February 1, 2012
Would Berkeley Endorse the Deflationary Theory of Truth?
In several place, most notably Alciphron 7, Berkeley seems to think that the meanings of many, if not all, terms are given by the rules for correctly applying them. He doesn't seem to mean the conditions under which they are true. Rather, he seems to mean the rules actual speakers apply in deciding to use the word. We're not talking about mere disquotation; we have to give conditions that speakers can actually use when deciding whether to utter sentences. So, to use one of Berkeley's favorite examples, the meaning of the symbol 'i' in algebra is given by the formula...
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January 26, 2012
Ross's Theory of Omnipotence Entails Double Predestination
Let E (for 'election') be the proposition which says de re of each person who will in fact be saved that he or she will be saved. That is, E is the longest conjunction of the form 'John will be saved, and Mary will be saved, and Lois will be saved...' which is true. Let R (for 'reprobation') be the proposition which says de re of each person who will in fact be damned that he or she will be damned. The doctrine of predestination is the doctrine that God, from eternity, has issued an efficacious decree of election -...
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January 18, 2012
The Mod Squad
Lewis Powell has
announced the formation of
The Mod Squad, a group blog devoted to the history of modern philosophy. My first post over there,
King's Theory of Election has just gone live. In the future, I will cross-post everything here as I have been doing with my
Prosblogion posts, but for now I will just encourage readers to check things out over there.
Continue reading "The Mod Squad"
January 11, 2012
Berkeley and Motivational Internalism
Motivational internalism is a view about moral language or evaluative language in general and its relation to motivation. According to motivational internalism, if someone says 'x is good' but is not in the least motivated to pursue x, then that person is either insincere or not a competent user of the language. This is not supposed to be a fact about human psychology (that all humans pursue the good), but rather a claim about how the word 'good' works: something good is something which is to be pursued, so if you call something 'good' without taking it to be something...
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December 19, 2011
Christmas in Platonic Context
The important cultural background to the rise of Christianity includes both the Hebrew context of the Old Testament and the context of the Greek culture which was dominant in the Eastern Roman Empire at the time. From the Christian perspective, Athens has quite a lot to do with Jerusalem. I believe there is adequate evidence for this (admittedly controversial) claim in the New Testament; if one is sufficiently traditional to allow the testimony of the Greek Fathers of the early church, then the matter should be beyond any doubt. Christmas is the celebration of the Incarnation, of God becoming man...
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December 15, 2011
"Understanding Omnipotence"
"Understanding Omnipotence," co-authored by myself and
Alexander Pruss, has been accepted for publication by
Religious Studies! Cambridge University Press's latest copyright agreement permits authors to post preprints on their personal web-sites, so I have made the complete text available
here. Also, here is the abstract:
An omnipotent being would be a being whose power was unlimited. The power of human beings is limited in two distinct ways: we are limited with respect to our freedom of will, and we are limited in our ability to execute what we have willed. These two distinct sources of limitation suggest a simple definition of omnipotence: an omnipotent being is one that has both perfect freedom of will and perfect efficacy of will. In this paper we further explicate this definition and show that it escapes the standard objections to divine omnipotence.
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November 19, 2011
Counterpossible Reasoning in Philosophy of Religion (and Elsewhere)
The latest (July 2011) Faith and Philosophy contains an excellent article by Jeff Speaks on some difficulties related to establishing the consistency of certain claims (he uses as examples the existence of human freedom and the existence of evil) with the existence of an Anselmian God. The basic idea is this: since an Anselmian God is, by definition, a necessary being, establishing the possibility of an Anselmian God is tantamount to establishing the necessary, and therefore actual, existence of an Anselmian God. But these compatibility arguments typically, in one way or another, assume the possibility, and so the actuality, of...
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Topic(s):
Alvin Plantinga
,
Conditionals
,
Contemporary Thinkers
,
Jeff Speaks
,
Logic
,
Metaphysics
,
Modality
,
Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Religion
,
Ted A. Warfield
,
The Problem of Evil
,
Trenton Merricks
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November 12, 2011
November 7, 2011
Berkeley's 'Master Argument' and the Theory of Mental Representation
I apologize for the very light posting; I have been busy stressing about my upcoming qualifying exam. But I thought I would break my silence today for some thoughts about (as usual) Berkeley. The following passage from Berkeley's Dialogues (L&J p. 200) is rather notorious: Phil. ... I am content to put the whole [debate] upon this issue. If you can conceive it possible for any mixture or combination of qualities, or any sensible object whatever, to exist without the mind, then I will grant it actually to be so. Hyl. If it comes to that, the point will soon...
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October 14, 2011
Berkeley on Miracles and Transubstantiation
It was the custom among 17th and 18th century English philosophers to take as many potshots at the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation as possible. Sometimes it almost seems that a desideratum for a theory of metaphysics is that it should be inconsistent with that doctrine. This desideratum is, of course, easily satisfied: most theories of metaphysics are inconsistent with transubstantiation. All versions of the doctrine require that it be metaphysically possible for flesh to exist under the 'species' of bread, and a conservative interpretation of the doctrine popular in the early modern period further required that numerically the same...
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Topic(s):
Anglican Communion
,
G. W. Leibniz
,
George Berkeley
,
Historical Thinkers
,
John Locke
,
Miracles
,
Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Religion
,
Protestantism
,
Roman Catholic Church
,
The Church
,
The Eucharist
,
Theology
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October 12, 2011
Locke and Berkeley on Cartesian Skepticism
Descartes's First Meditation is one of the most striking texts in the history of philosophy. As anyone who has taught the text can attest, students are immediately gripped by the problem, and often despair of a way out. John Locke was evidently not such a student, for he responds to these doubts primarily with ridicule: If any one say, a Dream may do the same thing [as sense perception], and all these Ideas may be produced in us, without any external Objects, he may please to dream that I make him this Answer, 1. That 'tis no great matter, whether...
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October 6, 2011
Quote of the Day: Philosophers and Platitudes
It is the profession of philosophers to question platitudes that others accept without thinking twice. A dangerous profession, since philosophers are more easily discredited than platitudes.
David Lewis, Convention, p. 1
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September 23, 2011
September 14, 2011
Reid on Character in HPQ!
I have just officially received word that my paper, "Thomas Reid on Character and Freedom," will appear in the April 2012 issue of
History of Philosophy Quarterly! Unfortunately, the journal has a moderately restrictive archival policy, so I have had to take down the online copy of the paper for now. (If I understand correctly, I can upload it to archives like philpapers and academia.edu after one year, and post it to my own web-site after three.) I'll post a link to the official version when it comes out, so that if you are subscribed, or your university is, you can get to it.
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September 10, 2011
Berkeley, Commonsense, and Surprising Discoveries
Suppose (as happens often) that scientists, or philosophers, or explorers, or whoever, make some sort of surprising discovery, one that appears to be at odds with our commonsense view of the world. How should we react? It seems that there are three possible courses: either one rejects commonsense, or one rejects the alleged discovery, or one attempts to revise and/or reinterpret things to synthesize the two perspectives. An example: periodically results come out in neuroscience which purport to show that some brain event, of which the subject is unconscious, occurs significantly before a subject makes a supposedly free conscious choice,...
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September 1, 2011
Lawless Events and the Existence of God
Christine Overall famously argued that miracles, conceived as violations of the laws of nature, would be evidence against the existence of the traditional God. A lengthy debate with Robert Larmer ensued, in which Larmer argued that only slight modifications to the law-breaking account of miracles are necessary in order for miracles to serve as evidence for, rather than against, the existence of God. Larmer tries to argue that miracles do not violate the laws of nature, but nevertheless holds that they are different from ordinary events in that they don't follow from the laws of nature. (I don't have Larmer's...
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August 18, 2011
A Dialectical Role for the Ontological Argument
It has been nearly a month since I've posted anything, and for this I apologize. The last few weeks have been pretty hectic - I was on vacation, and had to rush off to an unexpected funeral in another state, then came home and had to replace a car and a computer (the computer was expected, the car was not). Anyway, it seems the my world has more or less righted itself, and I am getting prepared for the semester to start on Monday. Here's what I'm thinking about today (not related to that dissertation I need to start working on...).
Suppose we make an ontological argument with the following general form:
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July 21, 2011
Berkeley and Sergeant
John Sergeant was a late seventeenth century English proponent of Roman Catholicism and Aristotelian philosophy. He is now mostly forgotten, though he is occasionally mentioned as a critic of Locke, partially because Locke and Stillingfleet discuss Sergeant's criticisms of Locke in their famous dispute. (Stillingfleet disowns Sergeant's criticisms; Stillingfleet and Sergeant had earlier been embroiled in a theological dispute about the rule of faith.) I mentioned a while ago that I think the Locke-Stillingfleet debate was an important influence on Berkeley. It looks like Sergeant may have been an important influence as well. First, in section 12 of the preface...
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July 6, 2011
An Annotated Bibliography of Omnipotence
I'm currently working on an article on omnipotence for the
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I found it a useful first step to compile an
annotated bibliography on the subject, and since I had the thing already prepared (and it's more comprehensive than what will go into the final article), I thought I'd share. If there is any important literature I'm missing, or any pieces which my annotations mischaracterize, I'd like to hear about it.
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July 2, 2011
"Thomas Reid on Character and Freedom"
I have posted a new draft to my
workbench, "Thomas Reid on Character and Freedom". As always, comments are welcome.
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June 29, 2011
A Short Story About Berkeley's Theory of Vision
On the plane back from Zurich last week I read a very interesting story, "He Who Shapes," by Roger Zelazny. This work won the Nebula for best novella in 1965. The story centers around essentially the same piece of technology depicted in the recent movie Inception: a device that allows two people to share a dream, with one of them, the 'shaper', in control of the dream world. However, unlike Inception, in which the technology is used primarily for corporate espionage, in "He Who Shapes" the device is used for psychotherapy. This would be interesting enough, but it gets better:...
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June 13, 2011
Omnipotence and Failure
The famous Stone Paradox asks, 'can an omnipotent being make a stone so heavy he can't lift it?' A simpler question, and one which I think makes the issues clearer, is, 'can an omnipotent being fail?' If a being can fail, then there is something that being doesn't have the power to do, namely, whatever it is it can fail to do. If a being can't fail, then there is something it doesn't have the power to do, namely, to fail. Now, we sometimes have chancy powers/abilities, as, for instance, in J. L. Austin's famous example, the power to sink...
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June 10, 2011
What Version of Locke's Essay Did Berkeley Read?
Locke's Essay went through several revisions in the author's lifetime, some of them quite substantive philosophically. The first edition was 1689, Locke died in 1704 and the posthumous fifth edition appeared in 1706. Locke seems to have had at least some hand in the revisions made between editions 4 and 5. Because some of the changes are substantive, I've sometimes wondered what version of the Essay Berkeley was working from. We know that it was required reading when Berkeley was studying for his BA at Trinity between 1700 and 1704. Today I was reading Berman's George Berkeley: Idealism and the...
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June 9, 2011
2011 International Berkeley Conference
The
program for the
2011 International Berkeley Conference, to be held in Zurich a few weeks from now, is now up. I'll be presenting a paper called "Berkeley's Lockean Religious Epistemology," and there are a number of other interesting talks on the schedule from several well-known and less well-known Berkeley scholars. The organizers solicited abstracts from the speakers for the web-site, so I'm sure those will appear shortly.
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June 6, 2011
Philosophers' Carnival 126
Welcome to the 126th
Philosophers' Carnival! The Philosophers' Carnival is a regular round-up of blog posts related to the academic discipline of philosophy.
Our first exhibit is David Fryman's,
Is God Necessary for Morality? at
The Bennett Commentary. David argues that most disputes on this question are purely verbal - that religious morality is a fundamentally different notion from secular morality, and the former, of course, relies on God, while the latter does not.
Next in line, Katja Grace wonders
whether running computer simulations of yourself can make you more likely to win the lottery at
Meteuphoric.
Luke Meuhlhauser...
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June 2, 2011
Miracles and Competence
I'm currently thinking about miracles and laws of nature, because I am working on revising this paper on the subject. Also on my mind is a paper of mine called "Divine Language, Unperceived Objects, and Berkeley's Response to Skepticism" which I will be presenting at the International Berkeley Society group session at the Eastern APA in December. It occurred to me that these two subjects of thought interact in an interesting way. In the Berkeley paper, I argue that we should take quite seriously Berkeley's claim that the laws of nature form the grammar of a language (PHK 108-110), and...
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May 26, 2011
True and Immutable Natures in Descartes's Ontological Argument
In the Fifth Meditation, Descartes argues that "from the fact that I cannot think of God except as existing, it follows that existence is inseparable from God, and hence that he really exists" (CSM 2:46). Caterus famously replied with the 'existing lion' objection (parallel to Gaunilo's 'Lost Island'): we can't think of anything as an existing lion without thinking of it as existing, so the existing lion must exist (CSM 2:72). In fact, Caterus didn't need to add 'existing' at all: existence is a necessary condition for the exemplification of any property whatsoever. Nothing can be red, blue, five feet...
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May 9, 2011
Berkeley and Stillingfleet
I'm increasingly convinced that the debate between Locke and Stillingfleet is important background to Berkeley. Berkeley, like Stillingfleet, thinks that Locke's philosophy leads to 'Socinian scruples' (PHK 95). Furthermore, even in the early works, Berkeley seems to be attacking the 'free-thinkers' (DHP, Pref.), but the only writer he quotes is Locke. This was the behavior Locke complained about in Stillingfleet. Stillingfleet was attacking 'the gentlemen of the new way of reasoning', who, according to Stillingfleet, denied the Trinity (the main target was John Toland), but only Locke is ever quoted. In addition to the fact that the Locke-Stillingfleet correspondence was...
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April 26, 2011
Phenomenalisms, De Re and De Dicto
'Phenomenalism' is the name given to Berkeley's doctrine that the being (existence) of material objects consists in their being perceived (their esse is percipi - PHK 3). This formula is, however, several ways ambiguous. Here I just want to point out one of them. (I have been thinking about these issues in connection with a paper I am writing on the question of whether Leibniz was a phenomenalist, and, if so, of what sort.) The ambiguity I am concerned with here is a de re/de dicto ambiguity. De re is Latin for 'concerning the thing', and de dicto is Latin...
