Aristotelian method accounts for essential functional regularities in terms of powers rooted in the substantial form of the functioning thing. Habits are posited to explain new and acquired functional regularities. Because Aquinas sees habits as rendering potentiae more determinate, he finds it natural to account for post-mortem supernatural functioning in terms of infused habits or qualities that build on nature with further determinations. By contrast, Scotus begins with the natural priority of receiving subjects over what they receive, and how what (...) they determinately are fixes which habits would be formally compatible and which incompatible with it. This leads him to reject the “new infused habit or quality” account of the soul’s post-mortem ability to see God, the will’s capacity to love God above all, and the body’s supposed post-mortem impassibility, subtlety, and brightness. (shrink)

[Marilyn McCord Adams] In this paper I begin with Aristotle's Categories and with his apparent forwarding of primary substances as metaphysically special because somehow fundamental. I then consider how medieval reflection on Aristotelian change led medieval Aristotelians to analyses of primary substances that called into question how and whether they are metaphysically special. Next, I turn to a parallel issue about supposits, which Boethius seems in effect to identify with primary substances, and how theological cases-the doctrines of the (...) Trinity, the Incarnation, and of the human soul's separate survival between death and resurrection-call into question how and to what extent supposits are metaphysically special. I conclude with some reflections on various senses of being metaphysically special and how they pertain to primary substances and supposits. /// [ Richard Cross] Scotus's belief that any created substance can depend on the divine essence and/or divine persons as a subject requires him to abandon the plausible Aristotelian principle that there is no merely relational change. I argue that Scotus's various counterexamples to the principle can be rebutted. For reasons related to those that arise in Scotus's failed attempt to refute the principle, the principle also entails that properties cannot be universals. (shrink)

The problem of evil is one of the most discussed topics in the philosophy of religion. For some time, however, there has been a need for a collection of readings that adequately represents recent and ongoing writing on the topic. This volume fills that need, offering the most up-to-date collection of recent scholarship on the problem of evil. The distinguished contributors include J.L. Mackie, Nelson Pike, Roderick M. Chisholm, Terence Penelhum, Alvin Plantinga, William L. Rowe, Stephen J. Wykstra, John Hick, (...) and Diogenes Allen. Including an introductory essay and a selected bibliography, this comprehensive and completely up-to-date collection is an invaluable guide to current scholarship in this highly debated area of the philosophy of religion. Oxford Readings in Philosophy aims to bring together important recent writings in major areas of philosophical inquiry, selected from a variety of sources, mostly periodicals, which may not be conveniently available. (shrink)

Nursing's efforts at organizing in the United States have encompassed various approaches to creating change at a systemic and political level, namely shared governance, professional associations, and nurse unions. The United States is currently experiencing the effects of an authoritarian sociopolitical agenda that has taken aim at our profession's ethic of providing equitable care for all people through legislation that bans gender‐affirming care and abortions. Nursing is simultaneously experiencing a crisis of burnout and moral distress, as we navigate the everyday (...) functions of a for‐profit healthcare system under the Capitalocene. As we situate ourselves within these policies and practices of late‐stage capitalism and an increasingly authoritarian nation‐state, we are compelled to think deeply about how nursing is currently organizing ourselves. Our paper will explore the evolution of various forms of organizing through the lens of intersectionality, which offers a framework for considering the ways that power operates, creating a matrix of sociostructural processes that fuel injustice. Intersectionality also compels us to examine whether our organizing has resisted, or perpetuated, a matrix of oppression. We will conclude by offering examples of radical imagining for a future of nursing resistance, where our collective organizing has a greater impact and responsibility for dismantling the status quo to achieve justice and liberation. (shrink)

A distinguished philosopher and a practicing minister, Marilyn McCord Adams has written a highly original work on a fundamental dilemma of Christian thought -- ...

Who would the Saviour have to be, what would the Saviour have to do to rescue human beings from the meaning-destroying experiences of their lives? This book offers a systematic Christology that is at once biblical and philosophical. Starting with human radical vulnerability to horrors such as permanent pain, sadistic abuse or genocide, it develops what must be true about Christ if He is the horror-defeater who ultimately resolves all the problems affecting the human condition and Divine-human relations. Distinctive elements (...) of Marilyn McCord Adams' study are her defence of the two-natures theory, of Christ as Inner Teacher and a functional partner in human flourishing, and her arguments in favour of literal bodily resurrection and of a strong doctrine of corporeal Eucharistic presence. The book concludes that Christ is the One in Whom, not only Christian doctrine, but cosmos, church, and the human psyche hold together. (shrink)

How can the Body and Blood of Christ, without ever leaving heaven, come to be really present on eucharistic altars where the bread and wine still seem to be? Marilyn McCord Adams examines how this question and its answer engaged thirteenth and fourteenth century philosophical theologians.

