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...
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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...
Continue reading "The Dialectical Appropriateness of Ontological Arguments"
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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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...
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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?
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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.
Continue reading ""In Defense of Ignorant Assertions""
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.
Continue reading "Philosophers' Carnival Call for Submissions"
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).
Continue reading "Quote of the Day: G. E. Moore on Philosophical Arguments"
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 ...
Continue reading "Seeing the World Through Teleology-Colored Glasses"
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...
Continue reading "A Berkeley-Centric Narrative"
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...
Continue reading "Best Recent Books For and Against Religious Belief"
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...
Continue reading "What Caused God?"
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...
Continue reading "Does 'The Desk is Black' Express a Proposition?"
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.
Continue reading "Quote of the Day: Australians Against Bullshit"
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!
Continue reading "Philosophers' Carnival 97"
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...
Continue reading "Intelligent Design and Scientific Instrumentalism"
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.
Continue reading "Announcing: The Extended Cognition Blog"
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...
Continue reading "I Exist!"
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...
Continue reading "Kant's Argument for Monogamy"
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...
Continue reading "(Self-)Quote of the Day: A Controversial Claim for Your Consideration"
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...
Continue reading "Hobbes, Locke, and Grievances Against the State"
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...
Continue reading "Moral Wrongs and Civil Rights"
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.
Continue reading "Philosophers' Carnival 87"
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...
Continue reading "On Christian Higher Education"
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')...
Continue reading "Quote of the Day: Kant Smacks Down Eudaimonism With Some Greek Word Play"
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...
Continue reading "Does Philosophy 'Trickle Down'?"
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.
Continue reading ""Can Berkeley's God Raise the Same Body, Transformed?'"
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...
Continue reading "Baber on the Real Presence"
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 are welcome. The best posts will be selected for inclusions (I will probably pick between 10 and 20 posts). Posts can be submitted online
here.
Continue reading "Call for Submissions: Philosophers' Carnival LXXVII"
August 30, 2008
Quote(s) of the Day: A Pair of Responses to van Inwagen's "Body Snatching" Account of the Resurrection
Peter van Inwagen famously argued in his 1978 paper "The Possibility of Resurrection" that the only way God can bring a dead person back to life is to raise the very same body. However, if the body has decayed or been cremated, then it doesn't exist to be raised. Therefore, van Inwagen reasons, if Christianity is true, God must, at the moment of death (or immediately prior) surreptitiously remove the dead/dying body and spirit it away somewhere, replacing it with a simulacrum. Otherwise, there could be no afterlife. Unsurprisingly, this has met with some "incredulous stares." Here are a couple...
Continue reading "Quote(s) of the Day: A Pair of Responses to van Inwagen's "Body Snatching" Account of the Resurrection"
July 9, 2008
R.I.P. Lex Americanorum (Sept. 17 , 1787 - July 9, 2008)
Lex Americanorum, the
King of America,
passed away this afternoon on the Senate floor. Lex had been ill for some years and White House-ologists in Moscow have long suspected that one or more cabinet members had in fact taken responsibility for most major decisions. The exact identity of this person had not been firmly established, but most experts agree that it is Vice President Dick Cheney.
Lex was born on
September 17, 1787 and became king shortly thereafter upon election by representatives of the 13 American colonies. Lex was able to survive and maintain power for nearly 221 years...
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June 5, 2008
Representative Realism, Phenomenalism, and "Physical-Talk"
When I wrote a while back about
the idealist strategy, I said that the second step was to "argue that our physical statements - both ordinary statements about physical objects and statements about the discipline of physics - are best construed as talking about
perception." What I want to do here is to unpack this statement. First, let's examine what the argument is supposed to do and then we'll look at the argument as it appears in a brief section of Berkeley's
Three Dialogues.
This piece of the argument is a
reductio against
representative realism...
Continue reading "Representative Realism, Phenomenalism, and "Physical-Talk""
May 3, 2008
Quote of the Day: Plato on Knowing that You Don't Know
THEAETETUS: Well, do you see what we're looking for?
VISITOR: I think I see a large, difficult type of ignorance marked off from the others and overshadowing all of them.
THEAETETUS: What's it like?
VISITOR: Not knowing, but thinking that you know. That's what probably causes all the mistakes we make when we think.
THEAETETUS: That's true.
VISITOR: And furthermore it's the only kind of ignorance that's called lack of learning.
THEAETETUS: Certainly.
VISITOR: Well then, what should we call the part of teaching that gets rid of it?
THEAETETUS: The other part consists in the teaching of crafts, I think, but here in Athens we call this one education...
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April 27, 2008
The Adversarial Method in Philosophy
Brandon points to a collection of posts at
Feminist Philosophers on the subject of
"philosophy as a blood sport". Apparently the phrase comes from
this article. The latest discussion seems to have been occasioned by a post by
Brian Leiter who is not particularly known for his civility, and apparently thinks this is all a big joke. In this post, I will not focus on the question of whether this has anything to do (either as cause or effect) with philosophy being male dominated. The reason for this is that that question would only be relevant in very specific circumstances, and I do not think these circumstances obtain...
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April 21, 2008
Philosophy is Analytic
It seems that
Alexander Pruss (also of
Prosblogion fame) has
set off a bit of a firestorm (there is a list of links at
Siris) on the subject of the history of philosophy and the analytic-Continental divide. He has been criticized for making statements about Continental philosophy and then admitting that he doesn't know much about it. I'm going to try to be careful here, because I'm certainly no expert on Continental philosophy myself, but I do want to enter into the fray with a few observations.