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April 18, 2011
The History of Swampman
It's been a while since I posted anything here, so I thought I'd take Jeremy's
recent discussion of Davidson's 'Swampman' case (and modifications thereof) as an occasion to post a historical tidbit about swampman-like scenarios.
Davidson's story - of a duplicate of himself being created by a lightning strike in a swamp - has obvious resemblances to the DC Comics character
Swamp Thing. What is less obvious, less well known, and not mentioned on Swamp Thing's Wikipedia page, is that the swampman scenario was actually originated by
Theodore Sturgeon in his short story
"It", originally published in
Unknown in August of 1940. Sturgeon himself, who was not a follower of comic books, did not know about his influence on that genre until he was invited to receive an award at the San Diego Comic Convention in 1975. Sturgeon's own description of the event can be found in the introduction to his 1984 collection,
Alien Cargo, and is quoted in the story notes to "It" in the
first volume of Sturgeon's Complete Stories.
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April 5, 2011
Quote of the Day: Confuting and Convincing
I think that as the proper end of our conference ought to be supposed the discovery and defence of truth, so truth may be justified, not only by persuading its adversaries, but, where that cannot be done, by shewing them to be unreasonable. Arguments, therefore, which carry light have their effect, even against an opponent who shuts his eyes, because they shew him to be obstinate and prejudiced. (Berkeley, Alciphron 4.2) This thought comes back at the end of the book, where Dion observes, "how unaccountable it [is] that men so easy to confute should yet be so difficult to...
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April 4, 2011
Philosophers' Carnival 123
Philosophers' Carnival 123 is now up at
Faith in Philosophy with a philosophy of religion focus, and a link to my post on
reactive attitudes.
Continue reading "Philosophers' Carnival 123"
April 1, 2011
Concluding Remarks on Sobel's Logic and Theism
Having finished my series of discussions on Jordan Howard Sobel's Logic and Theism, I thought I should post some concluding thoughts. The parts of Sobel's book I found most interesting were his discussions of a variety of ontological and cosmological arguments for the existence of God. His book is quite thorough (as it should be, given its length) and, in general, I think his evaluations are careful and fair. I, of course, have found plenty of occasions to disagree with him. However, I found his discussions consistently interesting and well-informed, and never simply dismissive of opponents. He chooses his opponents...
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March 22, 2011
An Argument from Reactive Attitudes for the Existence of God
In The Second-Person Standpoint, Stephen Darwall notes the fact that "we speak of being grateful for good weather" as a possible objection to his view that reactive attitudes are 'second-personal'. He goes on to dismiss the objection on grounds that such gratitude "evidently involves the conceit that the weather is a free gift, as if from God" (p. 73). This remark struck me because I have known people who feel a sort of psychological need to believe in God in order to have someone to be grateful to (or, in other cases, angry at) for events beyond human (or animal,...
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March 18, 2011
Faith and Rationality
In my previous post on Sobel's treatment of Pascalian wagers, I indicated that, although I accept a strong thesis about the autonomy of theoretical reason, I believe that religious faith has more to do with practical than with theoretical reason. Now, faith can have as its object either a person or a proposition. (There are also other uses, like having faith in a theory, but I take these two to be the central ones.) Call the former faith-in (as in, 'I have faith in you') and the latter faith-that (as in, 'I have faith that everything will turn out alright')....
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March 14, 2011
Philosophers' Carnival 122
The 122nd Philosophers' Carnival is now up at Icthus77, with a link to my post on bad footnotes. Also of interest this time is Michael Billy's post, "Is 'piracy' theft?". I am in broad agreement with Billy on this one, though I don't have time to lay out my thoughts in detail right now, but let me simply say that the distinction between piracy properly so-called, theft properly so-called, and copyright infringement is, to my mind, a very important one because it is my view that property is a natural right, whereas copyright and patent are only statutory rights. This...
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March 10, 2011
Two Bad Footnotes
I found two rather bad footnotes in student editions of early modern texts this week. Both texts are from the Oxford Philosophical Texts (OPT) series. The first makes a rather contentious historical/interpretive claim, and doesn't seem to recognize that it is doing so; the second is an outright error. The first footnote is in the OPT edition of Hume's first Enquiry. In the course of a critique of occasionalism, Hume writes, It argues more wisdom to contrive at first the fabric of the world with such perfect foresight that, of itself, and by its proper operation, it may serve all...
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Topic(s):
David Hume
,
Deism
,
Divine Attributes
,
Divine Necessity
,
Existence of God
,
G. W. Leibniz
,
Historical Thinkers
,
Historiography of Philosophy
,
Ontological Argument
,
Philosophical Theology
,
Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Religion
,
The Church
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March 2, 2011
Sobel on Pascalian Wagers
In the 13th and final chapter of his book, Sobel discusses Pascalian wagers. According to Sobel, there need not be anything wrong with the practical reasoning involved in a Pascalian wager. In addition to defending this controversial claim, Sobel must explain how, if the Pascalian reasoning is correct, he can be justified in holding on to his atheism. As the chapter unfolds, both contentions are defended as a package. In general, for reasons to be explained below, I disagree with Sobel's approach here. However, I do agree with him on one thing: religious faith is more a matter of practical...
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February 21, 2011
Philosophers' Carnival 121
The latest
Philosophers' Carnival is
now up at
Enigmania, with a link to my post on
the rationality of acting arbitrarily. (By the way, there is some good discussion on the
Prosblogion version of that post as well.)
Continue reading "Philosophers' Carnival 121"
February 19, 2011
Berkeley and Leibniz Should be Friends
In his 1733 Theory of Vision Vindicated, commenting on the prevalence of the deist and free-thinking movements in England and Ireland, and justifying his association of these views with outright atheism, Berkeley writes: That atheistical principles have taken deeper root, and are farther spread than most people are apt to imagine, will be plain to whoever considers that pantheism, materialism, fatalism are nothing but atheism a little disguised; that the notions of Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibnitz [sic], and Bayle are relished and applauded; that as they who deny the freedom and immortality of the soul in effect deny its being, even...
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Topic(s):
Baruch Spinoza
,
Contemporary Thinkers
,
Free Will
,
G. W. Leibniz
,
George Berkeley
,
Grace/Predestination
,
Historical Thinkers
,
Idealism/Phenomenalism
,
Metaphysics
,
Philipp van Limborch
,
Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Mind
,
Pierre Bayle
,
Theology
,
Thomas Hobbes
,
Vere Chappell
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February 12, 2011
The Target of Leibniz's "Comments on the Book Concerning 'The Origin of Evil'"
Toward the end of his Theodicy, Leibniz included a section which in the Huggard translation has the title "Observations on the Book Concerning 'The Origin of Evil' Published Recently in London." The French title is: "Remarques sur le Livre de L'Origine du Mal, Publie depuis peu en Angleterre." (Note that, unless there is a disagreement between different French printings, 'London' is a mistake for 'England' in the title, but in the first paragraph Leibniz does identify London specifically as the place of publication.) I just spent a considerable amount of time trying to identify the book in question, so I...
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February 11, 2011
Sometimes It's Rational to Act Arbitrarily
In the middle sections of his 12th chapter, Sobel goes through a series of adjustments to his deductive argument from evil designed to get around various versions of the Free Will Defense and other tactics attempted by theists. For reasons mentioned earlier, I am not happy with Sobel's formal treatment of these arguments, so I'm going to reconstruct the substance of the argument somewhat differently. Consider the following: If there were a perfect being, it would take a best course of action available to it in creating the world If a perfect being took the best course of action available...
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February 4, 2011
Malebranche and Robert Adams on Creating the Best
Leibniz famously argued that the actual world must be the best of all possible worlds (BPW). His argument, which he repeated in several places, went something like this: The actual world was created by an omnipotent and perfectly good being. An omnipotent being can actualize any possible world. A perfectly good being always chooses the best outcome from among its choices. Therefore, The actual world is the BPW. Most people have found the conclusion of this argument incredible, and sought ways to escape it. The logical problem of evil is essentially an argument to the effect that the only premise...
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Topic(s):
Contemporary Thinkers
,
Deontologism
,
Divine Attributes
,
Ethics
,
G. W. Leibniz
,
Historical Thinkers
,
Nicolas Malebranche
,
Omnipotence
,
Perfect Goodness
,
Philosophical Theology
,
Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Religion
,
Robert Merrihew Adams
,
The Problem of Evil
,
Utilitarianism
,
Virtue Ethics
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January 31, 2011
A Technical Difficulty in Sobel's Treatment of the Logical Problem of Evil
Unlike most other recent writers on the subject, Sobel believes that the logical problem of evil - that is, the problem of showing that it is logically possible for God and evil to coexist - is a serious problem which recent treatments have not adequately dealt with. In his 12th chapter, he considers several deductive arguments from evil against the existence of God. In future posts, I will consider the specific arguments that Sobel makes, but here I just want to point out a flaw or limitation in the way Sobel frames his arguments. Each version of the problem of...
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January 19, 2011
Skeptical Theism and the 'Beforehand-Switch'
I return now from my hiatus to blog through the last three chapters of Sobel's Logic and Theism. There are two chapters on arguments against the existence of God, mostly focused on arguments from evil, and one on Pascalian wagers. In chapter 11, section 4, Sobel presents what he takes to be Hume's evidential argument from evil, and discusses skeptical theist responses to it. Now, in general, the dialectic between the evidential arguer from evil and the skeptical theist goes something like this: the evidential arguer from evil says, a perfect being would probably create a world with very little...
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January 15, 2011
Validly Affirming the Consequent
I'm grading some logic exercises from an intro class today. The students were supposed to give examples of valid and invalid arguments, with true and false premises and conclusions, and so forth. One student turned in the following fantastic example (I have edited it to remove some ambiguities):
(P1) If P1, then C
(P2) C
:. (C) P1
The student, understandably, thought the argument was invalid, since it has the form of affirming the consequent. However, due to the self-reference, the argument is valid. The student just wrote 'the premise' and 'the conclusion', so I'm not sure if this is the intended interpretation, but still pretty clever.
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January 11, 2011
The Nature of the Visible Space in Berkeley's New Theory of Vision
One of the main aims of Berkeley's Essay Toward a New Theory of Vision is to argue that the application of spatial vocabulary ('far', 'near', 'big', 'small', 'right', 'left', etc.) to how things look ("visible objects") is derived from the primary meaning of that vocabulary as applying to how things feel ("tangible objects"). A big object is one you can't fit your arms around. An object looks big when the way it looks makes you think that you probably wouldn't be able to fit your arms around it. It is only by experience that we learn that objects we can't...
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January 10, 2011
December 21, 2010
Leibniz's Short Proof of Classical Theism
In a single paragraph near the beginning of the Theodicy, Leibniz gives a very compressed version of an argument a contingentia mundi (from the contingency of the world) from which he purports to derive not just the existence of God, but several of the most important traditional divine attributes (from which, Leibniz seems to think, the other divine attributes follow). In this post, I'll try to unpack Leibniz's reasoning. I'm not going to do too much evaluation of the arguments, since this post will be long enough without that; I'll just lay out the arguments as I see them and...
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Topic(s):
Cosmological Argument
,
Divine Attributes
,
Existence of God
,
G. W. Leibniz
,
Historical Thinkers
,
Omnipotence
,
Perfect Goodness
,
Perfect Wisdom
,
Philosophical Theology
,
Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Religion
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December 19, 2010
Quote of the Day: Leibniz on True Religion
One cannot love God without knowing his perfections, and this knowledge contains the principles of true piety. The purpose of religion should be to imprint these principles upon our souls: but in some strange way it has happened all too often that men, that teachers of religion[,] have strayed far from this purpose. Contrary to the intention of our divine Master, devotion has been reduced to ceremonies and doctrine has been cumbered with formulae. All too often the ceremonies have not been well fitted to maintain the exercise of virtue, and the formulae sometimes have not been lucid. Can one...
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December 14, 2010
December 1, 2010
Abilities and Tryings
I am trying to write a seminar paper about the ability to try (or perhaps the ability to will, or the ability to choose). It seems to me that commonsense recognizes, in at least certain situations, a non-trivial question about whether an agent has the ability to try to perform an action. However, given the close connection between the concepts of ability and trying, there is reason to believe that the question might be trivial, or even incoherent, after all. This is the issue I am investigating, and I'm going to try to do some blogging on the subject in...
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Topic(s):
Abilities
,
Action Theory
,
Contemporary Thinkers
,
Historical Thinkers
,
Jennifer Hornsby
,
Kadri Vihvelin
,
Ludwig Wittgenstein
,
Metaphysics
,
Michael Fara
,
Paul Grice
,
Philosophy
,
Richard Taylor
,
Trying
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November 29, 2010
Leibniz and Frankfurt on Freedom
The history of the debate on free will is sometimes narrated as follows: first, we have the 'classic compatibilists', starting from Hobbes, through Locke, Hume, and the positivists. At first these fellows square off against libertarians like Bramhall and Reid, who are (so the story goes) deservedly obscure. The debate is terribly unsophisticated: the compatibilists hold that freedom just is the ability to do what you want to do, the absence of any sort of external constraints. The libertarians require some kind of magic 'contra-causal' agent causation they can't explain. They slowly die out as English language philosophy is purified...
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Topic(s):
Augustine
,
Contemporary Thinkers
,
David Hume
,
Ethics
,
Free Will
,
G. W. Leibniz
,
Harry Frankfurt
,
Historical Thinkers
,
John Bramhall
,
John Locke
,
Martin Luther
,
Metaphysics
,
Moral Psychology
,
Peter van Inwagen
,
Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Mind
,
Roderick Chisholm
,
Thomas Hobbes
,
Thomas Reid
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November 23, 2010
John Locke, Ron Paul, and Airport Security
It has been rather a long time since I wrote on politics. As you can probably imagine, I'm pretty worked up about this whole body scanner business. As recently announced in a post on Homeland Stupidity, Ron Paul and two co-sponsors have introduced a bill in the House which would remove immunity from airport screeners and other federal employees who engage in certain sorts of behavior associated with airport screening. That is, it ensures that the screeners at airports are subject to the same laws regarding battery, sexual assault, child pornography, etc., as everyone else. I think there is something...
