At least since Alvin Plantinga’s and David Lewis’s work on modal metaphysics, philosophers have frequently appealed to the notion of counterfactual dependence to analyze concepts like causation and grounding. David Lewis also uses the concept to understand the asymmetry of time: The way the future is depends counterfactually on the way the present is. If… Read More »
This is part 2 of my ongoing series on Patrick Todd’s recently published book The Open Future: Why Future Contingents are All False (Oxford, 2021). You can find part 1 here. In chapter 2, Todd compares and contrasts “three models of the undetermined future” and proposes a unified semantics for the future tense. I argue… Read More »
I’m slowly working my way through Patrick Todd’s recently published book The Open Future: Why Future Contingents are All False (Oxford, 2021). I say “slowly” because I’m juggling a few other projects at the moment and want to make sure that I give his book its proper due given the centrality of the topic to my… Read More »
I tackled this topic several years ago, but I think it’s time to revisit it again. I’m going to argue that truthmaker maximalism (TM)—the view that every truth is grounded in some reality that makes it true—should not be regarded as a particularly controversial thesis. It’s virtually a corollary of the correspondence theory of truth (CTT).… Read More »
In a previous post I presented the infamous grounding objection to Molinism. The problem stems from the fact that for Molinism God’s middle knowledge (MK) is supposed to be non-natural, i.e., not part of, entailed by, or grounded in God’s nature contingent, i.e., neither necessary nor impossible in the abstract metaphysical sense that I describe… Read More »
In my previous post, I discussed the grounding objection to Molinism and also briefly touched on another problem having to with divine aseity. In this post I want to try to cut to heart of the matter and show as simply and directly as I can that Molinism is necessarily false because it is internally… Read More »
This post has three parts: To begin, I will (§1) explain what Molinism is. I will then (§2) explain the infamous “grounding” objection to Molinism. I will argue that Molinism cannot give a positive answer to the grounding objection. The Molinist simply has to bite the bullet and admit a boatload of ungrounded contingent truths and/or… Read More »
In a recent post, I argued that God’s existence is not “logically” necessary but should instead be thought of as “metaphysically” necessary. I also argued there that nothing exists out of logical necessity on the grounds that an ontologically empty world (a null world) is a logically coherent possibility. I subsequently got into a Facebook… Read More »
If there’s a “poster child” of classical theism, it would have to be Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274 AD). By the end of only the third question in the Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas has concluded that God necessarily exists and is the absolutely simple and purely actual first, uncaused cause of the moment-by-moment being of everything else.… Read More »
All theists believe—or should believe—that God’s existence is necessary in a metaphysically robust sense of “necessary”. How, after all, could we unswervingly commit our lives and our futures to an ontologically fragile God, one who could—try as He might to avoid it—cease to exist? Or one who, because He simply got bored with eternity, commit deicide,… Read More »