Necessary Existence breaks ground on one of the deepest questions anyone ever asks: why is there anything? Pruss and Rasmussen present an original defence of the hypothesis that there is a necessarily existing being capable of providing an ultimate foundation for the existence of all things.

Alexander R. Pruss examines a large family of paradoxes to do with infinity - ranging from deterministic supertasks to infinite lotteries and decision theory. Having identified their common structure, Pruss considers at length how these paradoxes can be resolved by embracing causal finitism.

The Principle of Sufficient Reason says that all contingent facts must have explanation. In this 2006 volume, which was the first on the topic in the English language in nearly half a century, Alexander Pruss examines the substantive philosophical issues raised by the Principle Reason. Discussing various forms of the PSR and selected historical episodes, from Parmenides, Leibnez, and Hume, Pruss defends the claim that every true contingent proposition must have an explanation against major objections, including Hume's imaginability argument and (...) Peter van Inwagen's argument that the PSR entails modal fatalism. Pruss also provides a number of positive arguments for the PSR, based on considerations as different as the metaphysics of existence, counterfactuals and modality, negative explanations, and the everyday applicability of the PSR. Moreover, Pruss shows how the PSR would advance the discussion in a number of disparate fields, including meta-ethics and the philosophy of mathematics. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction The PSR Nonlocal CPs Toward a First Cause The Gap Problem Conclusions and Further Research References.

This important philosophical reflection on love and sexuality from a broadly Christian perspective is aimed at philosophers, theologians, and educated Christian readers. Alexander R. Pruss focuses on foundational questions on the nature of romantic love and on controversial questions in sexual ethics on the basis of the fundamental idea that romantic love pursues union of two persons as one body. _One Body_ begins with an account, inspired by St. Thomas Aquinas, of the general nature of love as constituted by components (...) of goodwill, appreciation, and unitiveness. Different forms of love, such as parental, collegial, filial, friendly, fraternal, or romantic, Pruss argues, differ primarily not in terms of goodwill or appreciation but in terms of the kind of union that is sought. Pruss examines romantic love as distinguished from other kinds of love by a focus on a particular kind of union, a deep union as one body achieved through the joint biological striving of the sort involved in reproduction. Taking the account of the union that romantic love seeks as a foundation, the book considers the nature of marriage and applies its account to controversial ethical questions, such as the connection between love, sex, and commitment and the moral issues involving contraception, same-sex activity, and reproductive technology. With philosophical rigor and sophistication, Pruss provides carefully argued answers to controversial questions in Christian sexual ethics. "This is a terrific—really quite extraordinary—work of scholarship. It is quite simply the best work on Christian sexual ethics that I have seen. It will become the text that anyone who ventures into the field will have to grapple with—a kind of touchstone. Moreover, it is filled with arguments with which even secular writers on sexual morality will have to engage and come to terms." —_Robert P. George, Princeton University __ "_One Body_ is an excellent piece of philosophical-theological reflection on the nature of sexuality and marriage. This book has the potential to become a standard go-to text for professors and students working on sex ethics issues, whether in philosophy or theology, both for the richness of its arguments, and the scope of its coverage of cases. " — Christopher Tollefsen, University of South Carolina_ "Alexander Pruss here develops sound and humane answers to the whole range of main questions about human sexual and reproductive choices. His principal argument for the key answers is very different from the one I have articulated over the past fifteen years. But his argumentation is at every point attractively direct, careful, energetic in framing and responding to objections, and admirably attentive to realities and the human goods at stake." —_John Finnis, University of Oxford _. (shrink)

The latter third of the 20th century has seen the philosophical defence of theism - many philosophers were caught off-guard because they assumed that metaphysics and theology had been dealt with. Moreover, the leaders of this renaissance were analytically-rooted philosophers. Upon examination however, it is clear that significant developments in philosophical theism historically have come upon the heels of breakthroughs in the core areas of philosophy concerning meaning, logic and scientific methodology - cornerstones of analytic philosophy. This volume attempts to (...) document this golden era of analytical theism. (shrink)

We will give a new cosmological argument for the existence of a being who, although not proved to be the absolutely perfect God of the great Medieval theists, also is capable of playing the role in the lives of working theists of a being that is a suitable object of worship, adoration, love, respect, and obedience. Unlike the absolutely perfect God, the God whose necessary existence is established by our argument will not be shown to essentially have the divine perfections (...) of omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence, and sovereignty. Furthermore, it is not even shown that he is contingently omnipotent and omniscient, just powerful and intelligent enough to be the supernatural designer-creator of the exceedingly complex and wondrous cosmos that in fact.. (shrink)

Regularity is the thesis that all contingent propositions should be assigned probabilities strictly between zero and one. I will prove on cardinality grounds that if the domain is large enough, a regular probability assignment is impossible, even if we expand the range of values that probabilities can take, including, for instance, hyperreal values, and significantly weaken the axioms of probability.