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Topic(s):
Big Brother is Watching
,
Historical Thinkers
,
John Locke
,
Legitimacy
,
Philosophy
,
Political Philosophy
,
Politics
,
Privacy
,
Ron Paul
,
Technology
,
Terrorism
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November 22, 2010
November 9, 2010
Omniscience and Simplicity
The end of the semester is fast approaching, which means an even more hectic academic schedule, followed by a vacation. This post will be a brief remark on Sobel's treatment of omniscience, which completes his interlude on divine attributes. Following this, I will leave off until after the holidays, at which point I will deal with the remainder of the book, which treats arguments against the existence of God, and also 'Pascalian' practical arguments for belief in God. The main puzzle Sobel finds with omniscience is one pushed by Patrick Grim. The thrust of the argument is this: (1) a...
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Topic(s):
Abstract Objects
,
Contemporary Thinkers
,
Divine Attributes
,
Divine Simplicity
,
Jordan Howard Sobel
,
Metaphysics
,
Omniscience
,
Ontology
,
Patrick Grim
,
Philosophical Theology
,
Philosophy
,
Propositions
,
Timothy Williamson
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November 2, 2010
Leibniz Against Fine-Tuning
It appears that I'm going to be getting a bit behind on my Sobel series due to other commitments. Here is some Leibniz to make up for it. One of the problems with those forms of teleological (design) arguments that posit necessary 'gaps' in naturalistic explanation is that they are revisionary with respect to scientific practice: that is, it is a principle of scientific methodology to keep looking for naturalistic explanations no matter what. Now, most philosophers think that taking a revisionary attitude toward scientific practice is bad since the track record of science, on its current methodology, is stellar...
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Topic(s):
Albert Einstein
,
Christian Huygens
,
Contemporary Thinkers
,
Del Ratzsch
,
Existence of God
,
G. W. Leibniz
,
Historical Thinkers
,
Isaac Newton
,
Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Religion
,
Philosophy of Science
,
Science
,
Teleological Argument
,
Tim Maudlin
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October 26, 2010
On Omnipotence
In my last Sobel post, I discussed Sobel's proposal that, since the Stone Paradox shows essential omnipotence to be incoherent, the traditional God, since he would have his properties essentially, would have essential ONSLIP, or only necessarily self-limited power, but that this would not amount to omnipotence. Here I want to propose an alternative account of omnipotence, an attribute worthy of that name and which would be had essentially. First, however, we must distinguish power from freedom. To be omnipotent is to be all powerful. God is also supposed to be free in his exercise of power, and this creates...
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October 21, 2010
A Lame Response to the Problem of Evil
I very rarely say anything negative about Leibniz, especially when it comes to philosophy of religion and philosophical theology. This, however, is just ridiculous: [T]he world is not only the most wonderful machine, but also in regard to minds it is the best commonwealth, by whose means there is bestowed on minds the greatest possible amount of felicity or joyfulness; and it is in this that their physical perfection consists. But, you will say, we find in the world the very opposite of this. Often the worst sufferings fall upon the best men; the innocent (I speak not only of...
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October 17, 2010
Only Necessarily Self-Limited Power
After considering arguments for the existence of God, Sobel has a brief interlude on the divine attributes, before going on to arguments against the existence of God. Chapter 9 concerns omnipotence and the famous Stone Paradox. Sobel defines omnipotence (roughly) as the ability to do anything that can be done. (He improves this basic definition in a few ways, but these need not concern us.) The Stone Paradox, Sobel rightly recognizes, is no real problem for omnipotence as such, for if a being can do anything that can be done, then that being can take away some of the powers...
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October 12, 2010
October 8, 2010
Modern Cosmology and Theology
At the end of his discussion of fine-tuning arguments, Sobel briefly, and somewhat indirectly, discusses issues arising from attempts to combine theism with modern cosmology (pp. 285-287). In particular, many cosmologists now believe that the fundamental constants of nature were set by quantum fluctuations in the early universe. Stephen Hawking has suggested that such fluctuations might be very likely to produce a world like ours. If correct, the thought goes, this would undermine the fine-tuning argument. However, it would also do something more: if the laws of nature make it very likely, but not certain, that a world like ours,...
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Topic(s):
Contemporary Thinkers
,
David Hume
,
Existence of God
,
Historical Thinkers
,
Jordan Howard Sobel
,
Laws of Nature
,
Metaphysics
,
Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Religion
,
Philosophy of Science
,
Quentin Smith
,
Science
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October 5, 2010
Kant, Strawson, and Conditionals
P. F. Strawson is not one of Kant's more sympathetic interpreters: Kant's faculty psychology, he thinks, is no more than a historical curiosity. The account of logic is likewise a mess. Above all, transcendental idealism is sheer nonsense. Also, of course, Kant's arguments notoriously rely on the claim that Euclidean geometry is known a priori to be the geometry of the sensible world, whereas we now know that this claim is not only not known a priori, but is actually false. (James Van Cleve has argued, however, that Kant needs only the existence of some a priori geometrical knowledge, and...
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September 29, 2010
Evolution and Teleological Arguments
Much of Sobel's chapter on teleological (design) arguments is devoted to Hume interpretation and to explaining Bayesianism. The latter seems to be one of several places where Sobel has not decided whether he is writing a textbook or a monograph. As for the former, the 'analogical' version of the teleological argument is, I think, not the strongest version and, although I haven't conducted a survey of the various treatments, I would be surprised if Hume's version turned out to be the best. After all, Hume is at most a half-hearted supporter of the argument; even he doesn't think his argument...
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Topic(s):
Christine Overall
,
Contemporary Thinkers
,
David Hume
,
Evolution
,
Existence of God
,
Historical Thinkers
,
Intelligent Design
,
Jordan Howard Sobel
,
Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Religion
,
Science
,
Teleological Argument
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September 28, 2010
Explanatory Principles and Infinite Propositions
In the course of his discussion of cosmological arguments, Sobel argues against the Principle of Sufficient Reason and similar strong explanatory principles. In particular, he argues that even a weak principle like "there is a deductive explanation that has only true premises for every contingent truth" will result in modal collapse (p. 218). In Sobel's terminology, an argument 'deductively explains' its conclusion iff (1) the argument is sound, and (2) the conclusion does not entail the premises (p. 219; condition (2) applies to contingent conclusions only). Sobel now introduces the following two premises: (3) If there is any true contingent...
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Topic(s):
Abstract Objects
,
Contemporary Thinkers
,
Cosmological Argument
,
Existence of God
,
Explanation
,
G. W. Leibniz
,
Historical Thinkers
,
Jordan Howard Sobel
,
Logic
,
Metaphysics
,
Ontology
,
Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Religion
,
Propositions
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September 27, 2010
Joining the Prosblogion
I am pleased to announce that I have been invited to join
The Prosblogion, the premier philosophy of religion blog! As the invite seems to have resulted largely from my series on
Sobel's Logic and Theism, I suppose that, in addition to thanking the Prosblogion folks for inviting me, I should thank
Jonathan for challenging me to engage seriously with an atheist writer on my blog, and
Brandon for suggesting
Logic and Theism as the text of choice.
From now on, any serious, contentful posts on philosophy of religion (including the remainder of the Sobel series) will appear both here...
Continue reading "Joining the Prosblogion"
September 23, 2010
A Non-Leibnizian Cosmological Argument
In my last Sobel post, I reconstructed the cosmological argument Sobel attributes to Leibniz in such a way that there was no obvious contradiction in the premises by using Leibniz's own resources. Here I want to try to produce an argument with more widely accepted premises. Recall that Sobel's reconstruction is as follows: (1)The World - the Cosmos - exists. (2) The World is contingent, it is a contingent entity. (3) For everything that exists - for every fact and every existent entity - there is a sufficient reason for its existence. (4) The sufficient reason for the existence of...
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Topic(s):
Agent Causation
,
Causation
,
Contemporary Thinkers
,
Cosmological Argument
,
Events
,
Existence of God
,
Free Will
,
Jordan Howard Sobel
,
Metaphysics
,
Ontology
,
Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Mind
,
Philosophy of Religion
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September 21, 2010
"Leibnizian Miracles" in Pomona
I have just officially accepted an invitation to present
"A Leibnizian Theory of Miracles" at the
Southern California Philosophy Conference, to be held in Pomona Saturday, November 6.
Continue reading ""Leibnizian Miracles" in Pomona"
September 20, 2010
September 15, 2010
A Leibnizian Cosmological Argument
Sobel's sixth chapter is devoted to, as he says, "proofs
a contingentia mundi" (from the contingency of the world). The chief exponent here is Leibniz, though Sobel also considers Hume's Demea and his probable source, Samuel Clarke. Sobel argues that Leibniz's argument is valid ... by
contradiction explosion. That is, he argues that Leibniz's premises are inconsistent. In this post, I show how to fix the argument using Leibnizian resources. In the next post, I will give another version of the argument which uses premises which I consider to be anti-Leibnizian, but which I think are more widely held than...
Continue reading "A Leibnizian Cosmological Argument"
Topic(s):
Contemporary Thinkers
,
Cosmological Argument
,
Existence of God
,
G. W. Leibniz
,
Historical Thinkers
,
Jordan Howard Sobel
,
Logic
,
Metaphysics
,
Modality
,
Ontological Argument
,
Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Religion
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September 13, 2010
What is Supposed to be Proved in Aquinas's Five Ways?
I'm not a Medieval scholar, so I don't really know what I'm talking about, but
that's ok.
Sobel's fifth chapter is concerned with Aquinas's Second Way, one of the classic texts for the cosmological argument. Sobel raises some concerns about the premises, but for the most part he finds them plausible (though he may ultimately reject one or more of them). His main concern is that, as he schematizes the argument, a fallacy of equivocation occurs at the very end. Sobel reads the 'good' part of the argument as (perhaps) justifying the 'Preliminary Conclusion'...
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September 7, 2010
Would a Being With All Positive Properties Be God?
Sobel's final objection to ontological arguments is that, even if they are sound, their conclusion does not mean that God exists. That is, according to Sobel, a necessarily existing 'being than which none greater can be conceived' or 'being with all perfections' or 'being with all positive properties' would not be God. His argument for this is rather confusing and depends (1) on a controversial modal intuition, and (2) on an odd definition of 'worshipfulness'. As far as I can tell, the argument goes like this: it is clear (so Sobel claims) that such properties as consciousness, knowledge, power, love,...
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Topic(s):
'Worshipfulness'
,
Contemporary Thinkers
,
Existence of God
,
Historical Thinkers
,
J. N. Findlay
,
Jordan Howard Sobel
,
Kurt Gödel
,
Ontological Argument
,
Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Religion
,
Plato
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September 2, 2010
Modal Collapse: Sobel's Objection to Gödel's Ontological Argument
The last ontological argument Sobel discusses is the Leibniz-inspired argument put forward by the famous logician Kurt Gödel. Gödel sets up a formal system in third-order quantified modal logic with equality and abstraction (!) and proves within that system the theorem: □∃xG(x) Where the predicate G is defined as follows: Gx ↔ ∀φ[P(φ) → φ(x)] Where P is primitive. (Sobel includes the complete source texts for Gödel's proof on pp. 144-146.) Now, unsurprisingly, given that the proof was originated by Gödel, everyone agrees that the proof is valid in the formal system. The question is whether there are any interpretations...
Continue reading "Modal Collapse: Sobel's Objection to Gödel's Ontological Argument"
Topic(s):
Contemporary Thinkers
,
Dana Scott
,
Existence of God
,
G. W. Leibniz
,
Historical Thinkers
,
Jordan Howard Sobel
,
Kurt Gödel
,
Metaphysics
,
Modality
,
Ontological Argument
,
Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Religion
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August 31, 2010
August 30, 2010
A Genuine Dialectical Problem for Ontological Arguments
Sobel spends much of the third chapter
Logic and Theism evaluating the dialectical status of ontological arguments, and, in particular, whether ontological arguers are entitled to the premise that it is possible that there be a perfect being. I am simply going to take the occasion here to state my opinion on the matter.
There is a fundamental dialectical tension in the ontological arguments that start from this premise. If, on the one hand, necessary existence follows trivially from the stipulated definition of perfection, then the argument will beg the question as
Sobel suggests that Anselm's argument does. That is...
Continue reading "A Genuine Dialectical Problem for Ontological Arguments"
August 25, 2010
Sobel's Argument Against Believing in the Possibility of a Perfect Being
My previous posts on
Sobel's Logic and Theism, have been pretty favorable and made only minor criticisms or qualifications. In this post, my criticism will be much more strenuous for, in his criticism of modern modal ontological arguments, Sobel has made a serious error.
Sobel wants to argue that there is no strong presumption in favor of the possibility of a perfect being, and that, because of contrary evidence (e.g. the problem of evil), if the ontological argument is to benefit the theist (by showing that, necessarily, there is a perfect being), rather than harm the theist (by showing that...
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Topic(s):
Abstract Objects
,
Contemporary Thinkers
,
Existence of God
,
Jordan Howard Sobel
,
Metaphysics
,
Modality
,
Ontological Argument
,
Ontology
,
Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Religion
,
William Rowe
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August 24, 2010
The Dialectical Appropriateness of Ontological Arguments
After, for some reason or other, spending some 30 dense pages of
Logic and Theism on the laughable ontological arguments of Descartes and Spinoza, Sobel moves on to the more interesting argument advanced by Anselm. (The next chapter deals with versions of the argument set in modern modal logic, such as those of Hartshorne and Plantinga.) In my view, the Descartes and Spinoza arguments don't even look good; the Anselm version at least produces puzzlement, insofar as the reasoning looks valid, yet it seems, intuitively, that no such strong conclusion could ever be derived from such weak premises.
Sobel (fairly uncontroversially...
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Topic(s):
Alvin Plantinga
,
Anselm
,
Contemporary Thinkers
,
Dialectic
,
Existence of God
,
Gaunilon
,
Historical Thinkers
,
Jordan Howard Sobel
,
Logic
,
Ontological Argument
,
Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Religion
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Kenny at
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August 23, 2010
3quarksdaily Philosophy Prize
The blog
3quarksdaily has opened nominations for their second annual
philosophy prize, to be judged by Akeel Bigrami. Head on over and nominate your favorite philosophy blog post of the year. (Especially if your favorite post was one of mine!) After nominations, there will be a round of online voting, followed by a round of voting by 3QD contributors, and then Professor Bigrami will make a final selection.
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August 20, 2010
Normative Skepticism and the Existence of God
As I discussed in my last post, Sobel argues that the main requirement anything has to fulfill in order to count as a god is that it must be deserving of worship. However, as Sobel argues on pp. 24-25 of Logic and Theism, this requires that it makes sense to talk about something being worthy or unworthy of worship. An error theory of the normative (a view that questioned whether statements about 'worthiness' and other such things were ever correct), such as the view espoused by J. L. Mackie, would have the result that no matter what might exist in...