I've titled this post "Philosophy is Analytic." Let me begin by clarifying what I mean by that...
Continue reading "Philosophy is Analytic"
April 18, 2008
Reflections on the Philosophy Graduate Admissions Process
Well, I'm glad that's over.
On Wednesday, I accepted an offer of almost full funding from
the UC Irvine philosophy department. By "almost" I mean that I was waitlisted for funding and the spot I got was actually a California resident spot, so what would have been my stipend is being used to pay for the out of state tuition. This only affects the first year, since it only takes a year to establish residency in California.
When I was applying and waiting anxiously and so forth, I wasn't able to find many resources online that were helpful, so I thought that I would post what I have learned...
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April 14, 2008
Philosophers' Carnival 67: Idealism
Welcome to the 67th
Philosophers' Carnival, on the theme of idealism! A large number of submissions were received, so among those that were not idealism-themed, I have selected only a few of my favorites. My apologies to those that were not included. Also, for those of you who find the color scheme distasteful (or a cause of headaches), let me point you to the top right of the page, where a link reading "view with boring colors" will magically turn this page to black on white (please let me know if it doesn't work in your browser). And now, without further ado...
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April 11, 2008
Language and the Metaphysics of the Material World
Let me begin with a reminder: be sure to get your posts in for the 67th Philosophers' Carnival by tomorrow (Saturday) midnight (Eastern time), and remember that the theme is idealism. I've received many good posts already (probably more than I'll be able to include), but only a handful are idealism-themed. Having said that, let me begin my own idealism-themed post. In my paper "The Semantics of Sense Perception in Berkeley" (which I never tire of linking to, because it is much better thought out, developed, and argued than the mostly half-baked stuff I post on this blog), I spend...
Continue reading "Language and the Metaphysics of the Material World"
April 2, 2008
Philosophers' Carnival 66
I'm a couple days late with this (my apologies), but
Philosophers' Carnival 66 is now up at
The Uncredible Hallq with a link to my post,
Berkeley: Phenomenalist or Platonist?
The 67th Carnival will be held
right here, so stay tuned!
Continue reading "Philosophers' Carnival 66"
March 29, 2008
Berkeley: Phenomenalist or Platonist?
Commentators have long recognized the existence of two distinct strains of thought in Berkeley's discussions of how our perceptions give rise to something that is properly called a world. According to the phenomenalist strain, the world is quite simply composed of perception and it becomes a world, rather than simply an unrelated collection of perceptions, by means of the orderliness with which God causes perceptions. According to the Platonist strain, the world (and each object in it) has an archetype in the divine mind and our perceptions are perceptions
of the world because what we perceive is an "ectype" of that archetype...
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March 27, 2008
The Philosophers' Carnival Returns to blog.kennypearce.net
The 66th
Philosophers' Carnival is coming up this Monday at
The Uncredible Hallq. The Philosophers' Carnival is a bi-weekly roundup of blog posts on subjects related to academic philosophy including, but not limited to, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political theory, "continental" philosophy and the history of philosophy. Submissions are due
online every other Saturday for inclusion in the carnival the following Monday.
Following the Uncredible Carnival 66 this Monday, Philosophers' Carnival 67 will take place here at blog.kennypearce.net on Monday, April 14 (submissions due by Saturday April 12). Some of you may recall that I had previously hosted
Philosophers' Carnival 31. The 67th carnival will be focused on the theme of "idealism"...
Continue reading "The Philosophers' Carnival Returns to blog.kennypearce.net"
March 18, 2008
March 15, 2008
Berkeley's Theory of Reference and the Critique of Matter
George Berkeley is well known for his critique of matter. By "matter" he means Locke's "material substratum." At the end of the Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous he actually does acknowledge that one might use the word "matter" simply to mean "the stuff of the physical world" (that's not a direct quote) and he doesn't object to this, so he actually isn't opposed to the way the word was used in your physics or chemistry classes, but only to the way it was used in early modern metaphysics. The critique of matter is tied up in the critique of...
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March 12, 2008
Telecom Immunity and "Lex est Rex"
The most recent
Electronic Frontier Foundation newsletter contains a
couple of
links on telecom immunity which allude to an argument against telecom immunity that I want to expand upon.
Many people think that the basic principle of democracy or of a free society more generally is "majority rule" or some such. However, this is not historically how the matter has been viewed, and history in fact furnishes plenty of cases in which majority rule has not been particularly consistent with freedom. Classic liberals - the early modern thinkers who gave us the foundations of western democracy - had a different view...
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February 18, 2008
A Moderate and Plausible Arminianism, Based on John 6:40 and Romans 8:29
My position on the debate between Calvinism and Arminianism is that the more moderate forms of each are both plausible and orthodox. Hyper-Calvinism can slide into the heresy of fatalism, or the denial that God loves all people; hyper-Arminianism slides, of course, into Pelagianism. It is only the moderate forms of each which are, I say, plausible and orthodox. These moderate forms, I hold, represent two different man-made philosophical and theological systems designed to uphold the same doctrines revealed in Scripture. I believe that when the disagreement actually reaches all the way down to Biblical hermeneutics, rather than staying in...