We show that infinitesimal probabilities are much too small for modeling the individual outcome of a countably infinite fair lottery.

The Principle of Sufficient Reason must be justified dialectically: by showing the disastrous consequences of denying it. We formulate a version of the Principle that is restricted to basic natural facts, which entails the obtaining of at least one supernatural fact. Denying this principle results in extreme empirical skepticism. We consider six current theories of empirical knowledge, showing that on each account we cannot know that we have empirical knowledge unless we all have a priori knowledge of the PSR. We (...) consider objections based on Neo-Humeanism and the essentiality of origins, and we consider the possibility that we have empirical knowledge without knowing it. (shrink)

An omnipotent being would be a being whose power was unlimited. The power of human beings is limited in two distinct ways: we are limited with respect to our freedom of will, and we are limited in our ability to execute what we have willed. These two distinct sources of limitation suggest a simple definition of omnipotence: an omnipotent being is one that has both perfect freedom of will and perfect efficacy of will. In this paper we further explicate this (...) definition and show that it escapes the standard objections to divine omnipotence. (shrink)

(2013). Incompatibilism proved. Canadian Journal of Philosophy. ???aop.label???

In this article, we develop and defend a new argument for animalism -- the thesis that we human persons are human animals. The argument takes this rough form: since our pets are animals, we are too. We’ll begin with remarks on animalism and its rivals, develop our main argument, and then defend it against a few replies.

An infinite lottery machine is used as a foil for testing the reach of inductive inference, since inferences concerning it require novel extensions of probability. Its use is defensible if there is some sense in which the lottery is physically possible, even if exotic physics is needed. I argue that exotic physics is needed and describe several proposals that fail and at least one that succeeds well enough.

Scoring rules measure the accuracy or epistemic utility of a credence assignment. A significant literature uses plausible conditions on scoring rules on finite sample spaces to argue for both probabilism—the doctrine that credences ought to satisfy the axioms of probabilism—and for the optimality of Bayesian update as a response to evidence. I prove a number of formal results regarding scoring rules on infinite sample spaces that impact the extension of these arguments to infinite sample spaces. A common condition in the (...) arguments for probabilism and Bayesian update is strict propriety: that according to each probabilistic credence, the expected accuracy of any other credence is worse. Much of the discussion needs to divide depending on whether we require finite or countable additivity of our probabilities. I show that in a number of natural infinite finitely additive cases, there simply do not exist strictly proper scoring rules, and the prospects for arguments for probabilism and Bayesian update are limited. In many natural infinite countably additive cases, on the other hand, there do exist strictly proper scoring rules that are continuous on the probabilities, and which support arguments for Bayesian update, but which do not support arguments for probabilism. There may be more hope for accuracy-based arguments if we drop the assumption that scores are extended-real-valued. I sketch a framework for scoring rules whose values are nets of extended reals, and show the existence of a strictly proper net-valued scoring rules in all infinite cases, both for f.a. and c.a. probabilities. These can be used in an argument for Bayesian update, but it is not at present known what is to be said about probabilism in this case. (shrink)

One of the problems that Bayesian regularity, the thesis that all contingent propositions should be given probabilities strictly between zero and one, faces is the possibility of random processes that randomly and uniformly choose a number between zero and one. According to classical probability theory, the probability that such a process picks a particular number in the range is zero, but of course any number in the range can indeed be picked. There is a solution to this particular problem on (...) the books: a measure that assigns the same infinitesimal probability to each number between zero and one. I will show that such a measure, while mathematically interesting, is pathological for use in confirmation theory, for the same reason that a measure that assigns an infinitesimal probability to each possible outcome in a countably infinite lottery is pathological. The pathology is that one can force someone to assign a probability within an infinitesimal of one to an unlikely event. (shrink)

Cantor proved that no set has a bijection between itself and its power set. This is widely taken to have shown that there infinitely many sizes of infinite sets. The argument depends on the princip...

