February 2006 Archives

THE ENLIGHTENMENT PROJECT, REVISITED

May 18-20, 2006
Houghton College

Houghton, New York

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Robert Audi, Professor of Philosophy and David E. Gallo Professor of Business Ethics

Conference Dates: September 21-22, 2006
Location: Saint Louis University
Submission Deadline: May 22, 2006

The graduate students and faculty of the department of philosophy at Saint Louis University invite papers by all graduate students in any area relevant to the conference theme. We will consider papers from a broad range of topics including: evidentialism, reformed epistemology, the relationship between religion and science, natural theology, the possibility and prospects of philosophical theology, and the relationship between faith and reason.

Papers submitted should (i) be no more than 3000 words (or 30 minutes reading time), (ii) include a separate title page containing the author’s name, institution affiliation, address, phone number, and email address, and a one paragraph abstract and (iii) be prepared for blind review.

The paper should be submitted in either of the two following forms:
(1) By mail, with two printed copies per submission and a disk copy (in either Word, RTF or PDF format).
(2) By electronic submission, as an attachment to an e-mail (in either Word, RTF or PDF format).

Send papers to:
Saint Louis University Graduate Student Conference
Aaron Cobb
Saint Louis University Philosophy Department
Saint Louis University
3800 Lindell Blvd., Humanities 130
Saint Louis, MO 63108

For further information or for electronic submissions, please e-mail:
cobbad@slu.edu

Open theism has been much-discussed in philosophy of religion and theology circles since the 1995 publication of Pinnock, et al.'s The Openness of God. But in many ways I find that the view is still poorly understood. Critics frequently fail to appreciate that there are several importantly different versions of open theism.

First, we need a working definition of open theism. The core thesis of open theism is that the future is now, in some respects, epistemically open for God. Let's call this the epistemic thesis (ET). In general, a proposition P is 'epistemically open' for subject S at time T iff nothing that S knows at T suffices to guarantee either that P or that not-P. Thus, the future is epistemically open for God at T with respect to possible future state of affairs X iff for some future time T* neither "X will obtain at T*" nor "X will not obtain at T*" is known by God at T. Whatever is not epistemically open for God is epistemically settled.

Alvin Plantinga challenges Karl Giberson's claim that intelligent design explanations are tautological.

Matt Donnelly, Web editor at Science & Theology News, interviews Richard Swinburne on Science and the soul.

Review of Duncan Forrester's Apocalypse Now? and Colin Morris's Things Shaken, Things Unshaken, both reflections on faith in a time of terror.

Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic. gives an unsympathetic review of Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell:Religion as a Natural Phenomenon.

Lately I've been searching high and low for a copy of Peter van Inwagen's The Possibility of Resurrection and Other Essays in Christian Apologetics. Unfortunately the book is out of print which means it is a little hard to come by. So far I've found that the best used price was $58 and new it runs as high as $95. My searches did turn up a copy online. While not as handy as having your own you can read the entire book for free on Questia.

I've been thinking about Molinism of late and I'm puzzled by the claim that the counterfactuals of creaturely freedom (CCFs) are prevolitional (logically prior to God's creative activity), contingent, and within my power. Consider the claim that the CCFs are contingent. What is the relation between the CCFs re S's actions and S's individual essence? Not entailment. If individual essences are necessary (and I think they are) and if S's individual essence strictly entails certain CCFs then the CCFs are necessary. Suppose, instead, that the CCFs regarding S are made true by certain actions S performs. This conflicts with the prevolitionality condition. The CCFs are true prior to God's creative activity; ergo prior to S being on the scene. I don't see how S's actions can be the truth-makers for CCFs given that they are logically prior to God's creative activity. Truth-makers need to exist in order to make true something but I don't exist prior to God's creative activity; so my actions aren't the truth-makers for CCFs about me. Another option is to view the CCFs as brute. They are true in a similar way that possibility claims are true. Problem: possibility claims are necessary, at least for an S5er like myself. So the CCFs need to be brute and contingent. Problem: the CCFs should have some relation to (i) my individual essence and (ii) my choices. If they are entirely brute then the truth of the CCFs is not explicable in terms of (i) or (ii), in which case I begin to lose the intuition that they are within my power.

