Emanuel Rutten

A core presumption of object oriented ontology and other speculative realisms is that there is a world independent of the mind that can be successfully inquired and should take center stage in our reflections again. A profound case for this realist presumption is found in Meillassoux’s After Finitude. He aims to secure our access to reality as it is in itself by refuting correlationism according to which we cannot escape reality as it is thought by us. He presents three arguments: ancestrality, facticity and mathematization. On the first argument correlationism fails because it cannot render scientific statements about an universe anterior to us meaningful. I address the worry that he might not take this to be a real argument against correlationism and argue that it in any case fails. On the second argument correlationism is flawed since it remains committed to absolute possibilities. I argue that this argument is untenable as well. On his third argument correlationism fails because science reveals a mathematically describable reality indifferent to our existence. I argue that the almost perfect mathematization of nature can actually be cashed out as an argument for correlationism. I conclude by proposing an alternative way of showing that mathematics is the language of the absolute understood as a radical contingent hyperchaos.

Ever since Plato, philosophers have developed rational arguments for the existence of God. In the last decades the philosophical interest in these arguments has grown again significantly. In this book cosmological arguments are investigated. A cosmological argument derives the existence of God from the fact that there exist caused things. In the first part of this book the author argues that these arguments show that it is plausible that the cosmos was brought about by a necessarily existing conscious, free being. However, as is shown as well, it does not follow that this being is also the first cause of the whole of reality, something typically said of God. In the second part of the book a new argument for the existence of a first cause is presented, based on the premises of atomism and causalism. Subsequently, the author proposes a new modal-epistemic argument for the existence of a conscious, free being who is the first cause of reality. Objections to both new arguments are evaluated and refuted. The book concludes with the observation that these arguments can be combined with cosmological arguments in order to arrive at a renewed case for theism.

This paper provides a new first cause argument by showing that atomism, i.e. the thesis that each composite object is composed of simple objects, together with causalism, understood in this paper as the thesis that every object is a cause or has a cause, logically imply the existence of a first cause if some additional general premises regarding the interplay between parthood, composition and causation are accepted. Thus it is shown that a commitment to atomism, causalism and the additional premises result in a commitment to there being a first cause.

Recently, Stefan Wintein published an article in which he presents four objections to my modal-epistemic argument for the existence of God. His first objection is an alleged counterexample to the argument’s first premise, and the second objection is an alleged counterexample to the argument’s second premise. Wintein’s third objection attempts to show that the modal-epistemic argument is circular. Finally, the fourth objection is a parody objection. In this paper, I show that Wintein’s four objections all fail.

The well-known Principle of Plenitude has it that everything that exists in some possible world exists in the actual world. I argue for an amended version of this principle: If there’s a possible world in which something lacks some positive property, then there’s an object in the actual world that lacks that property. That is, all positive universally held properties in the actual world are necessarily universally held. This rules out that for some positive property, everything in the actual world merely happens to have it. After having presented and defended the argument, I show that it has a wide range of corollaries, such as that there are mereologically simple and composite things, physical and non-physical things, caused and uncaused things, and contingent and necessarily existing things. The argument has three premises. The first premise is the thesis that there are no things that do not exist. The second premise is a Fregean theory of linguistic meaning. According to the third premise, two meanings coincide if and only if their reference sets coincide. The notion of a reference set is defined in the paper.

In his new book Staat van verwarring: Het offer van liefde, Ad Verbrugge aims to elucidate the human condition in our strongly individualized and virtualized Western consumer society. He intends to show that contemporary Western man is in a state of confusion, caused by a discord in our inner life. Man is both a communal being as well as a transgressive being. I argue that Verbrugge wants to restore the unity in our lives by reconciling eros and philia. I also show that one can find two different attempts at reconciliation in his book that he himself does not clearly distinguish. According to the first, losing oneself individually or collectively through crossing a boundary is in fact crucial to vitalize and reinforce the orderly social community. According to the second, eros does not vitalize through transgression. Instead, it leads to firm relational and communal bonds through intense dedication and formative discipline. As Verbrugge has it, both aspects of eros can go together in one single undivided eros. This is because moments of ecstatically losing oneself can be temporally interchanged with moments of intensified concentration and focus. According to Verbrugge, it is precisely this dynamic and inclusive eros that can be embedded in a stable communal life of partnership and love. It seems indeed that in this way the contemporary confusion in the human soul can be overcome. Yet, Verbrugge’s healing approach can also result in a failure to appreciate the negative, the otherness, the atopic dimension of eros. In my conclusion, then, I argue that his approach does insufficient justice to eros as a genuinely disruptive force. As long as the negative is primarily understood as a pathway to reconciliation, as long as unpredictable and profound disorderly interruptions of the harmonic order are excluded, eros cannot truly manifest itself.

In his 2012 book God in the Age of Science? A Critique of Religious Reason Herman Philipse argues that all known deductive versions of the cosmological argument are untenable. His strategy is to propose a few objections to two classical deductive cosmological arguments. The first argument is from the impossibility of there being contingent entities that are the sufficient cause for the existence of a contingent entity. The second argument is from the impossibility of there being an infinite causal regress. In this article I argue that Philipse’s attempt to write off all deductive cosmological arguments fails.

Scientism and metaphysics Who deals with scientism soon discovers that scientism can be interpreted in many different ways. Most interpretations of scientism are so radical that they can hardly be defended, or so modest that they are nothing more than trivial platitudes nobody would disagree with. This poses a dilemma for adherents of scientism. Yet, in this article I will propose a particular interpretation of scientism that does seem prima facie defensible, while at the same time cannot be put away as being merely a trivial platitude. Having such a maximally fruitful interpretation of scientism does not help the adherents of scientism, though. For it entails a falsehood, namely that metaphysics cannot give us insights in the overall structure and nature of reality. I shall argue for this by fleshing out an interpretation of metaphysics, on which we can certainly say that metaphysics enables us to acquire said insights. Finally, I will discuss and assess a number of objections against my refutation of the aforementioned maximally fruitful interpretation of scientism.

I propose a new argument for the existence of God. God is defined as a conscious being that is the first cause of reality. In its simplified initial form, the argument has two premises: all possible truths are knowable, and it is impossible to know that the proposition that God does not exist is true. From and it follows that the proposition that God exists is necessarily true. After introducing the argument in its crude initial form and laying out the core intuitions behind its premises, I point to two difficulties that this simplified version faces. I then go on to show how the argument can be revised to handle these difficulties. I defend the revised argument from various objections.