          First an outline of the argument Assume that I once was a fetus. Who will deny this —surely a fetus was what I once was? Yet, though it is hard to deny, much of this paper will be work to bolster up this portion of the argument. For now assume this. But now if the right-to-life (understood as the right not to be deprived of life by human decision unless one (...) has deserved such deprivation through a crime that one has been.. (shrink)

I offer examples showing that, pace G. E. Moore, it is possible to assert ?Q and I don't believe that Q? sincerely, truly, and without any absurdity. The examples also refute the following principles: (a) justification to assert p entails justification to assert that one believes p (Gareth Evans); (b) the sincerity condition on assertion is that one believes what one says (John Searle); and (c) to assert (to someone) something that one believes to be false is to lie (Don (...) Fallis). (shrink)

A number of philosophers have attempted to solve the problem of null-probability possible events in Bayesian epistemology by proposing that there are infinitesimal probabilities. Hájek and Easwaran have argued that because there is no way to specify a particular hyperreal extension of the real numbers, solutions to the regularity problem involving infinitesimals, or at least hyperreal infinitesimals, involve an unsatisfactory ineffability or arbitrariness. The arguments depend on the alleged impossibility of picking out a particular hyperreal extension of the real numbers (...) and/or of a particular value within such an extension due to the use of the Axiom of Choice. However, it is false that the Axiom of Choice precludes a specification of a hyperreal extension—such an extension can indeed be specified. Moreover, for all we know, it is possible to explicitly specify particular infinitesimals within such an extension. Nonetheless, I prove that because any regular probability measure that has infinitesimal values can be replaced by one that has all the same intuitive features but other infinitesimal values, the heart of the arbitrariness objection remains. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Two Interrelated Problems Lewis's Solution Inductive Paradox Identity versus Counterpart Theory Platonism: The Main Realist Alternative to Lewis An Aristotelian Alternative Leibniz's Account A Combined Account.

New arguments against Bayesian regularity and an otherwise plausible domination principle are offered on the basis of rotational symmetry. The arguments against Bayesian regularity work in very general settings.

Our aim in this paper is to bring to light two sources of tension for Christian theists who endorse the principle of unrestricted composition, that necessarily, for any objects, the xs, there exists an object, y, such that the xs compose y. In Value, we argue that a composite object made of wholly valuable parts is at least as valuable as its most valuable part, and so the mereological sum of God and a wholly valuable part would be at least (...) as valuable as God; but Christian theism arguably demands that no concrete object other than God can be as valuable as God. And in Creation, we argue that the conjunction of theism and unrestricted composition, together with the claim that every concrete entity that is numerically distinct from God is created by God, implies that God is created by God. We conclude by examining the prospects of restricting the thesis of unrestricted composition to the domain of material or spatiotemporal objects as a way to sidestep the above arguments against the conjunction of Christian theism and unrestricted composition. (shrink)

Classical real-valued probabilities come at a philosophical cost: in many infinite situations, they assign the same probability value—namely, zero—to cases that are impossible as well as to cases that are possible. There are three non-classical approaches to probability that can avoid this drawback: full conditional probabilities, qualitative probabilities and hyperreal probabilities. These approaches have been criticized for failing to preserve intuitive symmetries that can be preserved by the classical probability framework, but there has not been a systematic study of the (...) conditions under which these symmetries can and cannot be preserved. This paper fills that gap by giving complete characterizations under which symmetries understood in a certain “strong” way can be preserved by these non-classical probabilities, as well as by offering some results to make it plausible that the strong notion of symmetry here is the right one. Philosophical implications are briefly discussed, but the main purpose of the paper is to offer technical results to help make further philosophical discussion more sophisticated. (shrink)

Assuming S₅, the main controversial premise in modal ontological arguments is the possibility premise, such as that possibly a maximally great being exists. I shall offer a new way of arguing that the possibility premise is probably true.

The classical principle of double effect offers permissibility conditions for actions foreseen to lead to evil outcomes. I shall argue that certain kinds of closeness cases, as well as general heuristic considerations about the order of explanation, lead us to replace the intensional concept of intention with the extensional concept of accomplishment in double effect.

