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253God’s Extended MindEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 5 (1): 1--16. 2013.The traditional doctrine of divine omniscience ascribes to God the fully exercised power to know all truths. but why is God’s excellence with respect to knowing not treated on a par with his excellence with respect to doing, where the latter requires only that God have the power to do all things? The prima facie problem with divine ”omni-knowledgeability’ -- roughly, being able to know whatever one wants to know whenever one wants to know it -- is that knowledge requires an internal representati…Read more
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350Middle knowledge: The “foreknowledge defense”International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 28 (1). 1990.
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161Evil and theistic minimalismInternational Journal for Philosophy of Religion 49 (3): 133-154. 2001.
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124Heath White: Fate And Free Will: A Defense Of Theological Determinism (review)Faith and Philosophy 38 (3): 379-385. 2021.
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293Moral responsibility and unavoidable actionPhilosophical Studies 97 (2): 195-227. 2000.The principle of alternate possibilities (PAP), making the ability to do otherwise a necessary condition for moral responsibility, is supposed by Harry Frankfurt, John Fischer, and others to succumb to a peculiar kind of counterexample. The paper reviews the main problems with the counterexample that have surfaced over the years, and shows how most can be addressed within the terms of the current debate. But one problem seems ineliminable: because Frankfurt''s example relies on a counterfactual …Read more
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254Frankfurt Counterexamples: Some Comments on the Widerker-Fischer DebateFaith and Philosophy 13 (3): 395-401. 1996.One strategy in recent discussions of theological fatalism is to draw on Harry Frankfurt’s famous counterexamples to the principle of alternate possibilities (PAP) to defend human freedom from divine foreknowledge. For those who endorse this line, “Frankfurt counterexamples” are supposed to show that PAP is false, and this conclusion is then extended to the foreknowledge case. This makes it critical to determine whether Frankfurt counterexamples perform as advertised, an issue recently debated i…Read more
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256Middle Knowledge and the Soteriological Problem of EvilReligious Studies 27 (1): 3-26. 1991.According to the thesis of divine ‘middle knowledge’, first propounded by the Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina in the sixteenth century, subjunctive conditionals stating how free agents would freely respond under counter-factual conditions may be straightforwardly true, and thus serve as the objects of divine knowledge. This thesis has provoked considerable controversy, and the recent revival of interest in middle knowledge, initiated by Anthony Kenny, Robert Adams and Alvin Plantinga in the 197…Read more
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173Freedom, foreknowledge, and FrankfurtIn David Widerker & Michael McKenna (eds.), Moral Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities: Essays on the Importance of Alternative Possibilities, Ashgate. pp. 159--183. 2003.
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318Frankfurt cases and the (in)significance of timing: a defense of the buffering strategyPhilosophical Studies 164 (3): 599-622. 2013.Frankfurt cases are purported counterexamples to the Principle of Alternative Possibilities, which implies that we are not morally responsible for unavoidable actions. A major permutation of the counterexample strategy features buffered alternatives; this permutation is designed to overcome an influential defense of the Principle of Alternative Possibilities. Here we defend the buffering strategy against two recent objections, both of which stress the timing of an agent’s decision. We argue that…Read more
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180Augustine on Theological Fatalism: The Argument of De Libero Arbitrio 3.1-4Medieval Philosophy & Theology 5 (1): 1-30. 1996.
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183Black the libertarianActa Analytica 22 (1): 3-15. 2007.The most serious challenge to Frankfurt-type counterexamples to the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP) comes in the form of a dilemma: either the counterexample presupposes determinism, in which case it begs the question; or it does not presuppose determinism, in which case it fails to deliver on its promise to eliminate all alternatives that might plausibly be thought to satisfy PAP. I respond to this challenge with a counterexample in which considering an alternative course of action i…Read more
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127Does Theological Fatalism Rest on an Equivocation?American Philosophical Quarterly 32 (2): 153-165. 1995.
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299Perils of the Open RoadFaith and Philosophy 30 (1): 49-71. 2013.Open theists deny that God knows future contingents. Most open theists justify this denial by adopting the position that there are no future contingent truths to be known. In this paper we examine some of the arguments put forward for this position in two recent articles in this journal, one by Dale Tuggy and one by Alan Rhoda, Gregory Boyd, and Thomas Belt. The arguments concern time, modality, and the semantics of ‘will’ statements. We explain why we find none of these arguments persuasive. Th…Read more
Vanderbilt University
PhD, 1983
Areas of Interest
1 more
Metaphysics |
Truthmakers |
Modality |
Metaphysics of Spacetime |
Free Will |
Agent Causation |