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February 16, 2008
Quote of the Day: Schopenhauer on the Absurdity of Materialism
The objective method [i.e. the method of philosophy which starts from the object and proceeds to the subject] can be developed most consistently and carried farthest when it appears as materialism proper. It regards matter, and with it time and space, as existing absolutely, and passes over the relation to the subject in which alone all this exists. Further, it lays hold of the law of causality as the guiding line on which it tries to progress, taking it to be a self-existing order or arrangement of things, veritas aeterna, and consequently passing over the understanding, in which and for...
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February 2, 2008
The Idealist Strategy
There is a particular strategy of argument generally employed by idealists in their arguments against materialism/physicalism/scientific realism and/or substance dualism. The strategy originates primarily with Berkeley. Some of the Parmenides fragments sound similar, but, absent context, it is not possible to determine exactly what he intended. Hume and Kant developed their metaphysical systems largely in response to it, and it is similar to the arguments of the so-called "modern Idealists" which
Moore set out to refute. Finally, the strategy is, in recent literature, explicitly adopted in John Foster's
The Case for Idealism, which I am currently reading. The strategy goes like this...
Continue reading "The Idealist Strategy"
January 22, 2008
January 19, 2008
A Brief Argument for Descriptivism About Laws of Nature
Isaac Newton believed that F=ma was a law of nature. Leave aside for the moment the question of whether he was right - some philosophers might think that, although it turned out simply to be an approximation that worked well for matters of ordinary experience, it still counts as a legitimate law. That's not what I'm concerned with right now. What I'm concerned with is what it means to claim that F=ma is a law of nature. Because of this, I may sloppily speak of F=ma as having a referent when, according to some theories I will be considering, it...
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December 26, 2007
Aristotle and Transubstantiation (Some More)
Tim Troutman (formerly known as "The God Fearin' Fiddler") of
The God Fearin' Forum has
responded to my
latest discussion of Eucharistic theology and Aristotle. Perhaps I have not been very clear. Whatever the case, Tim persistently misunderstands both my claim and my argument for it. I am going to try to make what I am claiming very clear here:
The doctrine of transubstantiation, as expounded by Trent, is rendered incoherent by any system of metaphysics sufficiently different from Aristotle's.
This should not be confused with any of the following claims, which I do
not make...
Continue reading "Aristotle and Transubstantiation (Some More)"
Topic(s):
Aristotle
,
Augustine
,
Church Dogmatics
,
Divine Revelation
,
Historical Thinkers
,
Metaphysics
,
Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Religion
,
Plato
,
Roman Catholic Church
,
The Church
,
The Eucharist
,
Theology
,
Thomas Aquinas
Posted by
Kenny at
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|
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|
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December 12, 2007
What is a Probability?
There is always a more fundamental question. Kenny Easwaran at
Antimetea has written a
response to my post
What Does Bayesian Epistemology Have to Do With Probabilities? In his post, he raises the question, just what
is a probability? I want to take a look at my own assumptions about what a probability is, and what he has to say, and see if this has any relevance for our discussion of Bayesian epistemology.
I will not attempt here to develop a philosophy of probability, like Bayesianism, or frequentism, or anything of that sort. These are accounts of what probabilities
mean, but not of what probabilities
are...
Continue reading "What is a Probability?"
December 3, 2007
November 30, 2007
What Does Bayesian Epistemology Have To Do With Probabilities?
The answer to the question in the title of this post may seem obvious (after all, isn't Bayesianism
all about probabilities?), but I think that the long discussion that followed
Lauren's post on van Fraassen's objection to Bayesianism from quantum mechanics shows that it isn't clear at all - or at least, that it wasn't clear to either of us as we were discussing the issue. I think that I now understand why. In this post, I'm going to give three answers to this question, which I will call The Primitivist Account (P), The Kripkean Possible Worlds Account (KPW), and the Lewisian Possible Worlds Account (LPW). This post will discuss...
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November 29, 2007
Quote of the Day: Schopenhauer on The History of Idealism
Now as, notwithstanding the transitory, isolated nature of our representations with respect to their immediate presence in our consciousness, the Subject nevertheless retains the representation of an all-comprehensive complex of reality, as described above, by means of the function of the Understanding; representations have, on the strength of this antithesis, been viewed, as something quite different when belonging to that complex than when considered with reference to their immediate presence in our consciousness ... This view of matter, which is the ordinary one, is known under the name Realism. On the appearance of modern philosophy, Idealism opposed itself to this...
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November 7, 2007
GUEST BLOG: Bayesian Probability and Quantum Mechanics
Hello. As a brief introductory reminder, I'm Lauren, Kenny's fiance, and a guest blogger here when I have time (which isn't very often.) However, I am going to take some time to discuss a paper by Bas C. van Fraassen, Conditionalizing on Violated Bell's Inequalities, in which he claims that quantum mechanics creates problems for Bayesian epistemology. I have two main points to make in response, the first is that he doesn't actually need quantum mechanics for his argument, and the second is where he has failed to account for the effect of choosing which events to talk about, which...
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November 2, 2007
Transubstantiation vs. Real Presence
The
God Fearin' Fiddler has a post up on
the historical significance of transubstantiation which has led to some interesting discussions. The principle problem with this post and the discussion that follows it, however, is that no one seems to understand the difference between transubstantiation and the Real Presence. Unfortunately, I'm not an expert on this either, but I do think I know enough to clear up some historical and metaphysical confusion. I am going to use two principal sources - session 13 of the Council of Trent, and the
relevant article from
the Catholic Encyclopedia - to explain the historical development and specific content of the doctrine of transubstantiation, and then attempt to show two things...
