Timothy O'Connor

Why did the omnipotent, omniscient, unsurpassably, and perfectly good being who is necessary in Himself, and having a supremely rational will, contingently create ex nihilo? What motivation could account for such freely undertaken activity, displaying it as neither necessary nor less than fully rational? The chapter considers and criticizes answers recently offered by Mark Johnston and Alex Pruss. It is argued that creation of some contingent reality or other is necessary, and that plausible reflections on the ordered complexity in God’s motivations indicate that the scope of contingency regarding what to create is highly constricted—though not to the point of complete modal collapse. A perfect creator would create either an infinite and richly varied multiverse or an infinitely improving universe realizing a wide array of kinds of goods. Finally, a rebuttal is given to the contention that any element of contingency in a divine choice entails a rational-explanatory deficiency.

In this classic, exciting, and thoughtful text, Metaphysics , Peter van Inwagen examines three profound questions: What are the most general features of the world? Why is there a world? and What is the place of human beings in the world? Metaphysics introduces to readers the curious notion that is metaphysics, how it is conceived both historically and currently. The author's work can serve either as a textbook in a university course on metaphysics or as an introduction to metaphysical thinking for the interested reader. This second edition, revised though not fundamentally changed, includes the basis of the first edition with a new chapter on the nature of time.

We are naturally disposed to believe of ourselves and others that we are free: that what we do is often and to a considerable extent ‘up to us’ via the exercise of a power of choice to do or to refrain from doing one or more alternatives of which we are aware. In this article, I probe thesource and epistemic justification of our ‘freedom belief’. I propose an account that (unlike most) does not lean heavily on our first-personal experience of choice and action, and instead regards freedom belief as a priori justified. I will then consider possible replies available toincompatibilists to the contention made by some compatibilists that the ‘privileged’ epistemic status of freedom belief (which my account endorses) supports a minimalist, and therefore compatibilist view of the nature of freedom itself.

I discuss several issues that concern human freedom of action. I begin by addressing the question of whether moral responsibility for one's actions and the consequences thereof requires that one have the capacity to have refrained from the action or to have prevented the ensuing consequence. Drawing to a significant extent on Peter van Inwagen's discussion of this matter, I defend certain forms of "alternative possibilities" conditions on moral responsibility against several recent objections, as well as point out a common shortcoming of alternative proposals that abandon such a condition. ;I then go on to ask what sort of account of the metaphysics of action would depict genuinely free and responsible agency. Since I am firmly of the opinion that freedom of action entails causal indeterminism, I restrict my attention to theories that accept this requirement. Broadly speaking, three indeterministic approaches to this issue have been taken in the modern era: simple indeterminism, causal indeterminism, and the agency theory. I argue that and are inadequate for fundamental reasons, through an assessment of the representative work of a few of their contemporary proponents. ;Accordingly, I turn to , the approach that deploys the notion of 'agent-causation', a type of causation that is conceived to be sui generis, irreducible to a relation between events. My attempt to refurbish and defend this rather beleaguered approach takes as its point of departure the work of Thomas Reid in the eighteenth century and, more recently, the writings of Richard Taylor and Roderick Chisholm. In attempting to extend their treatments, I sketch the particular sort of realist account of event causation that I believe is correct, and I try to show that agent causation can readily be understood as a distinct species of the primitive notion of causal production underlying realist accounts of event causation. ;Finally, for the agency theory to provide a truly illuminating model of human action, it must be compatible with ordinary reasons explanations of action. I try to satisfy this constraint by providing an indeterministic account of such explanations that explicitly incorporates the concept of agent causation

In the specialized and often peculiar conversation of philosophers, some speak of themselves and of others as willing our actions. Usually, they intend to imply thereby a distinctive kind of psychological event, one that lies at the origin of every instance of intentional action. This thesis, of course, has become highly controversial. Many argue that despite much traditional philosophical theorizing committed to such an essential feature of action, there is no basis for it in ordinary speech, introspection, or sound theory about the mind’s role in behavior. But even in everyday conversation, we do say of ourselves and of others that we or they often are trying to do various things, sometimes successfully and sometimes not. Since we not only say this but are aware of it often enough, sound theory should provide a place for this feature, at least. Now some recent philosophers seek to forge a link between the ordinary notion of ‘trying’ and the philosophical notion of ‘willing’. They fix upon special cases where agents experience themselves as acting while little or no bodily movement occurs. It seems that the activity there experienced must be purely psychological, a striving to achieve an effect that we often term “trying”. If this is right, perhaps it can be argued cogently that such a psychological activity is present in ordinary cases as well.

I briefly defend the following claims in response to my critics: (1) We cannot make a principled division between features of contingent reality that do and features that don’t "cry our for explanation." (2) The physical data indicating fine-tuning provide confirmation of the hypothesis of a personal necessary cause of the universe over against an impersonal necessary cause, notwithstanding the fact that the probability of either hypothesis, if true, would be 1. (3) Theism that commits to God’s necessary existence makes more sense than theism that denies it. (4) God is likely to have created an infinity of universes, and this conclusion helps with (though does not solve) the many problems of evil

Twentieth-century analytic philosophy was dominated by positivist antimetaphysics and neo-Humean deflationary metaphysics, and the nature of explanation was reconceived in order to fit these agendas. Unsurprisingly, the explanatory value of theist was widely discredited. I argue that the long-overdue revival of moralized, broadly neo-Aristotelian metaphysics and an improved perspective on modal knowledge dramatically changes the landscape. In this enriched context, there is no sharp divide between physics and metaphysics, and the natural end of the theoretician’s quest for a unified explanation of the universe is God, an absolutely necessary, transcendent, and personal source of all contingent reality.

In recent years, as the enterprise of speculative metaphysics has attained a newfound measure of respectability, incompatibilist philosophers who are inclined to think that freedom of action is not only possible, but actual, have re-emerged to take on the formidable task of providing a satisfactory indeterministic account of the connections among an agent's freedom to do otherwise, her reasons, and her control over her act. In this paper, I want to examine three of these proposals, all of which give novel twists to familiar themes. I will argue that despite the considerable ingenuity these philosophers evince, their attempts do not succeed. A common criticism of these theories will be that they fail to give a satisfactory account of what I term "agent-control," a certain feature of actions whose presence I take to be a central requirement for any workable model of responsible agency. I believe that the general notion I try to capture under this label is implicit in much of the voluminous discussion of the problem of free will (especially in compatibilist criticisms of libertarianism), although I am unaware of any explicit formulations of it in just the way I have in mind. Simply put, agent-control is that feature of the process of agency that accounts for how a particular piece of behavior is connected to, or an 'outflowing of, the agent, i.e., that which allows us properly to assert that the action was controlled by the agent.

Daniel Dennett's Freedom Evolves is a rhetorically powerful but philosophically unconvincing attempt to show that a deterministic and ontologically reductionist, but epistemologically pluralist, outlook may peacefully coexist with a robust acceptance of human freedom and moral responsibility. The key to understanding the harmony rests in recognizing that freedom is not a metaphysical or physical condition but is instead a product of deeply embedded social practices. I argue that Dennett's project rests on an unargued and implausible deflationary stance toward basic metaphysics.