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August 18, 2010
Divine Freedom and Worship
This is the first substantive post in my
discussion of Sobel's Logic and Theism. The first chapter of Sobel's book focuses on the question of what people disagree about when they disagree about whether God exists. There are a lot of interesting metaphysical and linguistic issues here, like the meaningfulness of negative singular existentials, but this is all really preliminary to the real purpose of evaluating beliefs in God and the reasons for them, so, although these issues are interesting, I'm going to keep discussion of them to a minimum, and focus on what I take to be the first
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August 17, 2010
Sobel's Logic and Theism: An Introduction to my Forthcoming Discussion
Some time ago, I
promised that I would take time on this blog to seriously engage with some recent work arguing in favor of atheism. The book chosen, mostly on
Brandon's recommendation, was
Jordan Howard Sobel's 2003 Logic and Theism: Arguments For and Against Beliefs in God. This summer I had a fairly long reading list of things more closely related to my main research directions in metaphysics and early modern philosophy so, unfortunately, I did not get started on this earlier. I have, however, now (one week before the start of classes) completed my other reading and begun working...
Continue reading "Sobel's Logic and Theism: An Introduction to my Forthcoming Discussion"
August 16, 2010
Ignorant Assertions in Pennsylvania
I've just heard that my paper,
"In Defense of Ignorant Assertions" will be included in the program of the
64th Mountain-Plains Philosophy Conference, to be held at Washington and Jefferson College in Washington, PA October 15-16. Will any other philosophy bloggers be in attendance?
Continue reading "Ignorant Assertions in Pennsylvania"
August 13, 2010
Quote of the Day: Gutting on Dawkins
Religious believers often accuse argumentative atheists such as Dawkins of being excessively rationalistic, demanding standards of logical and evidential rigor that aren't appropriate in matters of faith. My criticism is just the opposite. Dawkins does not meet the standards of rationality that a topic as important as religion requires. The basic problem is that meeting such standards requires coming to terms with the best available analyses and arguments. This need not mean being capable of contributing to the cutting-edge discussions of contemporary philosophers, but it does require following these discussions and applying them to one's own intellectual problems. Dawkins simply...
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August 12, 2010
More on FWD and Brute Contingencies
Yesterday, I noted that Plantinga's Free Will Defense (FWD), as it appears in The Nature of Necessity (NN) involves some very odd brute contingencies. These brute contingencies are not determined by God, or by anything else at all. They are truly brute: there is no reason or explanation for them. Furthermore, they limit God's power. When Plantinga admits that according to his theory "the power of an omnipotent God [is] limited by the freedom he confers upon his creatures" (NN 190), he cites William Wainwright, "Freedom and Omnipotence", Nous 2 (1968): 293-301. As it turns out, Wainwright is responding to...
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August 11, 2010
Some Odd Brute Contingincies in Plantinga's Free Will Defense
Once upon a time, many philosophers believed that there was a logical problem of evil. That is, it was held that the (obviously true) proposition that there is some evil in the world logically entails that there is no God. (Where God is conceived as omnipotent and perfectly good.) I imagine that a lot of philosophers still believe this, but today few are arguing for it in print. Instead, atheist philosophers now typically put forth an evidentiary problem of evil. That is, they propound an argument something like this: The more evil there is, the less likely it is that...
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August 9, 2010
Philosophers' Carnival 112
The 112th
Philosophers' Carnival is now up at
A Concentrated Tincture, with a link to my post on
The Lockean Proviso and Federally Managed Lands. Also in the carnival is
Paul Gowder's interesting treatment of, as he calls it,
"The Difference Between Faith and Fallibilism". I've left a lengthy comment there which may be of interest to some readers of this blog. This is supposed to be the first installment in a series of at least three posts; I am looking forward to reading the rest of what Paul has to say on this subject.
Continue reading "Philosophers' Carnival 112"
August 6, 2010
The Lockean Proviso and Federally Managed Lands
On my recent vacation, I visited a number of national parks (specifically: Crater Lake, Redwood, and Yosemite). This got me thinking about the moral and political aspects of federal land management, including the National Park System. Libertarians are often skeptical of government ownership of anything. However, in this post I want to argue that the Lockean Proviso actually demands such a system of government land management, and so such a system should be supported by libertarians of the Nozickian/Neo-Lockean sort, such as myself. Let's start at the beginning. Locke holds that initially all of earth's natural resources were held in...
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Topic(s):
Contemporary Thinkers
,
Environmental Policy
,
Historical Thinkers
,
John Locke
,
Libertarianism
,
Philosophy
,
Political Philosophy
,
Politics
,
Private Property
,
Robert Nozick
,
The State of Nature
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August 4, 2010
Philosophers' Carnival 111
I've just returned from a long vacation. During my absence
Philosophers' Carnival 111 was posted at
Parableman, with a link to my post on
authority and authoritativeness. I expect to resume regular blogging now.
Continue reading "Philosophers' Carnival 111"
July 9, 2010
Authority, Authoritativeness, and Objectivity
I've just finished reading John Foster's new book, A World For Us: The Case for Phenomenalistic Idealism. Foster had previously defended idealism in his 1982 The Case for Idealism, and many of the basic arguments are the same, though I think the structure is cleaner and easier to grasp. (I've also just finished reading the restored version of Stranger in a Strange Land, so every time I write 'Foster' I'm thinking of the archangel - but that's beside the point.) The main motivation behind Foster's idealism, all the way back to 1982, is the thought that if anything is to...
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Topic(s):
Authoritativeness
,
Authority
,
Contemporary Thinkers
,
Ecclesiology
,
Epistemology
,
Ethics
,
Idealism/Phenomenalism
,
John Foster
,
Metaphysics
,
Ontology
,
Philosophy
,
Realism
,
Roman Catholic Church
,
The Church
,
Theology
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July 6, 2010
Implicature and the Interpretation of Foreign Language Texts
I've just read Grice's "Logic and Conversation" (ch. 2 in Studies in the Way of Words) for (I'll admit) the first time. Something that struck me while reading it, which Grice does not explicitly recognize, is that his model helps to explain a phenomenon that causes a lot of trouble when one tries to interpret texts (or speech) in a language in which one is not fully fluent. Grice's basic model works like this: sometimes a speaker says something which, taken in its perfectly straightforward sense, seems quite odd. The oddness (at least in the cases in which Grice is...
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Topic(s):
Bible
,
English
,
Greek
,
Historical Thinkers
,
Languages
,
Paul Grice
,
Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Language
,
Pragmatics
,
Theology
,
Translation
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June 21, 2010
Unrestricted Quantifiers and Fundamental Quantifiers
According to Ted Sider, ontology is concerned with determining what objects are in the scope of the 'unrestricted' universal quantifier. Sider argues that ontological questions thus have genuine objective answers, for there can be no vagueness in the meaning of the unrestricted quantifier. Suppose, says Sider, that there are two precisifications, ∀1 and ∀2 of the universal quantifier ∀. Then, he says, there must be some thing, x, that is in the extension of one, but not the other, of ∀1 and ∀2. But in that case, whichever of ∀1 and ∀2 lacks x in its extension will fail to...
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June 14, 2010
Locke on the Arbitrariness of Ideas of Mixed Modes and Substances
In Locke's discussion of names of mixed modes and names of substances in EHU 3.5-6, he seems to suggest that the ideas of mixed modes are in some way more arbitrary than the ideas of substances. Some commentators, such as Nicholas Jolley (Locke: His Philosophical Thought, 155-161), have found this claim problematic for, according to Locke, ideas of substances are 'the workmanship of the understanding'; they are not given to us by nature. I think, however, that considerations from book two are sufficient to answer this worry. Locke defines mixed modes as "such Combinations of simple Ideas, as are not...
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June 7, 2010
Why Listen to 'Continental' Philosophers?
In a recent edition of Faith and Philosophy (the October 2009 edition, to be exact), there is an exchange between James K. A. Smith and Bruce Ellis Benson about what can or should be done to improve 'Continental' philosophy of religion. The discussion focuses on the reduction of 'enclaves' - i.e. on getting 'Continental' philosophy of religion into mainstream venues, and having dialogue with mainstream (analytic) philosophy of religion. Now, something about this exchange struck me as rather odd: the exchange takes place in a mainstream venue, a philosophy of religion journal read mostly by analytic philosophers. Yet the exchange...
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June 2, 2010
What is the Problem with Empiricism, Realism, and the Way of Ideas?
After discussing my last post offline with Lewis yesterday, I wanted to clarify this claim: "The argument points to serious problems with the combination of empiricism, realism, and the 'way of ideas.'" The problems I have in mind are difficulties with being justified in believing in, or perhaps even capable of expressing, realism. That is, there are certain views that seem natural if one accepts empiricism and the way of ideas which lead to the denial of realism. Here is, I think, the best example. Empiricism is an explanatory program for philosophy of mind which systematically favors explanations of the...
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Topic(s):
Empiricism
,
Epistemology
,
George Berkeley
,
Historical Thinkers
,
Idealism/Phenomenalism
,
Metaphysics
,
Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Mind
,
Realism
,
Sense Perception
,
The Way of Ideas
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May 29, 2010
Can Immediate Perception Save Realism? (Hint: No)
As I mentioned in my last post, now that the term is over I am catching up on some stuff I've been meaning to read. Another item on that list is Georges Dicker's "Anti-Berkeley" which appeared in British Journal for the History of Philosophy in 2008. Dicker's aim is to show that many of Berkeley's arguments are good, but immaterialism, nevertheless, does not follow. Dicker thinks that Berkeley's arguments are best seen as showing us how to formulate a better version of materialism than the one common in Berkeley's day. So, for instance, Dicker thinks that Berkeley successfully refutes the...
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Topic(s):
Contemporary Thinkers
,
George Berkeley
,
Georges Dicker
,
Historical Thinkers
,
Idealism/Phenomenalism
,
Metaphysics
,
Ontology
,
Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Mind
,
Realism
,
Sense Perception
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May 27, 2010
Three Substances, One Property-Instance: A Trinitarian Speculation
I've been using the beginning of my summer to make some progress on some theology books that have been awaiting my attention on my bookshelf. So far, in honor of Pentecost, I read St. Basil On the Holy Spirit, and I am also making some progress through St. John of Damascus' Concise Exposition of the Orthodox Faith. The latter is pretty dense and technical (that comes from being 'concise'); I started it quite some time ago and my progress has been slow. Anyway, as a result of this reading, and also the always interesting discussions on Dale Tuggy's Trinities Blog,...
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May 22, 2010
"In Defense of Ignorant Assertions"
I have posted a new draft to my
workbench, "In Defense of Ignorant Assertions." This very short (~7 pages) paper argues, against Timothy Williamson and Keith DeRose, that knowledge is not a norm on assertion, and provides an alternative explanation for the "modified Moore's Paradox" ('p, but I don't know that p').
Check it out, and come back here to let me know what you think in the comments.
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May 11, 2010
Leibniz + Adams = Calvinist Theodicy
As I have said before, it is my belief that revealed theology cannot resolve the Calvinist-Arminian debate. Both views (at least in their moderate forms) are both plausible and orthodox; any reason to prefer one to the other will be a philosophical reason, a conclusion of fallible human reason. With this understanding of revealed theology in mind, I reject Calvinism on philosophical grounds, one of which is that I think Calvinism has an extremely difficult time with the problem of evil. In a recent post, The Problem of Evil 101, at Reason From Scripture, Nathanael Taylor presents a 'Reformed' response...
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May 8, 2010
Quotes of the Day: Berkeley and Hume on Unconvincing Arguments
But that all his [Berkeley's] arguments, though otherwise intended, are, in reality, merely sceptical, appears from this, that they admit no answer and produce no conviction. Their only effect is to cause that momentary amazement and irresolution and confusion, which is the result of scepticism. (David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748): sect. 12.1.15) I am not to be persuaded by metaphysical arguments [for the existence of God] ... as they are not suited to my way of thinking they may perhaps puzzle but never will convince me. (Alciphron, the free-thinker, in Berkeley 1732 work by that name, sect....
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April 29, 2010
Meta-ethics on the Brain
Last night I had what might actually be the strangest dream ever. It was much weirder than hilzoy's now-famous (among philosophy bloggers, at least) synthetic a priori dream. In my dream, some space aliens discovered that platonism was false. They were very disturbed by this because, they thought, without platonic objects, there was nothing to serve as the ontological ground for moral facts. So the aliens convened a galactic council, and held a sort of lottery. Earth lost the lottery, so the aliens were rounding up all the humans and putting them into a simulation. In the simulation, the humans...
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April 26, 2010
Philosophers' Carnival 107
The
107th Philosophers' Carnival is now up at
Philosophy of Brains, with a link to my post,
"Morality as a System of Assertoric Imperatives". Also of interest is Gary Williams'
"The Myth of Sensory Immediacy - Why Berkeley Was Wrong", which argues that modern understanding of the neuro-psychology of perception disproves the sense data theory and thus deprives Berkeley of his starting point.
Continue reading "Philosophers' Carnival 107"
April 25, 2010
Quote of the Day: Turbayne on Alleged Refutations of Berkeley
The argument [for idealism] achieves [a proof of the external world] in a most ingenious yet simple way, by accepting the sceptical conclusion of one such as Hylas, that all we can ever know of the external world is certain ideas or appearances, and then admitting, as any consistent empiricist must, that these appearances are real. After all, it is a jest to hold, as do the philosophers, that the things we see and touch are mere illusions.[18] [18] This final step illuminates the irony inherent in Dr. Johnson's notorious ostensive refutation of Berkeley's 'ingenious sophistry', by exclaiming while 'striking...
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Topic(s):
Colin Turbayne
,
Familiar Objects
,
George Berkeley
,
Historical Thinkers
,
Idealism/Phenomenalism
,
Immanuel Kant
,
Metaphysics
,
Ontology
,
Philosophy
,
Quote of the Day
,
Realism
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April 19, 2010
Kantian Ethics Simplified
It is probably a safe bet that no view which has ever been successfully explained in a blog post can correctly be attributed to Kant. I won't try to falsify that claim in this post. What I will try to do is to present a sketch of a simple (probably too simple) moral theory that shows why I find Kantian ethics attractive. The fundamental principle of this ethical theory is the following definition: Wrongness =df. the property an action has iff it is the direct result of a practical judgment whereby the agent is committed to a practical contradiction. An...
