•  8
    Does living Christianity support personhood theism?
    International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 83 (5): 351-361. 2022.
    Personhood theism is the view that God exists and is a person. It is often claimed that, whatever conclusions might be reached abstractly by philosophers and theologians, Christianity as lived out practically embodies belief in personhood theism. In this article, I critically examine this claim and argue that Christian prayer and liturgical practice does not in fact embody this belief and that the claim that it does begs the questions against the non-personhood theist.
  •  18
    Aquinas on the Immortality of the Soul: Some Reflections
    Heythrop Journal 64 (1): 30-45. 2023.
    Aquinas's thoughts about the human soul present us with a puzzle. On the one hand, Thomas has been applauded within the analytic tradition as an anti-dualistic thinker, who emphasises the animal nature of human beings and denies that there could be disembodied human persons. Yet on the other hand he holds, as a faithful Catholic theologian, that the human soul survives death, and maintains that the post-mortem soul, prior to its reunification with the body is the subject of characteristically pe…Read more
  •  14
    Need anything follow from a contradiction?
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65 (3): 278-297. 2022.
    ABSTRACT Classical and intuitionistic logic both validate Ex Contradictione Quodlibet, according to which any proposition whatsoever follows from a contradiction. Many philosophers have found ECQ counter-intuitive, but criticisms of the principle have almost universally been directed from a position of support for relevance or other orthodox paraconsistent logics, according to which some, but not necessarily all, propositions follow from a contradiction. This paper draws attention to the histori…Read more
  •  12
    Herbert McCabe on God and Humanity
    New Blackfriars 102 (1101): 815-833. 2021.
    New Blackfriars, Volume 102, Issue 1101, Page 815-833, September 2021.
  •  194
    We note that a plural version of logicism about arithmetic is suggested by the standard reading of Hume's Principle in terms of `the number of Fs/Gs'. We lay out the resources needed to prove a version of Frege's principle in plural, rather than second-order, logic. We sketch a proof of the theorem and comment philosophically on the result, which sits well with a metaphysics of natural numbers as plural properties.
  •  11
    The Heythrop Journal, EarlyView.
  •  24
    Negation, denial and falsity: Logic's negative trio
    Ratio 34 (2): 109-117. 2021.
    Negation, denial and falsity lie at the heart of debates about logic. We set out the classical account of the relationship between negation and denial, owing to Frege and Geach. We then challenge this on the basis that it does not permit an adequate account of falsity. A dialetheic alternative is minuted and criticised before a novel rejectivist account is proposed according to which falsity is the aim of the speech‐act of denial, whilst negation embeds deniability into assertoric contexts.
  •  59
    Semantic Realism, Actually
    Metaphysica 21 (2): 237-254. 2020.
    Michael Dummett offered a semantic characterisation of a variety of realism-antirealism debates. This approach has fallen out of fashion. This has been to the detriment of metaphysics. This paper offers an accurate characterisation of Dummett’s view, often lacking in the literature, and then defends it against a range of attacks (from Devitt, Miller and Williamson). This understanding of realism debates is resilient, and if we take it seriously the philosophical terrain looks importantly differe…Read more
  •  35
    Disowning the Mystery : Stump's Non-Apophatic Aquinas
    Medieval Mystical Theology 1 3-14. 2020.
    On the face of it Aquinas stands in the mainstream of Western mystical theology, and in particular is a noteworthy proponent of negative theology. This view, however, is challenged within anglophone philosophical theology. The clearest attack on the view that Aquinas is an apophatic theologian is to be found in Eleonore Stump's Aquinas. This paper lays out Stump's reasons for reading Aquinas as non-apophatic, and shows that they are not convincing. Aquinas, it concludes, meant what he said when …Read more
  •  18
    Lead us not into Temptation: On the Proposed Revision of the Our Father
    New Blackfriars 101 (1095): 538-545. 2020.
    New Blackfriars, EarlyView.
  •  317
    Theism and Realism: A Match Made in Heaven?
    European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 10 (4): 27-53. 2018.
    There is no interesting entailment either way between theism and various forms of realism. Taking its cue from Dummett’s characterisation of realism and his discussion of it with respect to theistic belief, this paper argues both that theism does not follow from realism, and that God cannot be appealed to in order to secure bivalence for an otherwise indeterminate subject matter. In both cases, significant appeal is made to the position that God is not a language user, which in turn is motivated…Read more
  •  395
    It is often assumed that pluralities are rigid, in the sense of having all and only their actual members necessarily. This assumption is operative in standard approaches to modal plural logic. I argue that a sceptical approach towards the assumption is warranted.
  •  26
    Philosophy and living religion: an introduction
    with Anastasia Philippa Scrutton
    International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 79 (4): 349-354. 2018.
