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519 Divine Simplicity: Anselm’s Neoplatonic ApproachIn Mirosław Szatkowski (ed.), Ontology of Divinity, De Gruyter. pp. 375-390. 2024.
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Boethius on human freedom and divine foreknowledgeIn Michael Wiitala (ed.), Boethius' _Consolation of Philosophy_: A Critical Guide, Cambridge University Press. 2024.
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15Anselm on FreedomOxford University Press. 2008.Can human beings be free and responsible if there is an all-powerful God? Anselm of Canterbury offers viable answers to questions which have plagued religious people for at least two thousand years. Katherin Rogers examines Anselm's reconciliation of human free will and divine omnipotence in the context of current philosophical debates.
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41St. Anselm of Canterbury on God and MoralityThe Monist 105 (3): 309-320. 2022.Anselm of Canterbury, as a classical theist, does not hold that there is a moral, or value, order independent of God. What is good, indeed what is necessary and possible, depends on the will of God. But Anselm’s development of this claim does not succumb to the problems entailed by divine-command theory. One such problem addresses the question of whether or not the moral order is available to reason, bracketing Scripture and Church teaching. Anselm holds that to be just is to conform to God’s wi…Read more
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38The Experimental Approach to Free Will: Freedom in the LaboratoryRoutledge. 2022.Rogers canvases the literature critical of recent experiments, adding new criticisms of her own. She argues these experiments should not undermine belief in human freedom and lists ethical and practical problems facing the attempt to study free will experimentally.
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50Saving Eternity (and Divine Foreknowledge and Free Will): A Reply to HaskerRoczniki Filozoficzne 70 (1): 79-89. 2022.William Hasker and I disagree over whether or not appealing to a particular understanding of divine eternity can reconcile divine foreknowledge with libertarian human freedom. Hasker argues that if God had foreknowledge of a particular future choice, that choice cannot be free with libertarian freedom. I hold, to the contrary, that, given a certain theory of time—the view that all times exist equally—it is possible to reconcile divine foreknowledge with libertarian freedom. In a recent article, …Read more
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66An Anselmian Approach to Divine SimplicityFaith and Philosophy 37 (3): 308-322. 2020.The doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS) is an important aspect of the classical theism of philosophers like Augustine, Anselm, and Thomas Aquinas. Recently the doctrine has been defended in a Thomist mode using the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction. I argue that this approach entails problems which can be avoided by taking Anselm’s more Neoplatonic line. This does involve accepting some controversial claims: for example, that time is isotemporal and that God inevitably does the best. The most diff…Read more
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722Book Review: The Greatest Possible Being by Jeff Speaks (review)European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 11 (4): 213-219. 2019.
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142Classical theism and the multiverseInternational Journal for Philosophy of Religion 88 (1): 23-39. 2020.Some analytic philosophers of religion argue that theists should embrace the hypothesis of the multiverse to address the problem of evil and make the concept of a “best possible creation” plausible. I discuss what classical theists, such as Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas, might make of the multiverse hypothesis including issues such as: the principle of plenitude, what a classical theist multiverse could look like, and how a classical theist multiverse could deal with the problem of evil and the…Read more
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25A Medieval Approach to Keith Ward’s Christ and the CosmosPhilosophia Christi 18 (2): 323-332. 2016.In Christ and the Cosmos Keith Ward hopes to “reformulate” the conciliar statements of the Trinity and Incarnation since they cannot serve our post-Enlightenment, scientific age. I dispute Ward’s motivation, noting that the differences in perspective to which he points may not be as radical as he supposes. And his “reformulation” has worrisome consequences. I am especially concerned at his point that Jesus, while very special and perfectly good, is only human. This undermines free will theodicy,…Read more
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9Retribution, Forgiveness, and the Character Creation Theory of PunishmentSocial Theory and Practice 33 (1): 75-103. 2007.
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46Anselm Against McCann On God and Sin (review)Faith and Philosophy 28 (4): 397-415. 2011.Hugh McCann argues that God wills human sin, that humans are nonetheless significantly free, and that his position provides a satisfying theodicy of sin. I defend an Anselmian view: Although God causes the existence of all that exists, He does not produce sin. Human beings are the ultimate sources of their sinning, which sinning should not happen. McCann rejoins that my position is incoherent and that my criticisms are not well taken. I respond, clarifying Anselm’s understanding of human freedom…Read more
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21A Defense of Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo ArgumentProceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 74 187-200. 2000.
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5Libertarianism in Kane and AnselmProceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 81 279-290. 2007.Anselm of Canterbury is the first Christian philosopher, perhaps the first philosopher, to offer a systematic analysis of libertarian freedom. His work prefigures that of Robert Kane, and looking at the two philosophers together is helpful in understanding and appreciating the work of each of them. In this paper I show how Anselm adopts a view of choice that foreshadows Kane’s doctrine of ‘plural voluntary control.’ Kane proposes this doctrine as an attempt to answer the ‘luck’ problem. Alfred M…Read more
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122What’s Wrong with Occasionalism?American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 75 (3): 345-369. 2001.