Continue reading "Transubstantiation vs. Real Presence"
Topic(s):
Aristotle
,
Augustine
,
Church Dogmatics
,
George Berkeley
,
Historical Thinkers
,
Jesus of Nazareth
,
Metaphysics
,
Nicolas Malebranche
,
Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Religion
,
Plato
,
Roman Catholic Church
,
The Church
,
The Eucharist
,
Theology
,
Thomas Aquinas
Posted by
Kenny at
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October 29, 2007
Berkeley, Computers, and Time
I read a very interesting paper by James Van Cleve today, regarding a pair of arguments originally made by Jorge Luis Borges to the effect that either Berkeley's idealism or Leibniz's principle of the identity of indiscernables could be used to prove the unreality of time. The paper is "Time, Idealism, and the Identity of Indiscernables,"
Philosophical Perspectives 16 (2002): 379-393. Van Cleve identifies three "axioms of time order" which Borges' arguments are designed to undermine...
Continue reading "Berkeley, Computers, and Time"
October 26, 2007
"The Semantics of Sense Perception in Berkeley"
My paper
"The Semantics of Sense Perception in Berkeley" is now available on my
writings page. An earlier version of this paper served as my undergraduate honors thesis, and a somewhat reduced version of it has been accepted for publication by
Religious Studies. I haven't heard anything about what issue it will appear in.
This paper discusses Berkeley's theory that our sense perceptions (especially visual perceptions) form a language by which God communicates with us, and asks how we are to interpret this language. In particular, it argues...
Continue reading ""The Semantics of Sense Perception in Berkeley""
October 9, 2007
"Dionysius" on God-Talk
A collection of writings have come down to us under the name "Dionysius the Aereopagite" (after Acts 17:34) which effectively form the foundation of the tradition of Christian mysticism. Most scholars today believe the writer lived in Syria, c. 500 AD. The general consensus is that he couldn't have written earlier than this because he seems to have been influenced by 5th century Neo-Platonists. All this by way of background; I don't have any particular opinion as to when the writer lived or by whom he was influenced. The principle work of "Dionysius" is only a few pages long and...
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September 25, 2007
"The Ontological Status of Dreams in Berkeleian Metaphysics"
The Dualist 13 (2006) is finally available online, including my paper
"The Ontological Status of Dreams in Berkeleian Metaphysics". Unfortunately, the main index site is still badly broken. Hopefully it will soon be fixed. In the meantime, the direct link to my paper works.
There are some typesetting errors in the PDF (most importantly: footnote numbering is messed up, and some logical symbols are boxed out), and I haven't seen the print version to know if it contains these errors as well. I was never shown any proofs and I also found some spelling errors, and at least one place where a sentence is missing a word. Such is life. But the content is, I hope more interesting than the form...
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September 21, 2007
On Theological Method
Last night, I had a brief friendly debate with some Calvinists, which has me thinking about theological method. Briefly, I approach the issue of Calvinism and Arminianism from the perspective primarily of philosophy rather than revealed theology. That is, I argue that libertarian free will, which is incompatible with most (but, surprisingly, not all) versions of Calvinism, but is central to Arminianism, is a philosophically attractive thesis on grounds of, for instance, human moral responsibility, the problem of evil, and the phenomenology of choice. (I don't claim that Calvinists can't provide accounts of these things, I simply claim that Arminians...
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August 20, 2007
Armstrong on Berkeley
I was looking on half.com recently to see if I could find an affordable volume containing Berkeley's
Siris last week when I came upon
this 1965 collection,
Berkeley's Philosophical Writings (ISBN 0020641702 according to half.com; it's apparently too old to have an ISBN printed in it) edited and with introduction by none other than D. M. Armstrong. I was unable to find any further information on the book, but, at half.com prices, decided it was worth buying just to get Armstrong's introduction (and on the off-chance that it contained
Siris). Since there was no information on this book available online, and there are more copies still available, I thought I should provide some information myself...
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August 17, 2007
Why Believe the Bible?
Part 4: The Church's Witness to the Scriptures
Here it is, finally! Almost exactly 13 months after the last post, I am finally continuing my series. For those of you who have forgotten (probably most of you), in May of 2006 I outlined a proposed series providing an argument for belief in the Bible. I'm going to give a fairly detailed recap here because it has been so long since my last post. In
Part 1: Plan of Attack I outlined the argument I intended to give. The basic claim of the argument is that historical investigation renders the idea that the canon of Scripture as we have it is divinely inspired a live option...
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Part 4: The Church's Witness to the Scriptures"
August 8, 2007
Linguistic Ersatz Modal Realism and Types of Modality
David Lewis is best known for his
modal realism, the view that all possible worlds exist in precisely the same sense that the actual world exists. He holds this view because he believes that it solves all sorts of philosophical problems related to modality, counterfactuals, properties, and so forth. However, there are a number of philosophers who think that the benefits of modal realism can be had without actually supposing that the possible world really exist. These philosophers Lewis calls
ersatzers...
Continue reading "Linguistic Ersatz Modal Realism and Types of Modality"
July 31, 2007
Philosophy Humor
This is probably the best I've ever seen. I
had to post a link to it, just because it begins with the sentence "On Twin Earth, a brain in a vat is at the wheel of a runaway trolley," after which it took me a few minutes to stop laughing long enough to read the rest. Also, at the bottom we have the following modification: "
ALTERNATIVE EXAMPLE: Same as above, except the brain has had a commisurotomy, and the left half of the brain is a consequentialist and the right side is an absolutist."
