Hud Hudson

The metaphysical possibility of hypertime has recently been invoked in disputes concerning the nature of time, the rate of time’s passage, the possibility of time travel, the possibility of changing the past, and a variety of outstanding problems in the philosophy of religion. Guided by the familiar range of views on diachronic identity, the chapter investigates the new and perplexing topic of transhypertime identity (i.e. of persistence across a hypertime interval). The author formulates, motivates, and critically evaluates several positions, eventually defending one candidate over its rivals.

A severe and underappreciated problem confronts anyone who holds a certain popular combination of theses – namely, that there is such a thing as knowledge by revelation alone and that a defensive maneuver known as skeptical theism is sufficient to undermine a variety of popular arguments from the magnitude, intensity, duration, and distribution of evil to the nonexistence of God. After briefly characterizing and commenting on these two positions, this chapter identifies and explores the puzzle generated by their combination, and critically examines a variety of proposals for responding to that puzzle.

Popular thoughts concerning what is distinctive of and perhaps even constitutive of sculpture have been significantly over-influenced by reflecting on our best-known masterpieces, and one fears that one suffers from a tendency to mistake accidental characteristics of familiar pieces for essential characteristics of sculpture in general. This chapter will defend examples designed to challenge the commonsense theses that sculpture must be three-dimensional, or solid, or available to visual or tactile assessment, or in interaction with an ambient space. Finally, it will investigate a pair of intriguing features, the first manifested by sculptures carved from a single block of marble such as Michelangelo’s Pieta and the second manifested by sculptures related to multiple castings such as Rodin’s The Thinker. Finally, it offers some concluding remarks on the lessons of these investigations for the ontology of sculpture in particular and for the subfield of art ontology in general.

In his book _The Existence of God_, Richard Swinburne investigates an increasingly popular argument for theism that is grounded in the observation that the universe appears to be especially fine-tuned for embodied-free-intelligent-sentient life. Swinburne’s discussion is intriguing and also unusual due to the role he assigns to aesthetic considerations. After motivating and reviewing a very plausible thesis known as skeptical theism, this chapter explains how that thesis undermines the most popular defense of a crucial premise in Swinburne’s (and others’) fine-tuning arguments. Then it introduces and defends a second skeptical hypothesis, aesthetic skepticism (which stands to claims about beauty and sublimity as skeptical theism stands to claims about value more generally), and shows how attempts to reformulate fine-tuning arguments with respect to beauty and sublimity are jeopardized by the same sorts of reflections that trouble other versions of this strategy for supporting theism.

Despite its first page this paper is not yet another piece on Kant! Rather, the paper is a contribution to the literature on incongruent counterparts. Specifically, it concerns the question of whether we can construct a temporal version of the puzzle of incongruent counterparts—a question which (as far as 1 can tell) has been thoroughly neglected. I maintain that we can construct such a version of the puzzle, and that this temporal variant on the phenomenon has something to teach us about popular arguments for the possibility (or even actuality) of four‐dimensional space.

In a very influential paper, Abortion, Joel Feinberg offers a series of arguments against four popular proposals for the criterion of moral personhood and defends a fifth proposal. In this paper, I demonstrate that two widely‐accepted arguments employed by Feinberg against the modified species criterion and the strict potentiality criterion, respectively, are unsound. Moreover, I argue that there is a general feature of his inquiry into the criteria for moral personhood which undermines his efforts to argue convincingly either in favour of his own candidate or against other candidates.

Well‐known arguments for atheism have been grounded on the alleged lack of morally justifying reasons to permit particular moral and natural evils and on the thesis that God would have to create the best possible world. After discussing obstacles to the suggestion that there is a best of all possible worlds, I examine the prospects for responding to these atheistic arguments by exploring the case for our own world's being the best of all possible worlds against the backdrop of the multiverse hypothesis – an intriguing claim about the partitioned structure of reality that has been receiving serious and recent attention in philosophy and physics.

First, I pair and critically discuss a methodological naturalism (construed as a research program heavily inspired by epistemological naturalism) with the kind of work that is currently being practiced under the heading “contemporary analytic metaphysics.” Second, I pair and critically discuss an ontological naturalism with the kind of work that could be described under the heading “theistically informed metaphysics.” Each pairing provides a window on the sort of confrontation to be had between naturalism and non‐naturalized metaphysics. Along the way, I offer some reflections about the resilience and even the inescapability of metaphysics, despite threats from naturalism to diminish its scope and significance.

In this essay, I shall scold a Jinn, recommend a position in Islamic theology to my Muslim neighbors, explore a famous dilemma recounted in Genesis, and participate in a debate occasioned by an interpretive puzzle in Kierkegaard studies. I investigate two opposed ways of understanding the phrase, ‘the teleological suspension of the ethical’, offer some critical remarks on the interpretation of that phrase in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, and defend a range of considerations that speak in favor of one of the options over the other. Finally, I show how one may invoke my preferred interpretation to confront the puzzle common to Jewish, Christian, and Islamic theology presented by the story of Abraham and the binding of Isaac and also how a related strategy can be invoked to address the story of Iblis and the puzzle peculiar to Islamic theology to which it gives rise.

Hud Hudson presents an innovative view of the metaphysics of human persons according to which human persons are material objects but not human organisms. In developing his account, he formulates and defends a unique collection of positions on parthood, persistence, vagueness, composition, identity, and various puzzles of material constitution. The author also applies his materialist metaphysics to issues in ethics and in the philosophy of religion. He examines the implications for ethics of his metaphysical views for standard arguments addressing the moral permissibility of our treatment of human persons and their parts, fetuses and infants, the irreversibly comatose, and corpses. He argues that his metaphysics provides the best foundation in the philosophy of religion for the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body. Hudson addresses a broad range of metaphysical issues, but among his most strikingly original contributions are his defense of the "Partist" view and his argument for the compatibility of Christianity with a materialistic theory of human persons.