I was reading Peter van Inwagen's essay "I Look for the Resurrection of the Dead and the Life of the World to Come" since I got stuck in vortex of airline incompetence at O'Hare airport on my way from Rochester to the Pacific SCP in San Diego. My only solace in having to spend 15 hours in an airport instead of hanging out with my friends was that PVI himself was diverted by the same SNAFU.

At any rate, he there discusses his intriguing early essay "The Possibility of the Resurrection" (which, in spite of the title has been misconstrued in its purpose). He says

My goal in "The Possibility of Resurrection," was to argue for the metaphysical possibility of the Resurrection of the Dead. My method was to tell a story, a story I hoped my readers would grant was a metaphysically possible story.

He had said the same thing in the postscript to the version collected in the volume by the same title. This caught my attention more than the first time I read the essay because in Ed Wierenga's seminar this week we discussed the logical or quasi-logical relationship between conceivability and possibility in connection with a Humean argument for the impossibility of necessary existents. I recalled PVI's "modal skepticism" expressed briefly in the introduction to Part One of God Knowledge and Mystery and then later more thoroughly in "Modal Epistemology" in Ontology, Identity, and Modality.

That the stated method could achieve the stated end--that the telling of a story could establish something as possible--suggests an answer to Yablo's question "Is Conceivability a Guide to Possibility?" that, interestingly, is parallel to PVI's own answer to the Special Composition Question.

In _Material Beings_ PVI wends his way between the Scylla and Charibdis of the two extreme answers--nihilism and universalism. Likewise, though most philosophers either say that conceivability entails (or in every case prima facie justifies) possibility or that the two bear no logical relation one to another, PVI says that sometimes conceivability supports possibility and sometimes it does not.

I'm worried, though, about the specific criterion he suggests: "ordinary propositions about everyday matters," for the Resurrection Story seems anything but quotidian. I'll put the rest beneath the fold.

Hi everyone,

I'm honored to be able to join the blog team here at Prosblogion. Allow me briefly to introduce myself:

My name is Alan Rhoda. I have a Ph.D. in philosophy (2004) from Fordham University. While there, I studied with both Brian Leftow and Brian Davies, names I presume are familiar to many of you. I wrote my dissertation on the problem of induction under the direction of John Greco. Right now I'm a Visiting Assistant Professor at UNLV, where I expect to be for at least the next year. Still looking for that elusive tenure-track job.

My areas of specialization are, broadly speaking, epistemology and metaphysics, with areas of concentration in philosophy of religion, philosophy of science, and philosophical logic. Particular interests of mine include the philosophy of time, the problem of divine foreknowledge/providence and free will, skepticism, conditionals, and the work of Charles Peirce.

Theologically speaking, I'm a Christian of a broadly Protestant, broadly Arminian stripe. No close denominational affiliations, but my wife Heather and I do regularly attend a Foursquare church here in Las Vegas.

Feel free to visit my website or my personal blog. I look forward to interacting with all of you. Thanks for the invitation to join your team.

Blessings,
Alan

Metaphysics, Ethics, and Politics in the Thomistic and Analytic Traditions

August 7 - 11, 2006
On the campus of Princeton University, Princeton, NJ

Metaphysics, Ethics, and Politics in the Thomistic and Analytic Traditions is a summer graduate seminar devoted to promoting intellectual exchange between the philosophical tradition inspired by Thomas Aquinas, broadly understood, and contemporary analytic philosophy. This seminar hopes to further this engagement between traditions by offering faculty and graduate students a forum for focused study and discussion of Thomism, as well as providing a convivial environment that initiates long-term scholarly collaboration. The topics addressed by the seminar will range broadly from metaphysics to legal and political theory, encouraging consideration of how the various problems and subfields of philosophy intertwine. Perhaps most importantly, the seminar aims to be more than a conventional academic conference by contributing in some small way to a renewal of contemporary philosophical practice; it is hoped that “philosophy” can again be understood as a way of life—an ideal which includes but transcends argumentation.

Seminar Faculty

• Nicholas Rescher is University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh where he is also Chairman of the Center for Philosophy of Science.
  
• Alexander Pruss is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University.
  
