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69In a recent paper, Stefan Wintein criticizes my responses to the objections he raised to my modal-epistemic argument (MEA) for the existence of God. In this paper, I continue our debate and respond to Wintein’s criticisms of my previous responses. I argue that Wintein’s criticisms are unsuccessful. As a result, the MEA still stands.
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6Een beeld dat ons gevangen houdtAlgemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 106 (4): 331-335. 2014.Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.
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286Prison Break? In Defense of CorrelationismRevista Atlantika 2 (1): 1-22. 2024.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, …Read more
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3A Critical Assessment of Contemporary Cosmological Arguments: Towards a Renewed Case for Theism (edited book)VU Publishers. 2012.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 con…Read more
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228Atomism, Causalism and the Existence of a First CauseIn A Critical Assessment of Contemporary Cosmological Arguments: Towards a Renewed Case for Theism, Vu Publishers. pp. 123-135. 2012.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 prem…Read more
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34The Modal-Epistemic Argument Defended: Reply to WinteinSophia 21 (4). 2022.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 objec…Read more
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182Positive Universally Held Properties are Necessarily Universally HeldActa Philosophica 30 (1): 139-158. 2021.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 wor…Read more
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4On the Relationship between Eros and Philia in Ad Verbrugge’s ”Staat van verwarring: Het offer van liefde’Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 76 (4): 843-850. 2014.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 differen…Read more
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21Sciëntisme en metafysicaAlgemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 107 (3): 301-321. 2015.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…Read more
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132A Modal-Epistemic Argument for the Existence of GodFaith and Philosophy 31 (4): 386-400. 2014.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 poin…Read more
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38On Herman Philipse’s Attempt to Write Off Cosmological ArgumentsPhilo 16 (1): 77-94. 2013.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 caus…Read more
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