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April 13, 2010
Morality as a System of Assertoric Imperatives
I recently read Philippa Foot's paper "Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives" for an ethics class. The paper, as the name suggests, puts forward the view (which Foot has since rejected) that the imperatives of morality are merely hypothetical and not, as Kant had argued, categorical. What this means is that morality tells us how we should act if we want certain things, such as justice and the general happiness of humanity. As Foot recognizes, an untoward consequence of this view is that, if it is true, we can't sensibly tell people that they should want justice or the...
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April 6, 2010
March 27, 2010
How Reductive Theories of Mental Representation Lead to Phenomenalism
It seems initially plausible to suppose that mental representation can be reduced to phenomenal character. That is, we all know that when we think about things we get into certain states of mind, and there is such a thing as what it's like to be in that state of mind. Now, when we think about things, we are representing the world as being in certain ways. It is tempting to suppose that this representing can be explained entirely in terms of the what-it's-like (phenomenal character). According to naive forms of representative realism, this is because that phenomenal experience resembles the...
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March 19, 2010
Locke and Leibniz on Armchair Teleology
[I]f we may conclude that God hath done for men all that men shall judge is best for them, because it is suitable to his goodness so to do, it will prove not only that God has imprinted on the minds of men an idea of himself, but that he hath plainly stamped there, in fair characters, all that men ought to know or believe of him, all that they ought to do in obedience to his will, and that he hath given them a will and affections conformable to it. This, no doubt, everyone will think it better for...
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March 15, 2010
Philosophers' Carnival 105
Welcome to the 105th Philosophers' Carnival! The Philosophers' Carnival collects some of the best philosophy blog posts all in one place. Here they are: Metaphysics Aaron defends an account of the ontology of fiction which avoids commitment to possible worlds at the expense of introducing truth-value gaps, at the Florida Student Philosophy Blog. Philosophy of Mind Avery Archer of The Space of Reasons criticizes motivational rationalism. Gualtiero Piccinini provides a critical review of Gallistel and King's Memory and the Computational Brain: Why Cognitive Science Will Transform Neuroscience at Brains. Epistemology Martin Cooke considers a version of the two envelope paradox...
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March 11, 2010
Philosophers' Carnival Call for Submissions
I will be hosting the 105th
Philosophers' Carnival this coming Monday, March 15. Posts in all areas of academic philosophy are welcome.
Submissions should be made by Saturday, midnight.
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March 9, 2010
Deontic Utilitarianism, Liberty Utilitarianism, and Deontologism
I just came across the following passage by J.J.C. Smart in Smart and Williams'
Utilitarianism: For and Against: What Bentham, Mill and Moore are all agreed on is that the rightness of an action is to be judged solely by consequences, states of affairs brought about by the action. Of course we shall have to be careful here not to construe 'state of affairs' so widely that any ethical doctrine becomes utilitarian. For if we did so we would not be saying anything at all in advocating utilitarianism. If, for example, we allowed 'the state of having kept a promise'...
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Topic(s):
Amartya Sen
,
Civil Rights
,
Contemporary Thinkers
,
Deontologism
,
Ethics
,
Free Speech
,
J.J.C. Smart
,
Libertarianism
,
Philosophy
,
Political Philosophy
,
Politics
,
Robert Nozick
,
Utilitarianism
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February 18, 2010
What is a Right?
Among my moral convictions is the conviction that there is a sharp distinction to be drawn between public or political morality and private or individual morality. This roughly corresponds to Kant's distinction between the Doctrine of Right and the Doctrine of Virtue. That there be such a distinction is important to me because I believe that political morality is very permissive, whereas private morality is very restrictive. I have tried to cash this out before. I want to try it again today, by examining what I take to be the central concept of political morality, the concept of having a...
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February 8, 2010
A Simple Argument for Idealism
One of Berkeley's key arguments for his idealism (his positive view that the only fundamental entities are minds and ideas) is something like the following: (1)The gardener is justifiably certain that he waters the cherry tree daily. (2)One can be justifiably certain only of facts about one's own mind and its ideas. Therefore, (3)The gardener's belief that he waters the cherry tree daily is a belief about his own mind and/or its ideas. (1) is a 'common sense' premise, which Berkeley thinks we ought to preserve. (2) is supposed to have been shown by the skeptical considerations of Descartes and...
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February 2, 2010
Quote of the Day: G. E. Moore on Philosophical Arguments
It may be thought that my contention is unimportant, but that is no ground for thinking that I am not in the right. What I am concerned with is knowledge only - that we should think correctly and so far arrive at some truth, however unimportant: I do not say that such knowledge will make us more useful members of society. If any one does not care for knowledge for its own sake, then I have nothing to say to him; only it should not be though that a lack of interest in what I have to say is any ground for holding it untrue (G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica, sect. 37).
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February 1, 2010
Philosophers' Carnival 103
The 103rd
Philosophers' Carnival is
now up at
Philosophy, etc. with a link to my post on
seeing the world through teleology-colored glasses.
Also of interest in the new philosophers' carnival is
Chris Hallquist's discussion of reformed epistemology and moral realism. In the course of his discussion, Chris gives a narrative of the history of early modern philosophy which is similar to my
Berkeley-centric narrative (despite not mentioning Berkeley): Descartes sets up an impossible program, Hume shows that either Cartesian or classical empiricist assumptions lead inevitably to skepticism, and this motivates a 'Reidian' program...
Continue reading "Philosophers' Carnival 103"
Topic(s):
Alvin Plantinga
,
Blog Carnivals
,
Contemporary Thinkers
,
David Hume
,
G. E. Moore
,
George Berkeley
,
Historical Thinkers
,
Historiography of Philosophy
,
Philosophy
,
Rene Descartes
,
The Web
,
Thomas Reid
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January 29, 2010
Seeing the World Through Teleology-Colored Glasses
My previous post on
evaluating traditional theistic arguments has generated a lot of discussion! Thanks to
Jonathan,
Lewis, and
Clayton for helping to clarify some issues with my initial presentation.
Most of the discussion centered on the teleological argument. I'm not sure if that's just because I presented it first, or because it was the most problematic...Anyway, let me try to make my version of the argument a little more precise, and consider some objections. (The most important objection, I take it, is that we see the world through teleology-colored glasses, as it were; more on that below.) In trying to make the argument the more precise, I will ...
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January 25, 2010
Evaluating the Traditional Arguments for God
Kant famously classified traditional arguments for the existence of a divine being into three categories: ontological, cosmological, and teleological. Very few, if any, philosophers today think that any of these forms of argument is conclusive. However, some philosophers do believe that a cumulative case for the existence of a divine being can be made out from these arguments. Atheist colleagues often respond that "three leaky buckets won't hold water any better than one." However, this reply assumes that the traditional arguments don't show anything at all. Specifically, those who respond this way are often assuming that the arguments are straightforwardly...
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January 20, 2010
A Berkeley-Centric Narrative
Continuing the discussion of the historiography of modern philosophy, I want to consider an alternative narrative. The standard narrative is Kant-centric: the rationalists and empiricists spend a century squabbling, then Kant comes along and figures out what's right and what's wrong with each view, resulting in the Critical Philosophy. The key figures, apart from Kant, are Descartes, the great founder of the rationalists; Locke, the great founder of the empiricists; and Hume who called attention to the severe failings of both schools. (When I took intro to modern at Penn, this is exactly the way it went: these were the...
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Topic(s):
Alvin Plantinga
,
Contemporary Thinkers
,
David Hume
,
George Berkeley
,
Historical Thinkers
,
Historiography of Philosophy
,
Immanuel Kant
,
John Locke
,
Nicolas Malebranche
,
Philosophy
,
Rene Descartes
,
Thomas Reid
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January 12, 2010
Alternative Groupings of Early Modern Philosophers
Last month, there was some
blog discussion about historiography and teaching methods in early modern philosophy. The standard story is evidently due to Hegel, and continues to be
standard despite being unpopular among specialists in history of modern. It groups modern philosophers before Kant as follows:
Rationalists
Descartes
Spinoza
Leibniz | Empiricists
Locke
Berkeley
Hume |
Dana McCourt, blogging at
The Edge of the American West...
Continue reading "Alternative Groupings of Early Modern Philosophers"
Topic(s):
Baruch Spinoza
,
Contemporary Thinkers
,
David Hume
,
G. W. Leibniz
,
George Berkeley
,
Historical Thinkers
,
Historiography of Philosophy
,
John Locke
,
Nicolas Malebranche
,
Penelope Maddy
,
Philosophy
,
Rene Descartes
,
Thomas Hobbes
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January 11, 2010
Doing What You Believe to be Right vs. Doing What Is Right
Many, perhaps most, people disagree with the majority of my moral beliefs. When I find myself in a situation to advise such people, I often try to persuade them to adopt my moral beliefs, but if this fails I generally advise people to follow their own considered beliefs, rather than mine. Similarly, where there are disagreements on matters of fact, I take it that it is most important to persuade people to believe according to their own considered evaluation of the evidence available to them. Attempts to show that the evidence best supports my own position are secondary. The reason...
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December 31, 2009
Preventing Terrorism "At All Costs"
Insofar as there is any debate about airline security measures at all (and there is not as much as there should be), the debate typically assumes that we ought to prevent terrorism "at all costs". But this is simply false. Last night I saw a segment on the local news here in Johnstown, PA, where a "terrorism expert" (it wasn't clear exactly what his qualifications were) said that we could catch terrorists much more effectively by engaging in religious profiling. Apparently a federal legislator recently said the same thing. What these people are pointing out is something that should be...
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December 21, 2009
The Mystery of the Incarnation
As we are nearing the end of Advent, I hope that we (Christians) have all been pondering the mystery of the Incarnation. For myself, I have been doing some speculating, connecting the Chalcedonian Definition with some issues I have been studying in Greek philosophy. I mean, in particular, the argument which some scholars have made to the effect that Greek ontology is primarily concerned with the 'is' of predication (see section I of "The Homonymy of Predicative Being"). I have been considering this for some time but have not been confident enough to post it. However, I have just finished...
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December 8, 2009
Why are There So Few Atheist/Agnostic Philosophers of Religion?
The results of a
survey of the opinions of professional philosophers on philosophical topics were released today, and Trent Dougherty has some interesting discussion of some philosophy of religion numbers at
The Prosblogion. I was recently
bemoaning the scarcity of atheist/agnostic philosophers of religion. The survey numbers back me up: among philosophy faculty at top English-speaking universities, only 14.6% said they "accept" or "lean toward" theism. However, among faculty whose main area of specialization is philosophy of religion, that number was 72.3%.
Now, it's hardly surprising that atheists and agnostics don't feel the desire to dedicate their entire careers to investigating religious claims...
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December 2, 2009
Gupta and Idealism: My Project for the Next Two Weeks
It's been a while since I posted anything, and even longer since I posted anything other than Aristotle quotes - I have been busy trying to get my term papers underway. Since I don't expect to have any more time in the near future than I have had in the recent past, I thought I would keep things going around here by posting an outline of one of my projects. Below is a very rough draft of an introduction to one of my two papers (it doesn't have a working title yet) which describes what I hope to accomplish. Comments...
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November 21, 2009
Quote of the Day: A Science Fiction Thought Experiment in Aristotle
Therefore, however many things appear to come about in different types of material, for instance, a circle in bronze and stone and wood, it seems clear that neither bronze nor stone is part of the substance of a circle, since they can be separated. But even for things that are not observed to be separated, there is no reason why the same results should not follow, just as even if all circles that were seen were bronze, nonetheless bronze would be no part of the form, but it would be difficult to separate them in thought. For instance, the form human is always observed in flesh and bones and these sorts of parts. Are these parts therefore part of the form and the definition [of human]? ...
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November 16, 2009
Quote of the Day: Aristotle on Parmenides
Parmenides seems to speak with rather more insight: for not considering, aside from
being, anything that
is not worthy
to be, he thinks that from necessity it - that is,
being - is one, and nothing else ... But being compelled to follow the phenomena, he supposes that it is one according to reason [or: in account], but many according to sense perception (Aristotle,
Metaphysics 986b27-33, my translation, after Ross).
The surviving fragments of Parmenides speak of a 'path of persuasion' and a 'way of mortal opinion.' These seem to have been two sections of his original poem. In the former, he denies the reality of plurality or change. Puzzlingly...
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November 12, 2009
Best Recent Books For and Against Religious Belief
Right now there are two very active comment threads on this blog: the first discussing whether or not I should read The God Delusion and the second listing philosophical science fiction stories. As such, I thought I would combine the religious discussion with the successful attempt at blog bibliography by asking readers to list the best recent books for an against religious belief. I will admit that I actually haven't read any of the books below all the way through; I list them because they are commonly excerpted in philosophy of religion readers (I have read excerpts of most of...
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November 10, 2009
November 9, 2009
What Caused God?
In comments to my post on
Dawkins and the Philosophers, atheist blogger
Jonathan West has been pushing back against Michael Ruse's
claim that Dawkins' prominent use of the "what caused God?" question is, as Jonathan puts it, 'fatuous.' Jonathan has also pushed this point in a recent
blog post which considers this question in light of Swinburne's 'necessary being' arguments in
The Existence of God. I will first make a few remarks about Swinburne's work in this area, and then proceed to show why the "what caused God?" question is indeed confused. To be fair, I admit...
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Topic(s):
Abstract Objects
,
Alvin Plantinga
,
Contemporary Thinkers
,
Cosmological Argument
,
David Lewis
,
Existence of God
,
Historical Thinkers
,
James F. Ross
,
Modality
,
Ontological Argument
,
Ontology
,
Peter Unger
,
Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Religion
,
Plato
,
Richard Dawkins
,
Richard Swinburne
,
Sydney Shoemaker
,
Theology
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November 7, 2009
Subjunctive Phenomenalism and Logical Construction Idealism
Within the last week, I have seen the same mistake in two different recent books on the philosophy of perception: According to phenomenalism, objects are (in John Stuart Mill's excellent phrase) "permanent possibilities of sensation"; they are, in a more recent idiom, "logical constructions" of sense data. (Alva Noë, Action in Perception, 79) Berkeley observed that the philosophical conception that the objects of direct awareness are sense-data (or, in Berkeley's terminology, "ideas") is perfectly compatible with the commonsense conception that the objects of direct awareness are ordinary things (e.g., tomatoes). We can accept both, Berkeley argued, if we recognize the...
