Divine Simplicity

Faith and Philosophy 23 (4):365-380 (2006)
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Abstract

Augustine, Aquinas and many other medievals held the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS) -that God has no parts of any sort. Augustine took this to imply that for any non-relational attribute F, if God is F, God = Fness. This can seem to create three problems. I set them out. Having done so, I show that Augustine's DDS is set within a view of attributes now unfamiliar to us. When we bring this into the picture, it turns out that two of the problems do not really arise and the third is not really problematic. I then suggest that my rescue of Augustine may rescue other prominent friends of DDS as well.

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Brian Leftow
Rutgers University - New Brunswick

Citations of this work

Divine Simplicity.William F. Vallicella - 2019 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Another Look at the Modal Collapse Argument.Omar Fakhri - 2021 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 13 (1):1-23.
God As the Simplest Explanation of the Universe.Richard Swinburne - 2010 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 2 (1):1 - 24.
A New Paradox of Omnipotence.Sarah Adams - 2015 - Philosophia 43 (3):759-785.
Wherein lies the debate? Concerning whether God is a person.Ben Page - 2019 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 85 (3):297-317.

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