The future is ‘alethically’ open at time T with respect to possible state of affairs X and future time T* > T if and only if neither “X will obtain at T*” nor “X will not obtain at T*” is true at T. I believe that the future is alethically open with respect to future… Read More: A Recent Objection to the Alethic Openness of the Future »
I’ve been reflecting a bit about the following analogy proposed by Enigman: Given someone who knows that she can move freely anywhere within an infinitely dimensional space, does she know that she has complete freedom of motion? The problem is that such a space is isomorphic to a hyperspace containing such a space as a… Read More: Could God Infallibly Know that He Is Omniscient? »
Vlastimil Vohánka send me an email recently asking for my thoughts on the following reconstruction of an argument recently proposed by Quentin Smith. 1. Necessarily, global moral realism is true (everything, or rather, every physical entity, has a positive amount of value). Premise2. Necessarily, aggregative value theory is true (each physical location has a finite… Read More: Does Moral Realism and Infinite Spacetime Entail Atheism? »
As I note in a comment on my previous post, I have a strong intuition that there should be some sort of systematic connection between assertibility-conditions and truth-conditions. The source of that intuition, I think, stems from the Principle of Charity, which states that, so long as it is contextually plausible to do so, one… Read More: Assertibility and Meaning (Take 2) »
Thesis: Whatever anyone must believe in order rationally to assert a proposition p is part of the meaning of p. Obvious case: One cannot rationally assert p unless one believes that p. If the thesis is right, then it provides a test for whether a given proposition q is part of the meaning of p.… Read More: Assertibility and Meaning »
I’v just read an interesting paper on Enigman’s website entitled “Omniscience and the Odyssey Theodicy”. At one point in the paper, he employs Patrick Grim’s well-known Cantorian argument against omniscience to argue for open theism over against an essentially epistemically static (EES) deity (my term, not his). The argument is intriguing. According to set theory,… Read More: A Cantorian Argument for Open Theism? »
This is an insightful interview with author and sociologist Tom Wolfe. He discusses a variety of topics including political correctness, coed dorms, and feminism. The general theme is that many people and institutions today are too concerned with ephemeral goods like social status, and for the sake of them sacrifice timeless goods like courage, temperance,… Read More: Tom Wolfe on Political Correctness »
In philosophical discussions, and especially in philosophy of religion, the term “incompatibilism” comes up in wide variety of contexts. I’ve discerned five different types of incompatibilism. Moral incompatibilism: The thesis that human moral responsibility is incompatible with thoroughgoing causal determinism. Ontic incompatibilism: The thesis that foreexistence is incompatible with future contingency. More precisely, the thesis… Read More: Versions of Incompatibilism »
During my year at Notre Dame’s Center for Philosophy of Religion, I’m going to be working on a book-length research project on open theism, a relatively new proposal for understanding divine providence that has gotten a lot of discussion over the last 15 years, especially in philosophy of religion and evangelical theology circles. Roughly stated,… Read More: Open Theism and the Test for a Prophet »
My family and I are now living in South Bend, Indiana. We survived the move well enough, though unfortunately some of our furniture didn’t. (The movers wrecked the baby’s crib, broke all four of our floor lamps, and lost a box containing three of wall pictures. Next time we go U-Haul.) Anyway, my first blog… Read More: Can There Be a Self-Mover? Aquinas on Act and Potency »