• Gabriele De Anna is Permanent Researcher in philosophy at the University of Udine, Italy, and is currently a fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh.
  
• Mark C. Murphy is Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University.
  
• Michael Gorman is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America.

Applications and more information at: http://www.winst.org/philosophy.htm

Congratulations to fellow contributor Ted Poston! Ted has accepted a tenure-track offer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of South Alabama.

If, like me, your issue of F&P still hasn't arrived, or you are not a subscriber, here is the link to William Craig's "Does the Problem of Material Constitution Illuminate The Doctrine Of The Trinity?" a response to and Brower's "Material Constitution and the Trinity".

In my previous two posts I sketched Rea and Brower's account of numerical sameness without identity as a possible way of explaining the Trinity and pushed some on the metaphysics of numerical sameness without identity. In this post I want to grant that such a metaphysic is acceptable and how their proposed solution holds up.

In giving an explanation of the Trinity the traditional Christian must negotiate difficult waters so as not to fall into affirming a heresy while formulating an account that is both understandable and believable. One powerful route that is open to the traditional Christian would be to formulate a strong analogy for understanding the Trinity. While an argument from analogy does not entail that the doctrine of the Trinity is true, good analogies have strong explanatory power. No doubt anyone who has sought an explanation of the doctrine of the Trinity has been introduced to any number of analogies such as the clover analogy, the water analogy, or the egg analogy. The problem for the traditional Christian is that most, if not all, analogies to date fail in that they tended to lead to a heretical view.

It occurred to me that some readers may not be overly familiar with what a thorny problem the traditional doctrine of the Trinity can be for the philosopher. My favorite quote on the problem comes from Bernard Lonergan, a preeminent Canadian philosopher, theologian and economist, who is reported to have once said "The Trinity is a matter of five notions or properties, four relations, three persons, two processions, one substance or nature, and no understanding." Hopefully what follows will help clarify the problem.

Given my recent post on the reception of philosophy of religion within the discipline I was stuck by William Vallicella's quote of Daniel Dennett quoting Nelson Pike

If you are in a company of people of mixed occupations, and somebody asks what you do, and you say you are a college professor, a glazed look comes into his eye. If you are in a company of professors from various departments, and somebody asks what is your field, and you say philosophy, a glazed look comes into the eye. If you are at a conference of philosophers, and somebody asks what you are working on, and you say philosophy of religion . . . [Quoted in D. Dennett, Breaking the Spell, 2006, p. 33]

Vallicella's recent post Problems with Dennett's Definition of Religion picks up with a problem on page nine of Dennett's Breaking the Spell. If Bill continues to read Dennett's latest offering (I can't imagne he won't) we can expect he will have much more to say.

You can now add a button for Prosblogion to your Google Toolbar. Simply click on the "Add to Google Toolbar" link found in the upper right hand portion of this page. The button will allow you to search this site and provide a feed of our headlines.

In my previous post I sketched Michael Rea and Jeffrey Brower's proposal for understanding the doctrine of the Trinity. In this post I want to consider some ways a critic might push on their proposal. In considering the case presented by Rea and Brower there appear to be at least two ways for the critic to proceed. One route would be to push against the account of numerical sameness without identity as a solution to the problem of material constitution. The second route would be to show that the analogy between the proposed solution and the doctrine of the Trinity is weak. In what follows I will make some remarks in regards to the former route.

Father George V. Coyne, director of the Vatican Observatory, says the theory of Intelligent Design diminishes God into "an engineer who designs systems rather than a lover."

Michael Ruse interview on Intelligent Design and Evolution in the classroom.

Daniel Dennett on explaining religion as a natural rather than supernatural phenomenon.

Reviews of Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by philosopher Troy Jollimore and biologist Rupert Sheldrake.

This post, and one to follow, address two recent papers by Michael Rea and Jeffery Brower "Understanding the Trinity" and "Material Constitution and the Trinity". I've been told that there is already a response to the Material Constitution paper in the most recent volume of F&P. Of course I still haven't received my copy of F&P. So, hopefully my remarks won't overlap too much with those in the journal, and if they do I beg your indulgence. What follows in this post is simply a rough sketch of Rea and Brower's position. I'll put up a follow-up post tomorrow with what I take to be some problems for their account.