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Topic(s):
Alva Noë
,
Anil Gupta
,
Bertrand Russell
,
C. I. Lewis
,
Contemporary Thinkers
,
Familiar Objects
,
George Berkeley
,
Historical Thinkers
,
Idealism/Phenomenalism
,
Kenneth P. Winkler
,
Metaphysics
,
Ontology
,
Philosophy
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November 5, 2009
Dawkins and the Philosophers
I am periodically asked by my fellow Christians how Christians should respond to Richard Dawkins. I confess to being puzzled by the question of how I personally should respond to Dawkins. This is because a great many non-philosophical atheists take his word as Gospel, and a great many Christians are troubled by his arguments and assertions, but the fact of the matter is that, on the intellectual merits, Dawkins is simply not worth the effort of refuting. In philosophy, it is our practice, in arguing against positions, to target the best version of the view. This is why, for instance,...
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November 4, 2009
"A Leibnizian Theory of Miracles"
I have posted a new paper draft to my
writings page entitled
"A Leibnizian Theory of Miracles". The aim of the paper is to defend a conception of miracles on which no violation, suspension, or circumvention of the laws of nature is required. Comments are welcome.
Continue reading ""A Leibnizian Theory of Miracles""
November 3, 2009
Miraculous Early Modern Blogging!
As
previously mentioned, I am currently working on a paper entitled "A Leibnizian Theory of Miracles". After a few more rounds of edits, I will post a draft, so stay tuned. In the meantime allow me to point you to a few miraculous instances of early modern blogging (both posted today, incidentally)...
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November 2, 2009
Does 'The Desk is Black' Express a Proposition?
According to standard versions of subjunctive phenomenalism, such as the version developed by C. I. Lewis, sentences purporting to be about physical objects can be analyzed into long conjunctions of subjunctive conditionals having to do only with sense data and voluntary actions. It's very difficult to actually state these conditionals, but they are supposed to say things like 'if I'm in such and such a condition, and I do X, I will experience Y'. Alva Noë is not a phenomenalist, but he expresses some similar ideas about the nature of perception. Specifically, Noë argues that perception does not involve the...
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Topic(s):
Alva Noë
,
C. I. Lewis
,
Contemporary Thinkers
,
Familiar Objects
,
George Berkeley
,
Historical Thinkers
,
Idealism/Phenomenalism
,
Metaphysics
,
Ontology
,
Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Language
,
Philosophy of Mind
,
Sense Perception
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October 25, 2009
Speaking Loosely
Philosophers often use such phrases as 'strictly speaking' or 'in metaphysical rigor' before saying things that might sound outrageous. For instance, many philosophers have denied the existence of entities which everyone 'knows' to exist, such as chairs, or minds, or numbers. The philosopher will almost always prefix such a denial with this sort of modifier. The opposite of speaking strictly is speaking loosely. In early modern philosophy, the 'strict and philosophical' mode of speech was often contrasted with the 'loose and popular' mode. Other philosophers might use the modifier 'strictly and literally.' What is the point of making these qualifications?...
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October 19, 2009
Philosopher's Carnival 98
Welcome to the 98th Philosopher's Carnival! The Philosopher's Carnival is a roundup of the best philosophy blog posts of the last three weeks or so. As host, I have selected the submissions (and a couple of non-submissions) which, in my opinion, will be of most interest to academic philosophers. There is necessarily some subjectivity here, so I apologize to anyone who feels he or she was unfairly excluded. Metaphysics Steve Esser presents Notes on C.B.Martin's The Mind in Nature posted at Guide to Reality. This post summarizes Martin's work across a wide variety of metaphysical and especially ontological topics. Aaron...
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October 13, 2009
Leibniz's Theistic Case Against Humean Miracles
Most of the recent philosophical literature on miracles focuses on Hume's argument against belief in miracles in EHU 10. There, Hume asserts that all miracles are "violation[s] of the laws of nature" (10.12) and argues that we could never be justified in believing in such events. Call these Law-Breaking Events (LBEs). As Hume recognizes, being an LBE cannot be sufficient for being a miracle; miracles must have the right kind of theological/religious significance. Hume thus gives in a footnote a more precise definition: "A miracle may be accurately defined, a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition...
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October 7, 2009
Quote of the Day: Robert Adams on Contextualist History of Philosophy as Philosophy
I believe that historical accuracy and careful attention to the historical context are important to the philosophical as well as the historical value of work in the history of philosophy and, conversely, that philosophical argument and critique are important for historical understanding of philosophy. One reason for the philosophical importance of patient and careful attention to the actual meaning of Leibniz's writings in their historical context is that he was indeed a great philosopher, great enough that an arbitrary interpretation of his work, more relevant to our historical context than to his, is unlikely to be as interesting philosophically in...
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October 6, 2009
Quote of the Day: Australians Against Bullshit
"Analytic philosophy is all about bullshit detection, and we [Australians] are very good at that." -
Fiona Cowie, as quoted in
The Australian.
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September 30, 2009
Philosophers' Carnival 97
The latest
Philosophers' Carnival is
up at
Camels With Hammers with a link to my
list of philosophical science-fiction stories.
I will be hosting the next philosophers' carnival on Monday, October 19, so be sure to
submit a post by the deadline, Saturday the 17th!
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September 22, 2009
Philosophical Science-Fiction Stories: A Preliminary List
One of the main ways I was turned on to philosophy was via science-fiction, and I continue to be a big science-fiction enthusiast. I am most interested in the classic (c. 1935-1960) short stories, especially those of Theodore Sturgeon. I have been reading through the new Wiley-Blackwell Science Fiction and Philosophy volume, ed. Susan Schneider. This is a good collection of philosophical writing - both from the professional literature and from more popular writers - on topics that have a direct and obvious relation to popular works of science-fiction, with some great short fiction (including Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder"...
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September 18, 2009
Quote of the Day: A Source in Descartes for Berkeley's Visual Language Theory?
We must take care not to assume - as our philosophers [i.e. the scholastics] commonly do - that in order to have sensory awareness the soul must contemplate certain images [i.e. the species] transmitted by objects to the brain; or at any rate we must conceive the nature of these images in an entirely different manner from that of the philosophers. For since their conception of the images is confined to the requirement that they should resemble the objects they represent, the philosophers cannot possibly show us how the images can be formed by the objects, or how they can...
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September 17, 2009
Quote of the Day: Berkeley on Combining Ideas Into Objects
One of the big questions in Berkeley interpretation is how and by whom ideas or experiences get put together to form objects. (See, for instance, the end of Margaret Atherton's recent paper "'The Books Are in the Study as Before': Berkeley's Claims About Real Physical Objects".) I've just noticed an interesting passage in Berkeley that ought to be really important to this discussion, though I don't think I've seen it quoted in this connection: [I]t ought to be considered that number (however some may reckon it amongst the primary qualities) is nothing fixed and settled, really existing in things themselves....
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September 16, 2009
The New Cambridge Berkeley Volume
A brief review of George Berkeley, Philosophical Writings, ed. Desmond M. Clarke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). ISBN: 978-0-521-70762-6. 338 pp. $29.99 on Amazon. I recently acquired a copy of the new Berkeley volume in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, edited by Desmond M. Clarke. Clarke's selection of texts is quite good. As far as I know, this is the only collection of its kind to include excerpts from Alciphron and Siris, and the excerpts are well chosen. From Alciphron, we have the Dialogue IV's divine language argument for the existence of God, and Dialogue VII's theory...
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September 8, 2009
Quotes of the Day: Berkeley and 'Functional Role Semantics'
The second approach [to intentionality on the computational model of cognition] is known as functionalism (actually, "functional role semantics" in discussions of meaning) in philosophy, and as procedural semantics in cognitive psychology and computer science. Functionalism says that what gives internal symbols (and external symbols too) their meanings is how they function ... This picture can be bolstered by a consideration of what happens when one first learns Newtonian mechanics. In my own case, I heard a large number of unfamiliar terms more or less all at once: "mass", "force", "energy", and the like. I never was told definitions of...
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August 27, 2009
Reductivism, Eliminativism, and Berkeley's Theory of Physical Objects
In present-day metaphysical discussions it is common to distinguish between 'reductivism' and 'eliminativism' with respect to some class of objects, C. These can be thought of as two different ways of denying the (fundamental, metaphysical) existence/reality of the objects in C. Examples of classes discussed by philosophers in this way include minds, conscious experiences, and macrophysical objects. The two views may be given a linguistic formulation as follows: Linguistic Reductivism (LR): Sentences which appear to assume the existence of the putative objects in C are strictly and literally true, although, in metaphysical rigor, the putative objects do not exist. (The...
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August 24, 2009
External Coherence and the Reality of The Matrix
David Chalmers writes: I think that even if I am in a matrix [i.e. any computer simulation similar to the one depicted in The Matrix], my world is perfectly real. A brain in a vat is not massively deluded (at least if it has always been in a vat) ... Philosophers have held this sort of view before. The 18th-century Irish philosopher George Berkeley held, in effect, that appearance is reality ... If this is right, then the world perceived by envatted beings is perfectly real: they have all the right appearances and appearance is reality ("The Matrix as Metaphysics"...
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August 23, 2009
The Biblical Origin of Hobbes's State of Nature Theory
Thomas Hobbes is famous for his pessimistic state of nature theory. According to Hobbes, the 'state of nature' (i.e. anarchy) is a "warre of every man against every man" (
Leviathan, p. 63 of the 1651 'Head' edition). The concepts of justice or injustice are, according to Hobbes, not applicable in this state of war. This is because injustice is defined as "
the not Performance of Covenant" (p. 71). However, "If a Covenant be made, wherein neither of the parties performe presently, but trust one another; in the condition of meer nature ... upon any reasonable suspicion, it is Voyd"...
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August 8, 2009
On Pop Philosophers
What exactly is a pop philosopher, and what distinguishes a pop philosopher from a philosopher simpliciter? This question has been on my mind due to trying to explain to people why certain very good pop philosophers, such as C.S. Lewis, are nevertheless not very good philosophers. I will try here to explain what I take the difference to be. It should first be noted that both 'philosopher' and 'pop philosopher' are agency nouns. As such, they are attributed accidentally (inessentially) to a person in virtue of her involvement in certain activities: one person is called a 'butcher' in virtue of...
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July 28, 2009
Correlation, Causation, and Salvation
The New Testament uses a number of criteria to identify the 'saved' (in this post, I won't be concerned with what exactly 'saved' means, though I will be assuming, somewhat controversially, that its meaning is more or less consistent). For instance, the saved are identified as: Those who 'bear fruit' (Matt. 7:16-20), where this seems to involve undergoing some kind of general change of character (Gal. 5:22-25). Those who perform particular good or loving deeds (Matt. 7:21, 1 John 1:6, 2:3-6), especially care for the poor (Matt. 25:31-46). Those who abstain from particular evil or hateful deeds (1 John 2:9-11)....
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July 22, 2009
The Master Zombie Argument
Berkeley's so-called 'Master Argument' and Chalmers' 'Zombie Argument' are two famous arguments that turn on the relationship between conceivability and possibility. I have been thinking for some time about an amusing (and perhaps somewhat troubling) way of putting the two together. First, let me give simplified versions of the two arguments. The Master Argument (MA): (MA1) Whatever is conceived is conceived by some mind. (MA2) Whatever is conceived by a mind is in that mind. Therefore, (MA3) Nothing can be conceived that is not in a mind. (MA4) Whatever is inconceivable is impossible. Therefore, (MA5) It is impossible for anything...
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July 19, 2009
Why Libertarians Should Support a Carbon Tax
When people list reasons for having a strong central government, one of the reasons they most frequently give is the need for environmental protections. Air and water pollution frequently effect huge numbers of people across large geographic areas (in the case of greenhouse gasses, the entire world) and so, it is thought, we must have a strong central government that can regulate emissions and such. A typical libertarian response to the 'what about the environment?' question is to argue that there should be unlimited civil liability for environmental damage. The current system isn't working particularly well and, libertarians are always...
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July 13, 2009
"Kant's 'Bad' Examples"
I have posted another paper to my
workbench, entitled
"Kant's 'Bad' Examples". This is the paper I was working on when we were discussing
Kant on sexuality (follow-ups
here,
here, and
here). Many contemporary 'Kantian' ethicists ignore or even malign Kant's applied ethics. I argue that this is misguided: when Kant's theory is properly understood, it can be shown that many of his supposedly objectionable conclusions are well supported by it. I consider five of Kant's applications and argue that each of them can be supported by means of his theory of personality and the role it plays...
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July 7, 2009
Community Standards of Decency
May communities (justly) set standards of decency? In the recent
Philosophers' Carnival, Russell Blackford of
Metamagician and the Hellfire Club (a blog with which I am not familiar) argues that they may not. Blackford argues from not-quite-libertarian principles (he allows some limited degree of paternalism) to the conclusion that neither burkas nor nudity should be banned in public. What I want to do here is to show that, on the libertarian picture, either having or not having community standards of decency creates a problem, and try to chart a way forward from there.
Libertarians (and, indeed, all proponents of liberal democracy)...
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July 6, 2009
Quote of the Day: The Praying Agnostic
There is no reason why someone who is in doubt about the existence of God should not pray for help and guidance on this topic as in other matters. Some find something comic in the idea of an agnostic praying to a God whose existence he doubts. It is surely no more unreasonable than the act of a man adrift in the ocean, trapped in a cave, or stranded on a mountainside, who cries for help though he may never be heard or fires a signal which may never be seen. - Anthony Kenny, The God of the Philosophers,...
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June 30, 2009
"The Homonymy of Predicative Being"
I have just posted to my workbench a paper entitled "The Homonymy of Predicative Being." Here is the abstract: Aristotle famously claimed that "being is said in many ways." This has traditionally been understood as a claim about existence. However, the interpretation of Aristotle's theory of being under this assumption has proven problematic. In this paper, I argue for an alternative reading which identifies the core uses of 'being' as copula uses with primary substances as subjects. Comments and criticisms are welcome below....
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June 21, 2009
Intelligent Design and Scientific Instrumentalism
John Beaudoin's recent paper "Sober on Intelligent Design Theory and the Intelligent Designer" contains the following fascinating remark in a footnote: [William] Dembski has suggested that the designer referred to in ID theory need not be
real: it could in principle be treated by design theorists as a mere useful fiction, if that should better fit with a particular design theorist's philosophy of science.
