James Orr

SummaryThis article proposes an overdue corrective to declinist genealogies of modernity that trace a trajectory from the participatory ontology of late-antique and high-scholastic metaphysics – in which created reality is taken to exemplify patterns in God’s creative blueprint – to a nominalist ontology of discrete, singular particulars whose unity and intelligibility is grounded only in the linguistic capacities of the human subject. It does so by advancing two connected historical claims. First, the shift should be understood less in terms of the substitution of universals for vocal signifiers, as historical accounts of the rise of nominalism have tended to argue, but rather in terms of the slow substitution of divine ideas for human concepts. Second, from the earliest origins of the split between continental and analytic philosophy, the shift from divine intellectualism to secular conceptualism generated sceptical threats both for the phenomenological tradition – crystallized most dramatically in the dilemma of ‘correlationism’ that variously occupies Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Quentin Meillassoux – but equally acutely for analytic metaphysics, from Frege’s concepts and Russell’s universals to Michael Dummett’s semantic verificationism. The article concludes that for all the differences between these stances, they are forms of ersatz participatory realism that each endorse an intellectualist account of reality free of the theological commitments that once underpinned it, even though this came at the cost of a wholesale rejection of realism.

This book explores the relationship between a scientifically updated Aristotelian philosophy of nature and a scientifically engaged theology of nature that cuts across interdisciplinary boundaries. It features original contributions by some of the best scholars engaging with Aristotelianism in contemporary metaphysics, philosophy of science, and philosophical theology. Despite the growing interest in Aristotelian approaches to contemporary philosophy of science, few metaphysicians have engaged directly with the question of how a neo-Aristotelian metaphysics of nature might change the landscape for theological discussion concerning theology and naturalism, the place of human beings within nature, or the problem of divine causality. The chapters in this volume are collected into three thematic sections: Naturalism and Nature, Mind and Nature, and God and Nature. By pushing the current boundaries of neo-Aristotelian metaphysics to recover the traditional notion of substantial forms in physics, reframe the principle of proportionality in biology, and restore the hierarchy of being familiar to ancient philosophy, this book advances a metaphysically unified framework that accommodates both scientific and theological knowledge, enriching the interaction between science, philosophy and theology. Neo-Aristotelian Metaphysics and the Theology of Nature will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in metaphysics, philosophy of science, natural theology, philosophical theology, and analytic theology.

Historians of science have long considered the very idea of a law-governed universe to be the relic of a bygone intellectual culture that took it largely for granted that a divine lawmaker existed. Similarly, many philosophers of science today insist that the notion of a law of nature is fraught with implausibly theological assumptions, preferring instead to treat them as theoretical axioms in an optimal description of nature's regularities, or else as robust patterns of causal connections or causal powers whose status can be reconciled to the stringent demands of metaphysical naturalism. Yet the metaphor of lawhood has proven more difficult to dislodge than the theistic commitments it once presupposed, not least because it preserves the widespread intuition that the task of scientific inquiry is not to stipulate the difference between a lawful and an accidental regularity in nature, but to discover it. Taking its cue from the repeated failure to find naturalistic alternatives to divine lawmaking, this book undertakes a retrieval and reappraisal of a high-scholastic philosophy of nature that grounds lawlike regularities in the conceptual and causal powers of God and, having done so, concludes that the metaphysical framework of classical theism yields a more powerful and parsimonious explanation of the rhythms and patterns of the natural world than its secular rivals.

One common feature of debates about the best metaphysical analysis of putatively lawful phenomena is the suspicion that nomic realists who locate the modal force of such phenomena in quasi-causal necessitation relations between universals are working with a model of law that cannot convincingly erase its theological pedigree. Nancy Cartwright distills this criticism into slogan form: no God, no laws. Some have argued that a more plausible alternative for nomic realists who reject theism is to ground laws of nature in the fundamental dispositional properties or “pure powers” of physical objects. This article argues that for all its advantages over deflationary and rival realist accounts, a pandispositionalist account of law cuts against the commitment to metaphysical naturalism that its supporters almost always presuppose. It then examines and rejects a Platonic version of this account before elaborating and advancing a theistic alternative that is more theoretically powerful and more metatheoretically parsimonious. In slogan form: no God, no powers.