My apologies to those who don't spend their time reading contemporary ethics and metaphysics, and therefore haven't yet figured out why I'm laughing.
Continue reading "Philosophy Humor"
July 21, 2007
Economically Optimal Copyright Term is 14 Years
According to economic analysis recently published by Cambridge Ph.D candidate Rufus Pollock, the optimal term for copyright is 14 years. Presumably, this means that a 14 year term would maximize utility across society in an idealized free market or some such. This is of interest to me because I don't believe that one can hold libertarian property rights in information or ideas (or intangibles generally), and so I take copyright and patent law to be constructed in the social contract (which means that its enforceability by goverment is limited, in terms of what the government is morally permitted to do),...
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July 5, 2007
Paper #2: For Real This Time
Before I left last week, I sent in to Religious Studies the final draft of my paper "The Semantics of Sense Perception in Berkeley," which they have accepted for publication. The paper discusses the meaning of the "universal language of the Author of Nature" Berkeley argues for in the Essay Toward a New Theory of Vision and elsewhere. Essentially, the question I try to begin to answer is "if sense perception is a language by which God speaks to us, then what is he saying?" (I say "begin" because I have not developed a detailed semantic theory, but only offered...
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July 2, 2007
GUEST BLOG: Philosophical Implications of Wave-Particle Duality: Part 2
A few days ago, I talked about the classical assumptions relevant to wave-particle duality, in part 1 of this series. I hope to build up to discussing the relevant philosophical questions, most of which probably won't come in until part 4. But first, here and in the next part, I'm going to briefly discuss the important experiments in the development of wave-particle duality, because however it's interpreted in the philosophical discussion, it can't run afoul of these. This post is mostly physics; however, there's no math whatsoever. As always, suggestions about how to improve the physics to philosophy ratio would...
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June 28, 2007
GUEST BLOG: Philosophical Implications of Wave-Particle Duality: Part 1
Hello world! For those of you who missed the announcement, I am Lauren, Kenny's fiance, and now a guest blogger here. As Kenny mentioned, I'm majoring in physics, math, and philosophy, so one thing that I'm hoping to discuss on this blog is philosophical issues related to physics. As you can probably guess from the title, the first thing I've decided to try is wave-particle duality, an aspect of quantum mechanics. In particularly, wave-particle duality raises interesting questions about the relationship between properties and objects, whether there is one "thing" with wave properties and particle properties, or whether there is...
Continue reading "GUEST BLOG: Philosophical Implications of Wave-Particle Duality: Part 1"
June 27, 2007
The Teleological Argument
While we are
talking a bit about intelligent design, I'd like to take the opportunity to post a little paper I wrote last semester on the teleological argument for the existence of God. The assignment was to give the strongest possible version of the teleological argument, discuss the most important objection, and whether the objection succeeds (and why). The catch: it all had to fit on one page. (This sort of thing is, by the way, a very useful exercise for budding philosophers; I recommend it.) So, without further ado: Teleological arguments for the existence of a divine being attempt to show...
Continue reading "The Teleological Argument"
The Teleological Argument
While we are
talking a bit about intelligent design, I'd like to take the opportunity to post a little paper I wrote last semester on the teleological argument for the existence of God. The assignment was to give the strongest possible version of the teleological argument, discuss the most important objection, and whether the objection succeeds (and why). The catch: it all had to fit on one page. (This sort of thing is, by the way, a very useful exercise for budding philosophers; I recommend it.) So, without further ado: Teleological arguments for the existence of a divine being attempt to show...
Continue reading "The Teleological Argument"
June 26, 2007
Theological Implications and "Scientificness"
It is popularly believed that if a theory has theological implications, then the theory is somehow "unscientific." A
post (NOTE: MovableType won't let me link directly to this post because the URL contains an unescaped ' contrary to the HTTP spec so the above link goes to the daily archive) at the
Florida Student Philosophy Blog challenges this claim. I think the article is unnecessarily long and involved, but I'm quite impressed with the insight. The argument is a reductio that works more or less like this...
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June 6, 2007
Discussions on Scripture and Tradition
Just a couple quick links: John Fraiser of
Chaos and Old Night discusses the attitude Evangelical Protestants ought to take to Church tradition in his post,
Sifting Through Church Tradition. Fraiser argues that we need to recognize the influence tradition has on us, and we ought not to try to escape from that influence, but, at the same time, we need to recognize that it is Scriputre and not tradition which is authoritative. I mostly agree with what Fraiser said...
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May 24, 2007
Quote(s) of the Day: Selections From Berkeley's Letter to Sir John James
In the course of a bit of research on Berkeley's views on the epistemology of religion, I have just come across a little letter Berkeley wrote to one Sir John James, dated June 7, 1741. James was, apparently, an Anglican living in Boston who was considering converting to Roman Catholicism. While for some reason (perhaps because he was Irish) Berkeley is often mistakenly believed to have been a member of the Roman Catholic Church, he was, in fact, a member of the clergy of the Church of England, and wrote against Roman Catholicism on a number of occasions, this being...
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May 11, 2007
Quote of the Day
I am no feminist (my wife will confirm my impeccable Neanderthal credentials); I have strong views on women's ordination; but I am saddened by the way Reformed church culture so often tramples its women underfoot with its mindless identification of biblical manhood with something akin to John Wayne and its assumption that all Christian women should make Mary Poppins look domestically incompetent. - Carl Trueman, Reformation21.
I'm not sure where these attitudes come from...