Beaudoin cites Dembski's
No Free Lunch, p. 15, and
The Design Revolution, p. 65. I haven't bothered to read too much on the whole ID thing because it is not closely related to my main philosophical interests and from a theological/religious perspective seems like a mere distraction. Furthermore, most ID types seem to me to exaggerate the problems of 'orthodox' evolutionary biology...
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Topic(s):
Bas van Fraassen
,
Contemporary Thinkers
,
George Berkeley
,
Historical Thinkers
,
Instrumentalism
,
Intelligent Design
,
John Beaudoin
,
Penelope Maddy
,
Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Science
,
Science
,
William Dembski
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May 27, 2009
May 23, 2009
Kant, Libertarianism, and the Limits of Contract Right
By 'libertarianism' here (and in my tagline) I mean the family of broadly Lockean political theories, mostly articulated in the 20th century, which take private property to be the most fundamental concept for political theory. (Locke himself writes, "'Where there is no property, there is no injustice,' is a proposition as certain as any demonstration in Euclid: For the idea of property being a right to any thing, and the idea to which the name injustice is given, being the invasion or violation of that right; it is evident, that these ideas, being thus established, and these names annexed to...
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May 14, 2009
A Semantic Argument for Phenomenalism
I believe an argument similar to the following can be attributed to Berkeley, but I have too much real work to do to go find the texts to justify it right now. (Which is why we have blogs, where we don't have to adequately justify our assertions!) The meaning of a word is exhausted by the correct conditions of its application. Any speaker S on any given occasion determines whether to utter a given word based entirely on S's subjective state (i.e. factors internal to S). Speakers consistently and non-accidentally use 'plain language' correctly (i.e. 'common sense' is correct). Therefore,...
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May 13, 2009
Quote of the Day: Stillingfleet on the Natural Immortality of the Soul
You [Locke] say, That all the ends of Religion and Morality are secured barely by the Immortality of the Soul without a necessary Supposition that the Soul is Immaterial. I am of the opinion that the great ends of Religion and Morality are best secured by the Proofs of the Immortality of the Soul from its Nature and Properties; and which I think can prove it Immaterial. I do not question whether God can give Immortality to a Material Substance; but I say it takes off very much from the evidence of Immortality, if it depend wholly on God's giving...
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May 7, 2009
Quote of the Day: Leibniz on Survival of Death
One of the quandaries I ran into in writing my paper on Berkeley on resurrection is the question of what the 'revealed' Christian doctrine is supposed to be. In particular, there is the question of natural versus miraculous immortality of the soul. Some writers who seek to defend the Christian doctrine of survival of death assume that it is part of the doctrine that this survival is miraculous. (For a recent example, see Lynne Rudder Bakker's "Persons and the Metaphysics of Resurrection" which appeared in Religious Studies in 2007; James Ross also brought this up in his criticisms of my...
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May 6, 2009
Announcing: The Extended Cognition Blog
A fellow UCI graduate student,
Kris Rhodes, has
announced the launch of
The Extended Cognition Blog (ex-cog for short). Ex-cog will be devoted to the exploration of the extended mind hypothesis. Anyone interested in philosophy of mind should hop on over and check it out.
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May 4, 2009
April 29, 2009
Locke, Berkeley, and 'Common Sense'
John Locke is often portrayed as a 'philosopher of common sense' (or, 'tempered common sense', some say), and George Berkeley as a proponent of a bizarre and novel metaphysics which is radically discontinuous with common sense. However, it is
Berkeley, much more than Locke, who is constantly appealing to 'common sense' in support of his views. Why is this? And how is it that Berkeley, with his radical metaphysical claims, purports to be a defender of common sense?
The answer, I believe, is that the philosophies of Locke and Berkeley are related to our ordinary beliefs in radically different ways...
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April 18, 2009
Quote of the Day: Aristotle on the Law of Contradiction
The most certain principle of all [is one] it is impossible to be mistaken about ... A [principle] one must have in order to understand any being whatsoever - this is not a [mere] hypothesis! ... Next we will state what this principle is: it is impossible for the same thing at the same time to exist and not to exist in the same [subject] and in the same respect (and however many other [qualifications] we [previously] defined, let them be defined [here] on account of the logical difficulties).
...
But we now have accepted that it is impossible for a being to be and not be at the same time, and we showed that this was the most certain of all principles. In fact, some people, because [they are] uneducated, think that even this ought to be proven. [Someone who] doesn't know that it is necessary to prove some things and not others is uneducated...
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April 7, 2009
Repenting For Fear of Hell
Paul Gowder is discussing a recent case in which a man by the name of Elwin Wilson who used to be a violent racist and KKK member has changed his ways and gone around apologizing to the people he harmed or otherwise offended. Paul wants to know how we ought to respond to Wilson's repentance, given that Wilson states that he changed his ways out of fear of hell. Brandon's comments on that post are insightful (he notes, among other things, that the article gives another reason for Wilson's repentance: Wilson evidently believes that there will be blacks in heaven)....
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April 3, 2009
Apologetics: The Good and the Bad
I have been meaning for some time to write a post about apologetics: not to engage in it - though I do that sometimes - but to examine it as a practice. Brandon's recent post,
"On Controversial Blogging and Temperament," touches some of the same issues I have been thinking about, so I thought that I would build on it.
To start from the beginning: 'apologetics' derives from the Greek
apologia, meaning 'defense' (as, for instance, a court-room defense), and it means just that: the giving of reasoned defenses. Christians often talk about the importance of engaging in apologetics...
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March 29, 2009
Moving to USC
Today I accepted an offer of admission (with funding) from the
University of Southern California School of Philosophy. As those who have been following this blog for a while know, USC was one of my top choices
last year. I was encouraged to reapply by one of the professors there after very nearly making the cut last year. In addition to being very strong in my areas of interest and having an excellent placement record, USC will massively decrease my commute, offered me better funding, and will mean no longer depending on the unpredictable California state budget. All of these are good...
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I Exist!
Berkeley famously said that "to be is to be perceived." Quine's maxim was "to be is to be the value of a variable." We, however, know the truth: to be is to be a search result in
Philosophers' Index...
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March 23, 2009
Philosophers' Carnival 88
Welcome to the 88th
Philosophers' Carnival! The Philosophers' Carnival is a regular round-up of some of the best philosophy blog posts on the web. Each carnival receives a great many submissions, and it is therefore necessary for hosts to be selective. The posts that have been selected represent, in my very subjective opinion, the best of the submissions (in no particular order)...
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March 22, 2009
Kant's Argument for Monogamy
In my previous post on
The Problem of Sex in Kant's Ethics, I ended with Kant's argument for monogamy, on which I declined to offer any commentary. I am going to offer a brief reconstruction here (go back to the previous post for the original text).
The argument can be understood as follows:
- Sex involves the use of the other's 'sexual attribute' as a means
- It is impermissible (contrary to right) to use what one has no right to
- One cannot have a right to the sexual attribute of another without having a right to the whole person...
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March 19, 2009
(Self-)Quote of the Day: A Controversial Claim for Your Consideration
Hobbes's normative theory implicitly commits him to the belief that a constitutionally limited government of the sort that would later be described by John Locke would be a paradise if only it could be achieved and maintained.
- Kenneth L. Pearce, "Deposing Leviathan: Hobbes and Locke on Grievances Against the State" (working draft)
This is the last sentence of a paper that I just finished my first draft of. (I'm running a little late - it's due tomorrow evening!) As I'm editing, I'll be taking a closer look to try to see whether I've really established a claim this strong...
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March 18, 2009
Hobbes, Locke, and Grievances Against the State
It is a fact of life that people frequently come into conflict in various ways: conflicts both about whether a certain action took place, and about whether that sort of action is acceptable. Thomas Hobbes calls the first of these "a question
Of Fact" and the second "a question
Of Right" (
Leviathan ch. 15). Both Hobbes, the notorious proponent of absolute sovereignty, and John Locke, the great proponent of limited government (can you tell whose side I'm on?), agree that one of the chief reasons for forming governments is to prevent these disputes from leading to violence...
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March 6, 2009
Moral Wrongs and Civil Rights
The California Supreme Court
heard oral arguments on challenges to Proposition 8 yesterday, and The New York Times seems to expect that, surprisingly, the court may rule more or less
the way I want them to: that is, they are expected to rule that the state must extend all the same substantive rights to gay couples as to straight couples, but if the voters don't want to call them both by the same name they don't have to.
The NYT article happened to note that there were some protesters outside the courtroom, and one of them was holding a sign that read...
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March 4, 2009
Quote of the Day: Kant Against the Objectification of Women
Kant has something of a reputation as a misogynist. This reputation is not entirely undeserved. However, in his 1775-1780 Lectures on Ethics, Kant gives voice to a line of reasoning which, at least in its general outline, will be familiar to most readers from certain strains of 20th century feminism: There is no way in which a human being can be made an Object of indulgence for another except through sexual impulse ... it is an appetite for another human being ... Because sexuality is not an inclination which one human being has for another as such, but is an...
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March 3, 2009
Philosophers' Carnival 87
Philosophers' Carnival 87 is now
up at
There Is Some Truth in That with a link to my
"The Problem of Sex in Kant's Ethics". The 88th carnival will be held here at blog.kennypearce.net on Monday, March 23. The submission deadline will be Saturday, March 21.
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Dude, Where's My Teleology?
In introducing duties to the self considered as an animal being in the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant writes: There are impulses of nature having to do with man's animality. Through them, nature aims at (a) his self-preservation, (b) the preservation of the species, and (c) the preservation of his capacity to enjoy life, though still at the animal level only. - The vices that are here opposed to his duty to himself are murdering himself, the unnatural use of his sexual inclination, and such excessive consumption of food and drink as weakens his capacity for making purposive use of his...
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February 22, 2009
Quote of the Day: Why Write Political Theory?
I may be asked whether I am a prince or a legislator that I should be writing about politics. I answer no: and indeed that that is my reason for doing so. If I were a prince or a legislator I should not waste my time saying what ought to be done; I should do it and keep silent.
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, tr. Maurice Cranston, Introduction to Book I
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February 21, 2009
The Problem of Sex in Kant's Ethics
According to Kant, "
Sexual union (
commercium sexuale) is the reciprocal use that one human being makes of the sexual organs and capacities of another." (
The Metaphysics of Morals, tr. Mary Gregor, p. 61) A thing that is used is generally used
for something, and, indeed, in this section Kant mentions two purposes for which "the sexual organs and capacities of another" are used in "sexual union" (he does not say that these are exhaustive): "begetting and bringing up children" is said to be "an end of nature, for which it implanted the inclinations of the sexes for each other," but...
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February 17, 2009
On Christian Higher Education
There is an argument raging on
Leiter Reports about the APA's non-discrimination statement and the policies of certain Christian colleges and universities. Wheaton College, Azusa Pacific University, Belmont University, Calvin College, Malone College, and Pepperdine University are listed as institutions that allegedly violate the APA's non-discrimination statements with their policies about homosexuality. A
pair of
posts on
The Prosblogion offer some helpful reflections. What I want to try to do here is analyze in light of this issue the question of what Christian higher education ought to look like.
To start with, let me distinguish three types of goals...
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January 28, 2009
Quote of the Day: Kant Smacks Down Eudaimonism With Some Greek Word Play
If this distinction [between 'pathological pleasure' and 'moral pleasure'] is not observed, if eudaimonism (the principle of happiness) is set up as the basic principle instead of eleutheronomy (the principle of the freedom of internal lawgiving), the result is the euthanasia (easy death) of all morals. (Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, tr. Mary Gregor, p. 143)
For the record, I think that, whether accidentally or intentionally, Kant radically distorts ancient eudaimonism.
Eudaimonia doesn't mean 'happiness' in the English sense of that word, which comes from 'hap', meaning 'luck' (as in 'perhaps')...
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January 24, 2009
Kant on Copyright
Regular readers are no doubt aware that I
don't believe in intellectual property. That is, I don't believe that you can have property rights in ideas or, generally, in intangibles. I have, however, noted that
I support anti-plagiarism laws, and even suspect that they are capable of doing most of the good that so-called 'intellectual property' laws do. (Our current copyright and patent laws, in my opinion, do more harm than good.)
Kant, however, has an interesting argument (which is even more or less comprehensible - a rare find in a Kant text!) against the unauthorized publishing of books. The section is fairly short so I will publish the whole thing without authorization...
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January 23, 2009
How Putnam Defeats Descartes' Demon
A little while back, I wrote a post describing Cartesian demon skepticism as a form of
'adversarial epistemology'. The idea is that Descartes' thought experiment can be conceived of as a game with two players: the meditator and the demon. The meditator selects a process for forming beliefs from perceptual experiences, and the demon knows what process the meditator has selected, and controls all of the perceptual experiences. If the meditator ends up with mostly true beliefs, she wins. Otherwise, the demon wins.
Now, I mentioned at the bottom of that post that this way of framing the problem is helpful...
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January 21, 2009
The Limits of Religious Toleration
In a very sad case out of Wisconsin, the parents of 11 year old Kara Neumann are being
prosecuted for reckless endangerment after their daughter died of diabetes. They refused medical care for their daughter on account of their religious beliefs. (They do not belong to the Church of Christ, Scientist, which I believe is the largest religious organization which forbids its adherents from seeking medical care; rather, it appears that they are followers of some internet group by the name of "Unleavened Bread Ministries".) The Neumanns originally entered a constitutional challenge to their prosecution. The judge ruled that...
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January 20, 2009
Topics of Thought for This Quarter
Although I only very rarely post life updates to this blog, it is my custom here to list the subjects I am studying each term because it generally has some bearing on what interesting philosophy I will be blogging about. This quarter I am taking courses on the following topics: Early Modern Social Contract Theory. Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. I am already considering a paper topic: grievances against the state. (A timely subject.) Hobbes seems to say that you can't sue a sovereign (whether sovereignty is held by an individual or a group) unless he/she/they intentionally set up a process...
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January 19, 2009
Alex Byrne on Contemporary Debate About the Existence of God
The latest edition of
the Boston Review is running an article by MIT philosopher Alex Byrne on the state of philosophical debate about
the existence of God. For a popular article, it is in many ways quite good. It focuses on the ontological argument and the teleological argument (although it doesn't consider versions of the latter like
the one I advocate), which are probably the two most interesting of the traditional arguments, and it has interesting things to say about each of them. I do, however, have a few complaints.