  •  15
    Critical Studies/Book Reviews
    Philosophia Mathematica. forthcoming.
    CraigWilliam Lane.* * God andObjects – The Coherence of Theism : Aseity.Springer, 2017. ISBN: 978-3-319-55383-2 ; 978-3-319-55384-9. Pp. xv + 540.
  •  31
    Not Crying “Peace” The Theological Politics of Herbert McCabe
    New Blackfriars 99 (1084): 740-755. 2018.
    Herbert McCabe was, by widespread acclaim, one of the greatest Catholic thinkers in the English speaking world during the final quarter of the last century. He was also deeply committed to radical left‐wing politics. What is the relationship between these two facts? I lay out what I take to be the key themes in McCabe's politics before arguing that, in contrast to significant strands in present day political theology, he had a keen sense of the respective roles of faith and reason in guiding pol…Read more
  •  107
    God is not a person
    International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 85 (3): 281-296. 2019.
    This paper transforms a development of an argument against pantheism into an objection to the usual account of God within contemporary analytic philosophy. A standard criticism of pantheism has it that pantheists cannot offer a satisfactory account of God as personal. My paper will develop this criticism along two lines: first, that personhood requires contentful mental states, which in turn necessitate the membership of a linguistic community, and second that personhood requires limitation with…Read more
  •  58
    A version of Frege's theorem can be proved in a plural logic with pair abstraction. We talk through this and discuss the philosophical implications of the result.
  •  24
  •  491
    Realism and Theism : A Match Made in Heaven?
    European Journal for Philosophy of Religion. forthcoming.
    There is no interesting entailment either way between theism and various forms of realism. Taking its cue from Dummett's characterisation of realism and his discussion of it with respect to theistic belief, this paper argues both that theism does not follow from realism, and that God cannot be appealed to in order to secure bivalence for an otherwise indeterminate subject matter. In both cases, significant appeal is made to the position that God is not a language user, which in turn is motivated…Read more
  •  306
    Tuples all the Way Down?
    Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 7 (3): 161-169. 2018.
    We can introduce singular terms for ordered pairs by means of an abstraction principle. Doing so proves useful for a number of projects in the philosophy of mathematics. However there is a question whether we can appeal to the abstraction principle in good faith, since a version of the Caesar Problem can be generated, posing the worry that abstraction fails to introduce expressions which refer determinately to the requisite sort of object. In this note I will pose the difficulty, and then propos…Read more
  •  470
    Elucidating the Eucharist
    International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 80 (3): 272-286. 2019.
    ABSTRACTThe doctrine of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist presents a particular challenge to its defenders: how is it so much as intelligible? This paper explores Dummett’s response to this question, centred on the notion of deeming. Whilst instructive, Dummett’s position is unsustainable as it stands, since it fails to secure the meaningfulness of the doctrine. Once deeming is brought together with an account of bodiliness and an appreciation of the nature of the Eucharist as a meal,…Read more
  •  60
    If an ontologist could speak we couldn’t understand him
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 61 (4): 444-460. 2018.
    It is common for contemporary ontologists to claim that they are not concerned with what exists simpliciter, but rather with what exists ’fundamentally’, or what ’really’ exists. I argue that positions of this sort cannot satisfy reasonable constraints concerning the acquisition of language. I assess and dismiss possible responses to this complaint before commenting on the prospects for a metaphysics without bespoke existence claims.
  •  55
    Rosy with Sider? The Case of the Metaphysical Liar
    Journal of Philosophical Logic 47 (5): 787-801. 2018.
    An important trend in contemporary metaphysics denies that the structure of natural language is an important datum for investigating fundamental structure. Ted Sider proceeds on this basis to propose a metaphysical semantics for natural language. Within this framework he argues that natural language and a fundamental, ‘jointcarving’, language could be subject to distinct logics. Developing an argument of Hartry Field’s, I show that Sider’s preferred option of fundamental classicality combined wi…Read more
  •  261
    A Note on Gabriel Uzquiano’s “Varieties of Indefinite Extensibility”
    Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 59 (3): 455-459
    It is argued that Gabriel Uzquiano's approach to set-theoretic indefinite extensibility is a version of in rebus structuralism, and therefore suffers from a vacuity problem.
  •  187
    When Do Some Things Form a Set?
    Philosophia Mathematica 23 (3): 311-337. 2015.
    This paper raises the question under what circumstances a plurality forms a set, parallel to the Special Composition Question for mereology. The range of answers that have been proposed in the literature are surveyed and criticised. I argue that there is good reason to reject both the view that pluralities never form sets and the view that pluralities always form sets. Instead, we need to affirm restricted set formation. Casting doubt on the availability of any informative principle which will s…Read more