Eugene Mills has recently argued that human organisms cannot begin to exist at fertilization because the evidence suggests that egg cells persist through fertilization and simply turn into zygotes. He offers two main arguments for this conclusion: that ‘fertilized egg’ commits no conceptual fallacy, and that on the face of it, it looks as though egg cells survive fertilization when the process is watched through a microscope. We refute these arguments and offer several reasons of our own to think that (...) egg cells do not survive fertilization, appealing to various forms of essentialism regarding persons, fission cases, and a detailed discussion of the biological facts relevant to fertilization and genetics. We conclude that it is plausible, therefore, that human organisms begin to exist at fertilization – or, at the very least, that there are grounds for thinking that they existed as zygotes which do not apply to the prior egg cells. While this does not entail that human persons begin to exist at this point, it nevertheless has considerable significance for this latter question. (shrink)

This paper argues that considerations about frequency-to-chance inferences make very plausible a localized version of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR). But a localized version isn’t enough and so we should accept a full, non-localized version of PSR.

Consider the following three-step dialectics. (1) Even if God (consistently) commanded torture of the innocent, it would still be wrong. Therefore Divine Command Metaethics (DCM) is false. (2) No: for it is impossible for God to command torture of the innocent. (3) Even if it is impossible, there is a non-trivially true per impossibile counterfactual that even if God (consistently) com­manded torture of the innocent, it would still be wrong, and this counterfac­tual is incompatible with DCM. I shall argue that (...) the last step of this dialectics is flawed because it would rule out every substantive metaethical theory. (shrink)

Plantinga’s Free Will Defense is an argument that, possibly, God cannot actualize a world containing significant creaturely free will and no wrongdoings. I will argue that if standard Molinism is true, there is a pair of worlds w1 and w2 each of which contains a significantly free creature who never chooses wrongly, and that are such that, necessarily, at least one of these worlds is a world that God can actualize.

The value-ladenness of computer algorithms is typically framed around issues of epistemic risk. In this article, I examine a deeper sense of value-ladenness: algorithmic methods are not only themselves value-laden but also introduce value into how we reason about their domain of application. I call this domain distortion. In particular, using insights from jurisprudence, I show that the use of recidivism risk assessment algorithms presupposes legal formalism and blurs the distinction between liability assessment and sentencing, which distorts how the domain (...) of criminal punishment is conceived and provides a distinctive avenue for values to enter the legal process. (shrink)

We show that there is a version of dualism—and even of substance dualism—on which (a) the physical is causally closed, (b) there is no systemic overdetermination, (c) mental states are not physical states, and yet (d) mental states have physical effects. This shows that commonly-made claims about dualism about causal closure are not quite correct. The theory offered can be seen as a version of Aquinas’s theory of sensory consciousness, where sensory consciousness is partly constituted by the soul’s informing of (...) the body and partly by the states of physical organs. (shrink)

According to David Lewis's extreme modal realism, every waythat a world could be is a way that some concretely existingphysical world really is. But if the worlds are physicalentities, then there should be a set of all worlds, whereasI show that in fact the collection of all possible worlds is nota set. The latter conclusion remains true even outside of theLewisian framework.

Gödel's ontological argument is a formal argument for a being defined in terms of the concept of a positive property. I shall defend several versions of Gödel's argument, using weaker premises than Anderson's (1990) version, and avoiding Oppy's (1996 and 2000) parody refutations.

The privation theory of evil was developed by St. Augustine largely as a response to the Metaphysical Problem of Evil: If all things that exist are God or come from God, how can there be evil? I begin by noting that the simple theory that all evil is a privation is subject to decisive counterexamples, and that a refined theory due to Avicenna and Aquinas requires an implausible “Goldilocks ontology”: bloated by including certain odd items like tokens of truth or (...) authorization, but not so bloated as to include privations. Instead, I shall argue that we can drop the privation theory of evil and still answer the Metaphysical Problem of Evil in the same spirit, by denying that evils really exist, albeit without insisting that they are privations. The result puts much less pressure on one’s ontology. (shrink)

Our paper ‘A new cosmological argument’ gave an argument for the existence of God making use of the weak Principle of Sufficient Reason (W-PSR) which states that for every proposition p, if p is true, then it is possible that there is an explanation for p. Recently, Graham Oppy, as well as Kevin Davey and Rob Clifton, have criticized the argument. We reply to these criticisms. The most interesting kind of criticism in both papers alleges that the W-PSR can be (...) justifiably denied by the atheist, and constitutes no improvement on the strong Principle of Sufficient Reason (S-PSR) which claims that every true proposition in fact has an explanation. The criticism is predicated on the fact that it can be shown that the W-PSR entails the S-PSR. We argue that the W-PSR's plausibility remains despite the criticisms. From this it can be seen to follow that the entailment relation between the W-PSR and the S-PSR gives one reason to believe the S-PSR. (shrink)

