Enric F. Gel

In this paper, I present a much-neglected Aristotelian response to William Lane Craig’s popular moral argument for God’s existence. I argue that a striking concession in Craig’s work, when taken together with an Aristotelian understanding of morality, simply implies that the objectivity of moral values and duties is in principle independent of the existence of God. I end up by addressing the most promising theistic comeback to this Aristotelian response (an evolutionary debunking argument) and consider how an Aristotelian naturalist could respond. This, in turn, marks the way for the moral argument moving forward.

According to the Evil-God challenge, there is an epistemic symmetry between the hypothesis of a Good God and the reverse hypothesis of an Evil God. Hence, belief in a Good God is no more reasonable than belief in an Evil God. Several persuasive responses have been offered to this challenge, but in this paper I focus on one that, to my mind, is underdeveloped in the literature; namely that the Evil God hypothesis casts serious doubt on the reliability of our cognitive faculties, while no comparable thing can be said of the Good God hypothesis, in any case not to the same degree of plausibility. Assuming an apparently innocuous rationality principle, this breaks the supposed symmetry between the two hypotheses and gives the theist reason enough to justifiably prefer the latter.

In this paper, we revisit Norman Kretzmann’s argument that an immutable God can’t always know what time it is. We uncover two implicit premises that, we argue, theists can simply reject once their incompatibility with their theistic commitments is made apparent. These suppositions are (i) internalism about beliefs and (ii) content essentialism. We end by considering further whether these two theses are, in fact, in conflict between themselves. If true, this would make Kretzmann’s argument dialectically unstable.

We present and defend a Thomistic cosmological argument that runs independently of the principle of sufficient reason, sidestepping perhaps two of the most recurrent objections to cosmological reasoning: (a) the possibility of brute facts (i.e., that not everything needs an adequate explanation of its existence) and (b) the accusation of the composition fallacy. Drawing upon the work of Barry Miller, we show that any contingent entity like Thumper the rabbit, upon metaphysical analysis, is either a contradictory structure and therefore an impossible existent or else points towards an extrinsic cause for the unity of its really distinct metaphysical parts (namely, its essence and its existence). This conclusion enables the inference that only an uncaused cause with no really distinct metaphysical parts can ultimately produce anything with really distinct metaphysical parts. We then suggest it is not implausible that this entity is God.

Causal finitism claims nothing can have an infinite causal history. An influential defense of this position uses infinity paradoxes to argue that, if causal finitism is false, several impossible scenarios would be possible. In this paper, I defend that theists should not be persuaded by this argument. If true, this is an important development, since causal finitism is often argued for by theists as a core premise in Kalam-style cosmological arguments for theism. I extend the same analysis to an argument in favor of temporal finitism and conclude that my point may generalize to any reasoning of a similar structure.

I argue that classical theism has a significant advantage as a theory of the First Cause over Graham Oppy’s naturalistic account. This is because classical theism not only gives us a clear answer to the question of how many first causes there are but also because it explains why there is that number and not another. In comparison, Oppy’s ‘initial physical state’ account seemingly leaves these questions hopelessly open, and so does his ‘metaphysical simples’ proposal for a foundational layer of reality. I end by exploring two arguments from omnipotence and perfection that could be of use also to non-classical theists.

This article aims to test the hypothesis that metaphysical grounding is an instance of essentially ordered (or per se ) causation, a species of causation identified by medieval philosophers and theologians like Aquinas and Scotus, but largely forgotten from then on. The article reviews some of the consensus of grounding theorists on the nature of metaphysical grounding (or ontological dependence) compared to some of the crucial characteristics of essentially ordered causal series as articulated by scholastic and neo-Aristotelian philosophers then and now. The authors emphasize their similarities, which they hold is enough to render strongly plausible the thesis that grounding is essentially ordered causation (G = EOC). Moreover, they highlight the potential benefits of this identification both for theories of grounding and EOC, especially as it concerns matters of fundamentality. Finally, they consider the limits of their hypothesis.

Resumen: Analizo y critico las principales objeciones que Carlos Blanco plantea, en Las fronteras del pensamiento, contra las 5 vías de Tomás de Aquino. Mi objetivo es mostrar que dichas objeciones fallan, lo cual nos va a permitir traer, a la literatura en español, ciertas discusiones del mundo filosófico anglosajón. Palabras clave: 5 vías, Tomás de Aquino, Tomismo, Existencia de Dios, Filosofía de la religión Abstract: I analyze and critique Carlos Blanco’s main objections against Aquinas’s 5 ways, to be found in his latest book, Las fronteras del pensamiento. My aim is to show how these objections miss the mark. This will allow us to bring into the Spanish literature some discussions that have taken place in the English-speaking world. Kewyords: 5 ways, Thomas Aquinas, Thomism, God’s existence, Philosophy of religion.

En este trabajo repaso la concepción del cuerpo de Nietzsche y de Butler, intentando mostrar cómo cada una nos ayuda a superar un error de la modernidad. Nietzsche nos permite recuperar el cuerpo y contrarrestar el dualismo cartesiano, que lo valora tan poco, convirtiéndolo en una mera máquina. La obra de Judith Butler, por otro lado, especialmente Precarious Life y Frames of War, nos sirve para hacer frente al individualismo, al poner sobre la mesa la socialidad del cuerpo, el modo en que nuestro cuerpo habla de los otros y está expuesto a los otros.