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May 2, 2007
The Ontological Economy of Idealism
The following is an excerpt from a draft of my metaphysics term paper, which I thought might be of interest to readers. The paper presents an idealist theory of properties under which two things are said to have a property if those two things are or would be indistinguishable under some specified conditions. I call this account, fittingly enough, the "conditional indistinguishability" analysis of properties. After presenting the conditional indistinguishability account, I discuss the ontological economy of the idealist theory from which it arises, as compared especially to the currently dominant physicalist assumptions, but also to substance dualism: The theory...
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April 28, 2007
"Common Sense," "Pre-Theoretical Intuitions," and Philosophy
I am presently reading Peter van Inwagen's
Material Beings (I'm not sure if it's going to actually help with my very strange philosophy of religion term paper wherein I argue that idealism is compatible with a belief in the bodily resurrection of the dead, or if I'm just procrastinating). In section 10, after denying that there are, in metaphysical rigor, any artifacts (i.e. inanimate macrophysical objects, such as chairs), van Inwagen makes the following remark: Does my position not fly in the face of common sense? I do not think so. This is not because I think that my position is in accord with "common sense," but rather because I do not think that there is any such thing as the body of doctrine the philosophers call common sense...
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April 26, 2007
The New York Times Supports the Police State!
An editorial appearing in today's
New York Times finally, at least, more or less understands the position of supporters of the Second Amendment as written. That's close to all that can be said positively about this little article. It begins with this line:
By now, the logic is almost automatic. A shooter takes innocent lives, and someone says that if the victims had been armed, this wouldn’t have happened. The only solution to a gun in the wrong hands, it seems, is a gun in the hands of everyone.
Why do gun advocates support this line of reasoning? The critical point is that it is not possible to keep guns out of the hands of criminals...
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April 24, 2007
April 19, 2007
Calvinism and Arminianism: On Making the Right Objection
I want to make an important point about something that is either a reasoning mistake (if done accidentally) or an underhanded rhetorical trick (if done intentionally). I've seen it a lot (and done it myself, accidentally) in debates between Calvinists and Arminians (mostly on a popular level, but sometimes even in the writings of philosophers and theologians), so I'm going to use this debate to provide examples ... The issue is this: all of us believe implicit contradictions, because we are unable to determine all the consequences of our beliefs. This means that
there is a big difference between rejecting a belief p and accepting a belief q which, unbeknownst to you, logically entails not-p. So, if you believe ...
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April 9, 2007
Libertarian Compatibilism?
In metaphysics, libertarianism is the view that human beings (and other free beings) are free because they can do otherwise. Determinism is the view that the conjunction of the laws of nature with all the facts about the configuration of the world at some time t entail all the facts about the configuration of the world at all times. Compatibilism is the view that free will and determinism are logically compatible, and incompatibilism is the view that they are not. Libertarianism is generally taken to entail incompatibilism, and is contrasted with compatibilist theories of free will. However, in her recent...
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March 26, 2007
The Conjunction of the Armstrong-Laws is God
D. M. Armstrong is the best known proponent of a currently quite popular understanding of natural laws. Laws so understood are, as a result, called Armstrong-Laws, or A-Laws for short. These are distinguished from L-Laws, named for David Lewis. L-laws are identical to regularities in events (but not all regularities are laws). Unlike L-Laws, A-Laws are actual metaphysical entities, which exist independently of their instances. That is, according to this theory, the Law of Universal Gravitation is a thing out there in the universe (not in the mind) which actually makes massive objects move toward one another. The attraction (no...
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March 23, 2007
1 Timothy 2:12
Over at
Better Bibles Blog, Suzanne has been doing a series on Bible passages relevant to women in leadership. 1 Timothy 2:12 is of course an important verse to deal with on this subject. She hasn't actually got to it yet, but it came up in the comments to the post on
1 Corinthians 12:27-31, and I felt that I needed to say more about it than could reasonably be said in a comment, so here it is: 1 Timothy 2:12 is a very difficult verse. When taken with the following few verses it appears at first glance to make some argument like...
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March 19, 2007
Rational Atheism Entails Rational Solipsism?
In the Fourth Dialogue of Berkeley's Alciphron, Alciphron the "Free-Thinker" challenges Berkeley's spokesman, Euphranor, to present a proof of the existence of God. Alciphron, however, lays down some quite stringent conditions: First then, let me tell you I am not persuaded by metaphysical arguments; such, for instance, as are drawn from the ideas of an all-perfect being, or the absurdity of an infinite progression of causes. This sort of arguments I have always found dry and jejune; and, as they are not suited to my way of thinking, they may perhaps puzzle, but never will convince me. Secondly, I am...
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March 17, 2007
The Historicity of the Doctrine of Inerrancy
Jeremy Pierce of
Parableman has an excellent post
refuting the claim that the doctrine of inerrancy was invented in the 19th century as a response to theological liberals. I intend someday to get back to my long-stalled
Why Believe the Bible? series, and when I do some of what Jeremy says here will be important for the next post, which is supposed to be on the witness of the Church to the Scripture. My one complaint about this post is that, in a fashion that is unfortunately typical of my fellow Protestants, it jumps through Church history from the New Testament, to Augustine, to Luther and Calvin, as though there was nothing in between...
