As part of my ongoing research for my book project on Open Theism (under contract with Cambridge Univ. Press), I’ve recently begun reading Kirk MacGregor’s latest book, Molinist Philosophical and Theological Ventures (2022). I’m looking at the book because he addresses some aspects of an anti-Molinist argument that I’ve been developing over the past few… Read More »
This is part 5 of my ongoing series on Patrick Todd’s recently published book The Open Future: Why Future Contingents are All False (Oxford, 2021). (Previous installments: part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4.) Chapter 5 is a relatively short chapter that initially focuses on how to understand divine omniscience in relation to… Read More »
In my previous post on Ch. 2 of Patrick Todd’s book The Open Future (Oxford 2021), I criticized Todd for confusing supervaluationism with the view defended by Elizabeth Barnes and Ross Cameron in two influential papers. In this post I want to look more closely at the view of Barnes and Cameron (hereafter B&C). For ease of… Read More »
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 »
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 »
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 »
This post continues a series on issues related to truth. In previous posts I have looked at (a) the correspondence theory of truth and its relation to truthmaking, (b) disquotation principles, and (c) the conflict between correspondence and disquotation principles, to the detriment of the latter. In this post I want to look at a distinction… Read More »
In my previous two posts I have discussed the correspondence theory of truth and disquotation principles. In this post I’m going to use the former to argue against the latter. More specifically, I’m going to argue that the “if and only if” of the disquotation principles should be merely an “only if”. In other words, instead… Read More »