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17Christ Our BrotherAmerican Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 86 (2): 223-236. 2012.If Christ, a single member of the human race, can pay the debt of sin for all of us, then there must be some principle uniting all humanity. Some scholarssuggest that, in Anselm’s theory of the atonement, the unity in question is similar to that of a corporation or that it derives from our shared participation in humannature. Neither of these proposals can be supported from Anselm’s text. Rather, there is considerable evidence that Anselm held that all the “children of Adam”belong to the same li…Read more
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27Freedom and Self Creation: Anselmian LibertarianismOxford University Press UK. 2015.Katherin A. Rogers presents a new theory of free will, based on the thought of Anselm of Canterbury. We did not originally produce ourselves. Yet, according to Anselm, we can engage in self-creation, freely and responsibly forming our characters by choosing 'from ourselves' between open options. Anselm introduces a new, agent-causal libertarianism which is parsimonious in that, unlike other agent-causal theories, it does not appeal to any unique and mysterious powers to explain how the free agen…Read more
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56Eternity has no Duration: Katherin A. RogersReligious Studies 30 (1): 1-16. 1994.In 1981 Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann published a landmark article aimed at exploring the classical concept of divine eternity. 1 Taking Boethius as the primary spokesman for the traditional view, they analyse God's eternity as timeless yet as possessing duration. More recently Brian Leftow has seconded Stump and Kretzmann's interpretation of the medieval position and attempted to defend the notion of a durational eternity as a useful way of expressing the sort of life God leads. 2 However…Read more
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13The Anselmian Approach to God and CreationEdwin Mellen Press. 1997.In this series of essays, the author sets out the traditional, Anselmian views on certain questions in the philosophy of religion, and aims to defend these views in the contemporary idiom.
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32This work argues that Anselm was a Christian neoplatonist of the Augustinian variety, and that thus he was the inheritor of a powerful and systematic metaphysics and epistemology. The view that the world is an image of the divine mind and its ideas, a fragmented and temporal copy of of the perfect, eternal unity which is God, led Anselm to a strong exemplarism on the doctrine of the universals, and ultimately to a theistic idealism. This discussion concludes with a neoplatonic interpretation and…Read more
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35Perfect Being TheologyEdinburgh University Press. 2019.That being than which a greater cannot be conceived.' This was the way in which the living God of biblical tradition was described by the great Medieval philosophers such as Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas.Contemporary philosophers find much to question, criticise and reject in the traditional analysis of that description. Some hold that the attributes traditionally ascribed to God - simplicity, necessity, immutability, eternity, omniscience, omnipotence, creativity and goodness - are inherently i…Read more
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92Freedom, Science and ReligionIn Yujin Nagasawa (ed.), Scientific Approaches to the Philosophy of Religion, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 237. 2012.
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52Anselm's Perfect GodIn Jeanine Diller & Asa Kasher (eds.), Models of God and Alternative Ultimate Realities, Springer. pp. 133--140. 2013.
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35Freedom, Will, and NatureProceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 81 279-290. 2007.
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45Personhood, potentiality, and the temporarily comatose patientPublic Affairs Quarterly 6 (2): 245-254. 1992.
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61The Incarnation As Action CompositeFaith and Philosophy 30 (3): 251-270. 2013.The Council of Chalcedon insisted that God Incarnate is one person with two natures, one divine and one human. Recently critics have rightly argued that God Incarnate cannot be a composite person. In the present paper I defend a new composite theory using the analogy of a boy playing a video game. The analogy suggests that the Incarnation is God doing something. The Incarnation is what I label an “action composite” and is a state of affairs, constituted by one divine person assuming human nature…Read more
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39Christ Our BrotherAmerican Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 86 (2): 223-236. 2012.If Christ, a single member of the human race, can pay the debt of sin for all of us, then there must be some principle uniting all humanity. Some scholarssuggest that, in Anselm’s theory of the atonement, the unity in question is similar to that of a corporation or that it derives from our shared participation in humannature. Neither of these proposals can be supported from Anselm’s text. Rather, there is considerable evidence that Anselm held that all the “children of Adam”belong to the same li…Read more
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97The Divine Controller Argument for IncompatibilismFaith and Philosophy 29 (3): 275-294. 2012.Incompatibilists hold that, in order for you to be responsible, your choices must come from yourself; thus, determinism is incompatible with responsibility. One way of defending this claim is the Controller Argument: You are not responsible if your choices are caused by a controller, and natural determinism is relevantly similar to such control, therefore... Q.E.D. Compatibilists dispute both of these premises, insisting upon a relevant dissimilarity, or allowing, in a tollens move, that since w…Read more
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63Anselm on the Ontological Status of ChoiceInternational Philosophical Quarterly 52 (2): 183-197. 2012.If God is the cause of everything that has any sort of existence at all, where is there room in the universe for rational creatures to have freedom of will? Isn’t a choice made by a created agent a sort of thing, and hence made by God? But if God causes our choices, how are we responsible such that we can be appropriately praised and blamed? Call this the dilemma of created freedom and divine omnipotence. Anselm solves the dilemma by proposing a description of free choice in which what is contri…Read more