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March 12, 2007
A Note on Middle Knowledge and Berkeleian Philosophy of Science
A thought occurred to me just now as I was reading the end of Sydney Shoemaker's "Causality and Properties" and thinking, as usual, of a Berkeleian response. What, we ask, are the truth-conditions or truth-makers for statements about natural laws and causality? Shoemaker has a story about properties being defined in terms of dispositions to act a certain way in the presence of certain other properties, and he thinks we can flesh out these statements in this way. For Berkeley, of course, the properties of physical objects can have no causal efficacy. Instead, Berkeley takes these statements to be simple...
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March 10, 2007
Laissez-faire (the game) Version 2
Update (6/2/07): Three minor changes: (1) the cost of the Home Maintenance Co. has been increased to $500. (2) A provision has been made (see under "Taking a Turn" and "Jail") to ensure that players going out do not gift their properties to other players to alter the course of the game. (3) Changes have been made to the selection order at the beginning of the (not yet play-tested) zero sum variant in the hope of increasing the fairness of the initial selection of properties. Also some clarifications have been made. I am considering removing the Petroleum Distribution Co., but...
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February 24, 2007
Foreknowledge, Free Will, and the Grandfather Paradox
Compatibilism is belief in actions that are both free and determined. Usually, one hears such phrases as "what I will to do, I must do" (I think Hume phrases it something like this) or "I am free to act according to my nature." The idea is that human beings have determinate natures and they act as their natures determine. They are free because nothing outside determines their actions. Theories that posit a more robust freedom of the will are called "libertarian" (no relation to the political theory referred to in my tagline). Usually one hears phrases like "I am free...
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February 21, 2007
New Philosophers' Carnival Up!
The latest
Philosophers' Carnival is now
up at
This is the Name of This Blog (don't you just love analytic philosophy humor?) with a link to my
two posts on the nature of love.
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February 14, 2007
What Is Love? Part 2: Types of Love
In
part 1 of this series, I outlined a theory of love according to which love is defined as "a deeply internalized belief in the intrinsic value of the beloved." I indicated in that post that it was possible to differentiate between types of love along two dimensions: the reason for the belief, and the sorts of actions the lover takes or desires to take as a result. This post will discuss the traditional divisions of love and how the theory accounts for them along these two dimensions. The philosophical literature on love...
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February 12, 2007
What Is Love? Part 1: The Theory
In honor of Valentine's Day, I would like to present today a philosophical theory of love ... This first post will give my theory of love in outline, and a second post will discuss the different types of love in light of this theory. The theory that I hold to is this: Love is a deeply internalized belief in the intrinsic value of the beloved. I believe that this brief definition is able to take account of essentially all of the important facts about love (though I don't have any pretensions about actually listing all of the important facts about love in a single blog post, or even about knowing them all!). Let's take it apart ...
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February 7, 2007
Quote of the Day: A Puzzle About Infinity
The following is from William Lane Craig's
"The Existence of God and the Beginning of the Universe". It is part of the defense of premise 2.11 of his version of the
kalam cosmological argument, which says that "an actual infinite cannot exist:" Perhaps the best way to bring home the truth of (2.11) is by means of an illustration. Let me use one of my favorites, Hilbert's Hotel, a product of the mind of the great German mathematician, David Hilbert. Let us imagine a hotel with a finite number of rooms. Suppose, furthermore, that
all the rooms are full. When a new guest arrives asking for a room, the proprietor apologizes, "Sorry, all the rooms are full." But now let us imagine a hotel with an infinite number of rooms and suppose once more that all the rooms are full...
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February 3, 2007
No Such Thing as an Ontological Free Lunch
In D.M. Armstrong's book
Universals: an Opinionated Introduction, he discusses the pros and cons of a number of theories of the metaphysics of properties. Chapter three deals with "resemblance nominalism." According to resemblance nominalism, properties can be accounted for in terms of degrees of resemblance between the various objects having the property. So, for instance, on object is red if and only if it resembles some paradigmatic red objects. This theory is plagued by the "Resemblance Regress." Armstrong quotes Bertrand Russells' version as the "classical exposition" of the difficulty (p. 53): If we wish to avoid the universals...
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January 27, 2007
Scripture and Tradition in Protestantism
At the new blog Metaphysical Frameworks, Johnny-Dee (also of Fides Quaerens Intellectum fame) discusses the meaning of sola scriptura in its application to the practical methodology of Protestant theology. His suggestion is that "protestants consider the Bible to be like the Constitution, and the theological tradition to be like legal precedents from the Supreme Court." In other words, the determinations made by previous generations of Christians as to the teaching of Scripture are to be given great weight and not overturned lightly, but, ultimately, they are interpretations of Scripture and it is Scripture that is ultimately authoritative. Therefore, as much...
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January 23, 2007
What is "Trope Theory" Supposed to Explain?
I'm taking a graduate seminar in metaphysics this semester and, for the first part of the course, we are focusing on the metaphysics of properties. One account of properties is known as "trope theory". Tropes are often spoken of, rather sloppily (it doesn't seem to be possible to speak of tropes without being sloppy - a point I take to be significant to the epistemological problem we are about to discuss), as "property instances." The reason this is sloppy is that the point of trope theory is to get rid of universals (Platonic forms or their equivalents in other small-p...
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January 17, 2007
Quote of the Day
Philosophy of religion, I believe, is best viewed as a process of critical dialog... Such a critical dialog is risky. Probably everyone has heard a story of a student in a strict religious environment who loses his faith as a result of the critical challenges hurled at him at a university. But there is something unhealthy and even dishonest about a faith which hides from such a challenge. Can one really believe in God wholeheartedly and at the same time assert that one can only continue to believe by refusing to consider the evidence against one's belief? Such a "belief"...