It is often loosely said that Ramsey The foundations of mathematics and other logical essays, Routledge and Kegan Paul, Abingdon, pp 156–198, 1931) and de Finetti Studies in subjective probability, Kreiger Publishing, Huntington, 1937) proved that if your credences are inconsistent, then you will be willing to accept a Dutch Book, a wager portfolio that is sure to result in a loss. Of course, their theorems are true, but the claim about acceptance of Dutch Books assumes a particular method of (...) calculating expected utilities given the inconsistent credences. I will argue that there are better ways of calculating expected utilities given a potentially inconsistent credence assignment, and that for a large class of credences—a class that includes many inconsistent examples—these ways are immune to Dutch Books and single-shot domination failures. The crucial move is to replace Finite Additivity with Monotonicity, then \\le P\)) and then calculate expected utilities for positive U via the formula \\, dy\). This shows that Dutch Book arguments for probabilism, the thesis that one’s credences should be consistent, do not establish their conclusion. Finally, I will consider a modified argument based on multi-step domination failure that does better, but nonetheless is not as compelling as the Dutch Book arguments appeared to be. (shrink)

We shall use Gödel’s Second Incompleteness Theorem to show that consistency is not possibility, and then argue that the argument does serious damage to some theories of modality where consistency plays a major but not exclusive role.

God is omnirational: whenever he does anything, he does it for all and only the unexcluded reasons that favor the action, and he always acts for reasons. Thisdoctrine has two unexpected consequences: it gives an account of why it is that unification is a genuine form of scientific explanation, and it answers the question of when the occurrence of E after a petitionary prayer for E is an answer to the prayer.

This paper argues that if creatures are to have significant free will, then God's essential omni-benevolence and essential omnipotence cannot logically preclude Him from creating a world containing a moral evil. The paper maintains that this traditional conclusion does not need to rest on reliance on subjunctive conditionals of free will. It can be grounded in several independent ways based on premises that many will accept.

Plural quantification, often used to evade Russell paradoxes, will lead back to them, given certain assumptions about propositions. This chapter provides a more generalized version of the path to paradox by showing that any theory that makes possible the construction of an appropriate packaging relation falls prey to a Russell paradox. It gives examples of widely-held metaphysical theories that require such a relation. It shows that the paradoxes that can result from plural quantification are more widely damaging, and harder to (...) tame, than has been recognized. It also displays formal requirements that any metaphysical framework with a packaging relation must meet if it is to have a chance of escaping self-contradiction. The chapter first gives the general paradox-generating setup, and then shows how three families of metaphysical assumptions allow one to instantiate it. It concludes by assessing the aftermath of the arguments presented. (shrink)

This article focuses on the question of whether the doctrine of the real presence of Christ's body and blood, and likewise the doctrine of the real absence of bread and wine, can be defended philosophically. It argues for an affirmative answer, and does so by considering a variety of metaphysical models, including that of Aquinas. It will appear, thus, that transubstantiation is a philosophical possibility. If it is possible for two substances to be in the same place at the same (...) time, consubstantiation will be a philosophical possibility as well. Of course, the question of actuality is a theological one. (shrink)

Functionalism in the theory of mind requires an account of function that has a normative component—mere conditional connection (whether indicative or sub-junctive) is not enough. For instance, a component of a computing system isn’t an adder just in case its output is always or would always be the sum of the inputs, since any computing system in a world with as much indeterminism as ours can err or malfunction. Two general reductions of normative language have been proposed that one might (...) wish to apply to the problem of defining proper function: the evolutionary reduction (Wright, Millikan) and the agential reduction (Plantinga). We argue that whatever the merits of the reductions in other contexts, a functionalist theory of mind that defines proper function in either of these ways must fail. The argument proceeds by first showing the agential reduction is viciously circular in the context of a functionalist theory of agency. Second, if functionalism about mind is true and proper function is reducible evolutionarily, then it is possible to have a situation in which the presence or absence of mental properties depends in an implausibly spooky, acausal way on remote facts. It is plausible that the only currently avail-able way for the functionalist to meet these challenges is to accept irreducible end-directed causal powers of minds and/or their functional parts, in accordance with a broadly Aristotelian tradition. (shrink)