Richard Tamburro

In response to John Bishop's (2007) account of passionally caused believing, Dan-Johan Eklund (2014) argues that conscious non-evidential believing is (conceptually) impossible, that is, it's (conceptually) impossible consciously to believe that p whilst acknowledging that the relevant evidence doesn't support p's being true, for it conflicts with belief being a truth-oriented attitude, or so he argues. In this article, we present Eklund's case against Bishop's account of passionally caused believing, and we argue that it's unpersuasive, at least to those who accept permissivism about evidence, that is, that it's possible for there to be more than one rational response to a given body of evidence. We do this through a novel application of a case of nurtured belief, that is, of a person holding a belief simply because she was caused to do so by her upbringing, and we use it to show exactly where Eklund's argument goes wrong. We conclude by drawing a general lesson drawn from this debate: if permissivism about evidence is true, then belief being truth-oriented is consistent with non-evidential believing being possible.

We present a new understanding of Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist on the model of Stump’s account of God’s omnipresence and Green and Quan’s account of experiencing God in Scripture. On this understanding, Christ is derivatively, rather than fundamentally, located in the consecrated bread and wine, such that Christ is present to the believer through the consecrated bread and wine, thereby making available to the believer a second-person experience of Christ, where the consecrated bread and wine are the way in which she shares attention with him. The consecrated bread and wine are then, in a sense, icons of Christ.

This project examines whether we can consistently make two claims: i) God cannot prevent sin without destroying free will; and ii) in heaven, God prevents sin without destroying free will. It explores the conditions under which agents may be said to be acting freely, guided by consideration of the free will defence to the problem of evil. This involves considering prominent themes in the philosophy of action, and in the metaphysics of free will. It develops, and defends, a non-causal incompatibilist account of free agency. This is then applied to the theological problem of how God ensures the sinlessness of the saints in heaven, and why this could not be achieved prior to heaven.