attitude, or so he argues. In this article, we present Eklund's case against Bishop's account of passionally caused believing, and we argue that it's unpersuasive, at least to those who accept permissivism about evidence, that is, that it's possible for there to be more than one rational response to a given body of evidence. We do this through a novel application of a case of nurtured belief, that is, of a person holding a belief simply because she was caused to do so by her upbringing, and we use it to show exactly where Eklund's argument goes wrong. We conclude by drawing a general lesson drawn from this debate: if permissivism about evidence is true, then belief being truth-oriented is consistent with non-evidential believing being possible.