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January 8, 2007
January 4, 2007
Why Idealism?
I talk a lot about Berkeley on this blog, and it has probably become clear to most regular readers that I am quite sympathetic to his position. There are a number of reasons for holding to various forms of idealism, and I have already discussed the chain of inferences which leads Berkeley to his theory. Important also is Berkeley's critique of matter, which proceeds by collapsing Locke's distinction between primary and secondary qualities (this collapse is almost universally viewed as successful by later philosophers), then applying Locke's arguments that secondary qualities are not actually in the objects to all perceived...
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January 1, 2007
Plato on Homosexuality
A month or so ago, I published a post which has been rather popular on
Christianity and Homosexuality. In it, I discussed Paul's statements on homosexuality in contrast to the "received view" in Greco-Roman "polite society." I referred then to Plato's
Symposium and
Phaedrus, early and middle dialogs, respectively, which contain useful information on the practice of pedaresty in classical Athens. (If you are interested in interpreting Paul, it is important to note that classical Athens is some 400 years earlier...
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Quote of the Day
"For when two things are raised by one and the same exertion, the lesser quantity will invariably yield more readily and the greater (which offers more resistance) less readily, to the force applied." - Plato (tr. Donald J. Zeyl),
Timaeus 63c
So what you're saying is that an object's acceleration is directly proportional the force applied and inversely proportional to its mass. Didn't some
other guy get famous for saying that? Hmm...
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December 31, 2006
On Moore's Alleged Refutation of Idealism
I've just finished reading G.E. Moore's paper, "The Refutation of Idealism." The paper was originally published in Mind in October 1903 and reprinted in Moore's Philosophical Studies in 1922, but I've got the version reprinted again in Colin Turbayne's edition of Berkeley's Principles with critical essays, and I'll be citing page numbers from there. Moore's target in the essay is not Berkeley directly (it is, of course, Berkeley in whom I am most interested here), but what he calls "modern Idealism." The modern Idealism described by Moore seems to be a sort of immaterialist panpsychism; that is, Moore claims that...
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December 29, 2006
Laissez-faire (The Game)
I received for Christmas this year a copy of the game
Anti-Monopoly. The game has an interesting premise. Half of the players are "monopolists" who play according to rules similar to the original Monopoly, and the other half are "competitors" who must charge "fair" rents and obey laws and so forth. The competitors make up for their lower rents by being able to build houses without controlling a monopoly. If you are detecting a slight socialist bias here, you are right; the rulebook contains questionable and irrelevant interjections like "monopolists will destroy competitors in the absence of anti-monopoly laws." However...
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December 22, 2006
My Five Favorite Philosophers
Recently, while I was busy with finals,
Clarke at Mormon Metaphysics and
Johnny-Dee at Fides Quarens Intellectum posted lists of their favorite philosophers. I thought that today I would do the same. I won't get fancy with pictures and stuff, because that's not my style (as you can plainly see if you are looking at this page), but I do have a list, roughly in order...
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Philosophical Language in Hebrews 11:1
Over at
Better Bibles Blog, Wayne Leman is discussing the
difficulties involved in producting coherent English from Hebrews 11:1. I want here to produce some considerations on the use of a couple of unusual (in the NT) words in this verse that will hopefully help us to produce a better translation of the word. Wayne made it clear that his post was primarily about the coherence of the English. However, I think part of the reason we have difficulty rendering this verse in English is that we're not totally clear on what we are trying to communicate...
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Greek
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Historical Thinkers
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Metaphysics
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Pauline Epistles
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Philosophy
,
Plato
,
Theology
,
Translation
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November 30, 2006
Christianity and Homosexuality
In the very first
Carnival of Citizens, there is a post at
HeartFulls (a blog with which I was not previously familiar) in which the author wants to know
how Christians deal with homosexuality. She seems to be particularly concerned with the question of gay marriage (which is presumably why this post was included in the Carnival of Citizens). She cites a few Scripture passages that are commonly used in arguments, but doesn't present a clear picture of how and why these arguments cause Christians to hold the positions they do (presumably, she doesn't know quite how these passages are interpreted, which is why this is part of her "I want to know" series). In this post, I will try to explain how these verses are interpreted, and how they should influence Christians' actions, especially in the political realm...
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November 28, 2006
US Mint Out to Get the Liberty Dollar?
It seems, over the last few months, that the U.S. Mint has suddenly been out to get the Liberty Dollar. This after years of investigations by the Secret Service and others which concluded that there was nothing criminal about it whatsoever. In the latest Liberty Dollar newsletter, which will be available on their web-site shortly, we read that "'threatening' letters have been received via certified mail by all the [regional currency officers] and [monetary architect Bernard von NotHaus] from Daniel P. Shaver, chief counsel for the US Mint." Also, NORFED, the organization behind the Liberty Dollar, has had their bank...
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November 15, 2006
On Synergism
Gerald has a piece on
Augustine and the synergism/monergism distinction up at
Iustificare. Gerald believes that the real question is not about synergism vs. monergism, but rather about the resistability of grace. I think he is probably right about this, but I question his definition of synergism, since synergism is
working together, but he seems to interpret it as simple concurrence. If I want God to do something, but have no power in myself to make it happen, it's not clear that this is synergism. However, Jesus does say "this is the work of God: that you believe in the One He has sent" (John 6:29). So let's suppose that believing or willing is a "work" (
ergon) for the purpose of synergism. I have two points to make...