In a couple of recent papers Rea and Brower suggest that a "much neglected solution" to the problem of material constitution has promise for explaining the doctrine of the Trinity. That much neglected account is Aristotle's account of Accidental Sameness, which is an attempt to solve the problem of material constitution. One particular problem of material constitution arises whenever it appears that an object X and an object Y share all of the same parts and yet have different modal properties. Arguably the best contemporary puzzles that illustrate the problem material constitution are David Wiggins cellulous/tree puzzle and Allan Gibbard's Lumpl/Goliath puzzle. In the case of Lumpl/Goliath the puzzle is that we are supposed to be inclined to think that the bronze of Goliath is a lump of bronze and a bronze statue. What initially seems like an implausible claim becomes clearer if we consider that the two things have identical material parts, yet they are not identical because they manifest different modal properties. That is to say that the lump is not identical with the statue because the statue but not the lump would be destroyed if the statue were melted down and recast into a different shape. It seems evident from the characterization of this particular problem of material constitution that a plausible solution could turn the problem cases into powerful analogies for the Trinity. The authors also rightly note that if such an analogy can be made it has the advantage of being "motivated by considerations independent of the problem of the Trinity."

I just ran across John Cottingham's review of Adriaan Peperzak's Philosophy between Faith and Theology.

In this stimulating series of essays, Adriaan Theodoor Peperzak defends the need for "a kind of learning that goes beyond academic professionalism", and reflects on how one might re-establish the links between philosophy and the "central concern" philosophers once shared with "sages, theologians and masters of spirituality", for whom the driving force was a "profound passion for succeeding in the art of living humanly".

But can philosophy recover a spiritual dimension? Indeed, should it? The predominant criteria and goals of academic work (even among those Catholic scholars whom Peperzak has in mind in his subtitle) are largely those of the secular enlightened university, and philosophy's self-conception is strongly conditioned by this ethos.

The small revival in addressing "meaning of life" type questions raises some interesting questions for discussion. Could one go further and say that there is a hunger for philosophers to address these grand traditional questions? Do we bear any kind of public responsibility to try to answer these questions? Are philosophers in a good position to answer these kinds of questions? Are philosophers of religion in a unique position to answer these kinds of questions? I have my own answers, but I'd like to see what others have to say.

Just discovered that the contributed papers for the 2006 Society of Christian Philosophers Pacific Regional Meeting have been posted at the conference web site. Unfortunately this does not include Peter van Inwagen's "I Look for the Resurrection of the Dead and the Life of the World to Come."

This past year turned out to be an excellent year for fans of Maimonides scholarship. 2005 saw the publication of Kenneth Seeskin's Maimonides on the Origin of the World and The Cambridge Companion to Maimonides. This year looks like it could match '05 with Menachem Kellner's forthcoming Maimonides: Metaphysics, Metaphor, Morality, Joel Kraemer's Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization's Greatest Minds, and possibly Daniel Frank's contribution to the OUP's Great Medieval Thinkers Series, Moses Maimonides. NDPR recently posted Frank's insightful review of Seeskin's Maimonides on the Origin of the World. The review is worth a read just for Frank's remarks on the divide between Straussian and straight forward approaches to Maimonides scholarship.

If you've never taken the time to read the Guide of the Perplexed let me encourage you to do so. I read the Guide over winter break and found it both insightful, and remarkably modern. The still serviceable Friedländer translation is in the public domain now, and it can be downloaded in multiple digital formats for free. Beware though. Maimonides does engage in a bit of psychological warfare in his introduction. His invocation of the principle of interpretive charity in the introduction places the heaviest burden on the reader that I've seen to date. He enjoins the reader to attend not simply to his propositions, but to every word choice throughout the text. Maimonides claims that to do otherwise would be to lose the benefit of the text, and if it leads to an objection then you do injury to Maimonides himself. He even demands that the reader not expound on or explain the text to another, especially if one has an objection. After all if you think you've found an inconsistency or contradiction, and it isn't simply an apparent one, then you probably are not one of the initiated. That is you are not one of the educated, philosophically sophisticated, set.

This article is by Robert Roberts of Baylor. It considers religious emotions largely but not exclusively within the context of what would commonly be called "religious experience".