Brian Leftow

The first response to Anselm’s Proslogion argument for God’s existence, Gaunilo’s On Behalf of the Fool, began a tradition of replying to Anselm with parody. I argue that Gaunilo’s original parody fails, show how to remedy its defects, and point out (what seems till now to have been overlooked) that Anselm actually responds to the parody. I show that his response applies too to the amended parody. I then discuss the revised parody, as a sample parody based on a best possible member of a physical kind. I contend that this too fails, because there cannot be best possible members of physical kinds. This response goes back at least to Plantinga, and in reply, parodists have jiggered physical kinds to permit (they claim) a best possible. I consider all possible ways to make this move, though not all possible instances of each way. I argue that they all fail.

Medieval philosophers distinguished God from all else by calling Him supremely one. Realists about properties affirmed God's special unity by arguing either that God cannot be conceived to be without His properties or that God wholly lacks the real complexity having properties involves. ;This thesis examines the latter, more radical doctrine of divine simplicity. On this doctrine, for all F, what makes God F differs in no way from what makes Him God. ;If all truths about God have the same truth-condition, they all are materially equivalent. Their predicates' senses seemingly must shift in divinis to allow this unusual equivalence. Many medievals concluded from this that God is simple, it is impossible to say anything comprehensible about Him and in particular to ascribe to Him personal attributes. ;By distinguishing sense- from application-fixing properties associated with predicates, I so analyze talk of a simple being as to give it comprehensible sense. I argue that we can ascribe a simple God the sort of knowing involved in understanding a proposition and that this renders such a God "personal enough" for religion. ;If coherent, the radical doctrine of divine simplicity follows from God's being the most perfect logically possible being on the assumptions that something is a better F the less likely it is to cease being F and that being "one with one's Fness" involves more "unity" with one's Fness than does being necessarily F. Divine simplicity entails God's timelessness, immutability, uniqueness and aseity. It also entails two conditionals, that if God wills, He is omnipotent and that if God knows, He is omniscient. By tracing out these connections I show that divine simplicity brings to a concept of God both systematic neatness and plausible explanations for God's having many of His traditional attributes

Western theists agree that God is eternal. But they disagree over what eternality is. This chapter clarifies one view of eternality, that of Boethius, and shows that some aspects of this view are coherent. On Boethius' view, God is not temporal. The chapter first gives a minimal account of what it is to be temporal. This account explains what sets Boethius' view of God's eternality apart from others. It is shown that Boethius' view implies that though God's life is not temporal, there are events in it, and these events have what is typically a temporal property: they occur in a present. The chapter argues that these are coherent claims.

Brian Leftow makes an important contribution to the longstanding debate among philosophers and theologians about the nature of God's eternity. The author develops a powerful and original defense of the notion that God is eternal in that he exists timelessly; that is, that though God exists, he does not exist at any time. Leftow defends the claim that a timeless God can be an object of human experience, and he attempts to delineate the extent of such a God's omniscience. Finally, the author pays special attention to the relation between the claim that God is timeless and the claim that God is metaphysically simple.

This essay by Brian Leftow provides an account of the nature and extent of God’s freedom. Theists typically believe that God could have done other than He has done. Many think that God gives them gifts He need not have given. Most Western philosophical theologians have held that God had the choice not to create, for instance. While there is general agreement that God has some leeway, there is disagreement over how much He has. The central point is a defense of a voluntarist rather than a rationalist account of the extent of God’s live options: God is not bound to effect the best, where the sort of value in question is nonmoral.

This chapter adumbrates a Thomistic, non-Cartesian version of dualism, defending the Thomistic theory from the familiar charge of inconsistency by showing how it is possible to assert simultaneously that the human being is a single, unitary substance, that the soul is the ‘form’ of the human body, and yet that the soul can exist without the body by virtue of being an immaterial particular. It demonstrates that a Thomistic ‘form’ need not be a mere state of a thing, like a shape: it may also be an immaterial particular, present in every part of a substance, that _causes_ it be in a certain state (such as that of being alive). Aquinas's view of the embodied souls avoids being _dualistic_ by denying that the human body is a separable substance in its own right. What combines with the soul to produce a substantial human thing is not one thing but a plurality. Moreover, the chapter explains that Aquinas's claim that human thought has no bodily ‘organ’ does not entail the natural independence of our cognitive functions from the physical condition of the brain. It does, however, imply that mental content cannot be _fully and determinately_ encoded in the brain's physical condition. Finally, the chapter clarifies the sense in which the disembodied soul is not for Aquinas (unlike Descartes) a substance.