I find the following argument persuasive: I have an intrinsically first-person awareness of myself as a self, i.e., as a center of first-person awareness. All purely physical phenomena can be wholly understood in strictly third-person terms. The self qua self (first-person qua first-person) cannot be wholly understood in non-self (third-person) terms. Therefore, I am not… Read More »
Last year I was going through a real dry spell – it seemed like I couldn’t get anything published. So far this year, however, things have gone pretty well. I’ve had three papers accepted at three different journals: Fumerton’s Principle of Inferential Justification, Skepticism, and the Nature of Inference (forthcoming in Journal of Philosophical Research)… Read More »
A few months back during one of the presidential primary debates someone asked the nominees “Do you believe in evolution?” Some answered ‘yes’ and some answered ‘no’, but frankly, both answers are misguided. The problem is that the term ‘evolution’ is multiply ambiguous, a fact which has resulted in massive amounts of confusion in discussions… Read More »
There’s an interesting post at Uncommon Descent that raises a very good question for the biological debate over intelligent design. For those who don’t know, biological intelligent design (BID) is the view that the combination of random mutations + natural selection + deep time is not sufficient to account for the existence of life on… Read More »
This post is a somewhat belated reply to Ian’s last comment on this post. He and I have different theories of time – he defends the ‘static block’ view, whereas I am a presentist. As part and parcel of that larger debate we have been arguing about “tensed facts”. As a presentist, I hold that… Read More »
I say that God cannot have infallible foreknowledge of creaturely libertarian free choices. By ‘infallible’ I mean the impossibility of error. By ‘foreknowledge’ I mean knowledge of an event that is temporally prior to that event. Thus, “S foreknows that event E will occur” means that at some time t S knows that E will… Read More »
One of Ian’s comments on an earlier post of mine got me thinking about the distinction between theoretical elimination and theoretical reduction. This is a familiar distinction in the philosophy of mind, but it comes up in lots of different contexts. In general, eliminativism (E) and reductionism (R) are reactions to a thesis (T) to… Read More »
Browsing around the Web I recently came across this post at Fides Quaerens Intellectum and thought I would put together a summary of my current philosophical outlook. Metaphysics Trinitarian theism – God exists and is essentially tri-personal. A-theory of time – There is an objective ‘now’. The totality of reality is non-constant. Presentism – Whatever… Read More »
I am an A-theorist with respect to the metaphysics of time. An A-theorist is one who believes that there is an objective ‘now’ or, what amounts to the same thing, that the totality of reality undergoes change. The opposite of the A-theory of time is called the B-theory. According to the B-theory, reality is constant… Read More »
In response to an earlier post of mine, Ian Spencer has continued to press me to clarify and defend an argument I make in a recent paper to the effect that unqualified claims about the future (i.e., ones which say that something “will” or “will not” happen) normally carry a high degree of “causal force”… Read More »