First, early in the article we find this colorful phrase...
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January 9, 2009
Quote of the Day: A Summary of Berkeley's Mature Doctrine of Signs
Although the details are sketchy, Berkeley's basic point is clear: A sign may be significant not because it marks an idea, or even because it can be traced to something with which we are immediately acquainted, but because it is a working part of a system of signs that makes a genuine difference to our lives - to our thoughts, actions, and emotions. (Kenneth P. Winkler, "Berkeley and the Doctrine of Signs" in Winkler, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Berkeley, p. 151) This is Winkler's summary of Berkeley's mature "doctrine of signs" as developed in Alciphron 7. By the way,...
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January 5, 2009
The Problem of Analyticity
The new quarter has begun, and I have just finished reading Quine's
"Two Dogmas of Empiricism". One of Quine's chief purposes here is to argue that the difference between 'analytic' and 'synthetic' truths is one of degree, and not of kind, so that there is no neat division between the two. I want discuss this difficulty here, although I shall treat it slightly differently than Quine does.
Anyone who has been exposed to post-Kantian philosophy is familiar with the distinction between the analytic and the synthetic. For instance, 'no bachelor is married' is an analytic truth...
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December 29, 2008
Philosophers' Carnival 84
The 84th
Philosophers' Carnival is
up - in verse! I have my own stanza...
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December 24, 2008
Valicella on Private and Public Morality
Bill Valicella of
The Maverick Philosopher has an interesting discussion on the distinction between
private and public morality. Valicella supposes that there is an inherent tension between any Socratic, Platonic, or Christian ethics and the requirements of a stable state. A couple years ago, in my post on
rights, obligations, and abortion (which continues to be one of the most popular posts on this blog) I argued that there was no inherent contradiction, or even tension, between the idea that I have a libertarian right to retaliate for an offense against me, but an obligation of private morality not to exercise that right...
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December 22, 2008
Cartesian Demon Skepticism as 'Adversarial Epistemology'
In one of my computer science classes in undergrad, we discussed a particular way of thinking about the efficiency of an algorithm, which the professor called 'adversarial upper bounds'. The idea was to suppose that someone knows the 'guts' of your algorithm - exactly how it works - and that person is trying to make your algorithm take as many steps to complete as possible. The upshot was that sometimes with this kind of system inserting some randomness will give you a better expectation value. For instance, suppose I am trying to find a route (just any route) from A...
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December 19, 2008
Legislation and Regulation in the Libertarian State
A little while back, I argued that the current crisis was not, by any means,
the end of libertarianism, and that anyone who says so misunderstands libertarianism both in terms of its practical consequences and in terms of its theoretical basis. What I mean by this is, in the first case, that libertarianism doesn't condone the policies that led to the current crisis and, in the second case, that libertarianism is a deontological theory of political morality, not a theory of political 'utility'. That last claim perhaps needs a translation for non-philosophers...
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December 13, 2008
Philosophers' Carnival 83
I apologize for being late on this (as usual), but Philosophers' Carnival 83 is now up at The Uncredible Hallq with a link to my post, What Is Composition? Chris, the carnival host, laments the fact that, unlike Michael Drake, I do not have a part 2. I do, however, hope to continue my discussion of composition (or perhaps post my paper) eventually, so stay tuned!...
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December 4, 2008
The Reason for Berkeley's Anti-Abstractionism
In my post,
Does Philosophy 'Trickle Down', I noted that "Berkeley thinks he has discovered two philosophical doctrines which are indeed 'the Chief Causes of Error and Difficulty in the Sciences' and also 'the Grounds of Scepticism, Atheism, and Irreligion.' These are the epistemic/linguistic doctrine of
abstraction, and the metaphysical doctrine of
corporeal substance." In this post I want to examine how the doctrine of abstract ideas is supposed, according to Berkeley, to lead to "Error and Difficulty in the Sciences ... [and] ... Scepticism, Atheism, and Irreligion."...
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November 20, 2008
What Is Composition?
I am currently doing research for a term paper in which I will argue that composition requires a 'principle of unity'. That is (to a first approximation), that given some objects, the xs, there cannot be any y which has all and only the xs as parts unless there is some feature of the world which bestows some degree of unity or oneness on y. I hope to argue that this is a conceptual truth - that is, that it flows from what we mean by composition. I haven't finished reading up on the subject yet, so there may already...
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Topic(s):
Aristotle
,
Contemporary Thinkers
,
Familiar Objects
,
Historical Thinkers
,
Mereology
,
Metaphysics
,
Ontology
,
Peter van Inwagen
,
Philosophy
,
Trenton Merricks
,
W.V.O. Quine
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November 16, 2008
Three Varieties of Certainty
'Certainty,' whatever that is supposed to be, would certainly (!) seem to be important in epistemology. Like a lot of important words, it frequently gets thrown around without definition. I know of at least three totally distinct ways of using this term, and the only thing they all seem to have in common is 'very high epistemic status' - i.e. something is certain if we really know it, in some way that is 'better' (more certain!) than ordinary knowledge. I'm going to outline here these three different varieties of certainty. Cartesian Certainty (also called 'demon-proof certainty') is attributed to a...
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November 15, 2008
Quote of the Day: Beer and Philosophy
"The claim that atoms arranged baseballwise fail to compose a baseball might be hard to swallow. But it goes down like draught Guinness compared to the claim that baseballs are simples." - Trenton Merricks, Objects and Persons, p. 63. Some context: so-called 'folk ontology' (i.e. 'commonsense' beliefs about what sorts of things there are, modified by just a bit of modern science) claims that there are a bunch of atoms bonded together in a spherical region which compose an object called a baseball. Merricks is arguing that, while all of those atoms exist, there does not exist, in addition to...
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November 11, 2008
Does Philosophy 'Trickle Down'?
One of the interesting things about George Berkeley as a historical figure is that he labors under the peculiar belief that he is writing philosophy out of
pastoral concerns. I like to illustrate Berkeley's purposes by reference to the subtitles he gave to his works. The
Treatise on the Principles of Human Knowledge is subtitled, "wherein the Chief Causes of Error and Difficulty in the
Sciences, with the Grounds of Scepticism, Atheism, and Irreligion, are inquired into." Berkeley thinks he has discovered two philosophical doctrines which are indeed "the Chief Causes of Error and Difficulty in the
Sciences" and also "the Grounds of Scepticism, Atheism, and Irreligion." These are the epistemic/linguistic doctrine of
abstraction, and the metaphysical doctrine of
corporeal substance...
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October 30, 2008
Quote of the Day: Berkeley's Own Summary of the Argument from Representational Realism to Skepticism
In a previous post, I summarized Berkeley's argument against representational realism. I just came across a very good passage in the Dialogues where Berkeley himself gives a summary of his argument that representational realism leads to unpalatable skeptical consequences: It is your opinion, the ideas we perceive by our senses are not real things, but images, or copies of them. Our knowledge therefore is no farther real, than our ideas are the true representations of those originals. But as these supposed originals are themselves unknown it is impossible to know how far our ideas resemble them; or whether they resemble...
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October 23, 2008
The Simplicity of Berkeley's Argument Against Representative Realism
A passage in T.E. Jessop's introduction to the Siris reminded me today of how simple Berkeley's argument against representative realism is. Jessop writes, "Such archetypes - material things as understood by the Cartesians and Locke - [Berkeley] rejected on the epistemological ground that they require a representative theory of perception, which logically entails scepticism, since it excludes the possibility of comparing the sensed object and the supposed 'real object'." (Berkeley, Works, ed. Luce and Jessop, vol. 5 p. 17) The argument, in all its simplicity, goes like this: Representative realism holds that, for each object of our experience, there exist...
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October 22, 2008
California Proposition 8: What Rights?
There are some issues that I always hesitate to talk or write about on account of the fact that it seems to me that most of the discussion on the issue - regardless of which side it's coming from - is, well, stupid. Evolution (in the context of either (1) theology, or (2) public education) is one of those issues. Another is gay marriage. Nevertheless, since, now that I'm a Californian, I have to decide how to vote in two weeks, I suppose I had better wade in. When the California Supreme Court ruled in favor of allowing gay marriage,...
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"Can Berkeley's God Raise the Same Body, Transformed?'
My paper
"Can Berkeley's God Raise the Same Body, Transformed?", which is to be presented at the
Society of Christian Philosophers, Pacific Division conference next week is now available on the conference web-site. I would greatly appreciate any comments or criticisms.
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October 21, 2008
The End of Libertarianism?
I'm still on the newsletter of the
Penn Libertarian Association, which has pointed me to an article on
Slate entitled
"The End of Libertarianism". Author Jacob Weisberg believes the current US financial collapse proves that libertarianism is not viable in the same way that the fall of the USSR proved that Communism is not viable. I offer two brief practical responses and one theoretical response.
Firstly, without any government involvement, it is unlikely that any of this would have happened...
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October 17, 2008
Quote of the Day: Why do Relativists Write Books?
The sophist
Protagoras of Abdera (c. 490-420 BC) wrote a book entitled
Truth (which does not survive) in which he argued that 'man is the measure of all things;' an early form of relativism. In Plato's
Theaetetus, Socrates gives the following review of Protagoras' book: Well, I was delighted with his general statement of the theory that a thing is for any individual what it seems to him to be; but I was astonished at the way he began. I was astonished that he did not state at the beginning of the
Truth that 'Pig is the measure of all things'...
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October 14, 2008
Minimalist Ontology and Familiar Object Talk
I have just finished reading Mark Johnston's 1992 paper, "Constitution is Not Identity," reprinted in Michael Rea's
Material Constitution: A Reader. After arguing against a variety of theories of material constitution, Johnston claims that, with regard to our talk about familiar objects, "the distinction it embodies is acceptable as it stands and what is bogus is the conception of justifying our practice which requires that, for the distinction to be justified, the difference between an
F and its constituting matter must be a deep metaphysical difference secured by an extra ingredient of the
F." (Rea, p. 58) Johnston calls the person who holds this view 'the Minimalist'...
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October 8, 2008
Baber on the Real Presence
Some of the papers to be presented at the
Society of Christian Philosophers, Pacific Division Conference have now been
posted. Mine isn't up yet, but I will provide a link when it is. For now, I want to point readers to a paper by
the University of San Diego's Harriet Baber which she has entitled simply
"The Real Presence". We have previously discussed here
the difference between transubstantiation and real presence. Baber describes this quite nicely in her introduction...
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Topic(s):
Church Dogmatics
,
Contemporary Thinkers
,
Harriet Baber
,
Historical Thinkers
,
Huldrych Zwingli
,
John Calvin
,
Metaphysics
,
Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Religion
,
Protestantism
,
Roman Catholic Church
,
The Church
,
The Eucharist
,
Theology
,
Thomas Aquinas
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October 6, 2008
September 26, 2008
Quote of the Day: Appearances and Judgments About Appearances
And when we question whether the underlying object is such as it appears, we grant the fact that it appears, and our doubt does not concern the appearance itself but the account given of that appearance, - and that is a different thing from questioning the appearance itself. For example, honey appears to us to be sweet (and this we grant, for we perceive sweetness through the senses), but whether it is also sweet in its essence is for us a matter of doubt, since this is not an appearance, but a judgement regarding the appearance. (Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of...
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September 21, 2008
Quote of the Day: Plato on Opinion and Knowledge
Following up on the last post, I thought it would be helpful to go back to Plato to provide another view on the subject. Socrates and Meno are discussing the nature of virtue, whether it is a form of knowledge, and whether it can be taught: SOCRATES: So true opinion is in no way a worse guide to correct action than knowledge. It is this that we omitted in our investigation of the nature of virtue, when we said that only knowledge can lead to correct action, for true opinion can do so also. ... MENO: That appears to be...
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Is Deduction Justification-Preserving?
There is a popular class of theories of epistemology called "Justified True Belief" (JTB) theories. According to these theories (which have their ancestor in Plato) a belief counts as knowledge just in case the content of the belief is true and the belief itself is justified. ... The reason I call this a class of theories, rather than a single theory, is that no one can agree on what 'justification' is other than to say that it is that property which, when added to truth, makes a belief knowledge.
The Gettier cases are a famous pair of objections to JTB accounts. Many more cases have been added since the original publication in 1963. Now, both of the original Gettier cases and, as far as I know, all of the more recent ones, involve a type of deduction called a
vacuous introduction...
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September 18, 2008
Society of Christian Philosophers, Pacific Division Conference
A paper of mine entitled "Can Berkeley's God Raise the Same Body, Transformed?" has been accepted to the
Society Christian Philosophers,
Pacific Division Conference on "Mind, Body, and Free Will" at UC Riverside Oct. 30 - Nov. 1. The conference organizers plan to post papers online, and I will provide a link when they do. In the meantime, I've discussed some of the material in the paper
here and
here. My official abstract is as follows: Orthodox Christianity affirms a bodily resurrection of the dead. That is, Christians believe that at some point in the eschatological future, possibly after a period of (conscious or unconscious) disembodied existence, we will once again live and animate our own bodies...
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September 8, 2008
Philosophers' Carnival LXXVII
Welcome to
Philosophers' Carnival LXXVII at
blog.kennypearce.net! The Philosophers' Carnival is a fortnightly roundup of the best blog posts related to academic philosophy. Following the procedure I used for
Carnival XXXI, I will divide the posts according to the three major traditional divisions of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, and value theory. (Actually in Carnival XXXI I used "ethics" rather than "value theory", but "value theory" is a broader term.) In order to accommodate a variety of posts, I have construed each category rather broadly...
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September 4, 2008
Elsewhere on the Web
I'd like to draw all of your attention to a couple of sites. The first is
Houyhnhnm Land (no, I don't have any idea how to pronounce 'Houyhnhnm' or what it means), a resource for the study of early modern thought created by Brandon Watson (of
Siris fame). I have just finished my first post to the Houyhnhnm Land guest blog,
"Berkeley and Ordinary Objects". In the future, I plan to cross-post everything, but for now I am going to tell all of you to click on over there and explore the site.
Secondly,
Logical Space, the brain child of Lewis Powell...
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September 3, 2008
Call for Submissions: Philosophers' Carnival LXXVII
Philosophers' Carnival LXXVII will be hosted here at blog.kennypearce.net this Monday, September 8. Submissions on any subject related to academic philosophy ar