This book presents a series of studies by the late Marilyn McCord Adams of medieval philosophical and theological views regarding the powers that govern human psychological processes. She explores which of them were taken to be ours to exercise and control, and which to be controlled and exercised only by God.

Over the past thirty years, analytical philosophers of religion have confronted the problem of evil in the guise of the atheistic argument from evil against the existence of God. Many have met it from the posture of defense, constructing logically possible morally sufficient reasons for divine permission of evils from the materials of religion-neutral value-theory. At best, such defenses vindicate divine goodness along the dimension “producer of global goods,” while neglecting the religiously more relevant dimension of His goodness to individual (...) suffering creatures. My methodological recommendation is that we Christian philosophers shift away from defense and concentrate on formulating what we really believe about the goodness of God and how He is solving the problem of evil. If successful, our accounts would not only exhibit how divine permission of evils is logically consistent with His goodness to creatures, but also advertise Him as a character worthy of worship. Failures would pinpoint more precisely where and how evil is a problem for us. I illustrate this method by examining Duns Scotus’ many-faceted conception of divine goodness and measure its power to explain the compossibility of God and evil. (shrink)

Christians have often held that on the day of judgment God will condemn some persons who have disobeyed him to a hell of everlasting torment and total unhappiness from which there is no hope of escape, as a punishment for their deeds up to that time. This is not the only way that hell has been or could be conceived of, but it has been the predominant conception in the Christian church throughout much of its history and it is the (...) one on which I shall focus in this paper. (shrink)

Medieval philosophical theologians thought that they had solved the problem of how God and creatures can be alike genuine agents in producing the world as we know it. But could God and creatures share genuine agency, when it comes to counting creatures and their actions worthy of eternal life? All agreed: God’s contribution was to elevate created agents by making them holy. Thinkers from Lombard to Ockham saw God as doing that in two ways: through a distinctive kind of presence (...) and through extra efficient-causal contributions. After Lombard, both were seen to involve Divinely infused habits. Debates about the role of infused habits led to refinements of the concept of genuine created agency. The attempt at philosophical accounts of the special kinds of presence that some but not other Divine persons could have to some but not other creatures, at first provoked conceptual experimentation with appeals to hypostatic union or primitive relations, but later ran to verbal accommodations of the theological authorities. (shrink)

In “Supralapsarianism, or ‘O Felix Culpa,’” Alvin Plantinga turns from defensive apologetics to the project of Christian explanation and offers a supralapsarian theodicy: the reason God made us in a world like this is that God wanted to create a world including the towering goods of Incarnation and atonement—goods which are appropriate only in worlds containing a sufficient amount of sin, suffering, and evil as well. Plantinga’s approach makes human agents and their sin, suffering and evil, instrumental means to the (...) end of God’s cosmic aims. I press the objection that means/end conceptuality is inadequate to explain how God is loving and merciful (as opposed to abusive) towards human sinners and sufferers. Plantinga’s theodicy remains under-developed without an explanation of how Incarnation and atonement benefit them. (shrink)

Ockham is called a nominalist because he identifies universals with names. But there are different kinds of names and a variety of forms of nominalism. One sort says that universals are names whose meaning is ultimately to be explained in terms of the conventions of linguistic communities. Ockham appears never to have taken such a “nominalism of convention” very seriously. Citing the possible position that.

Some theodicists, skeptical theists, and friendly atheists agree that God-justifying reasons for permitting evils would have to have an instrumental structure: that is, the evils would have to be necessary to secure a great enough good or necessary to prevent some equally bad or worse evil. D.Z. Phillips contends that instrumental reasons could never justify anyone for causing or permitting horrendous evils and concludes that the God of Restricted Standard Theism does not exist—indeed, is a conceptual mistake. After considering Phillips’ (...) and other objections in the neighborhood, I argue that the Expanded Theism of Christian theology does forward a God who ‘digs in’ and eternally answers for horrors. (shrink)

How can the Body and Blood of Christ, without ever leaving heaven, come to be really present on eucharistic altars where the bread and wine still seem to be? Marilyn McCord Adams examines how this question and its answer engaged thirteenth and fourteenth century philosophical theologians.

[Marilyn McCord Adams] In this paper I begin with Aristotle's Categories and with his apparent forwarding of primary substances as metaphysically special because somehow fundamental. I then consider how medieval reflection on Aristotelian change led medieval Aristotelians to analyses of primary substances that called into question how and whether they are metaphysically special. Next, I turn to a parallel issue about supposits, which Boethius seems in effect to identify with primary substances, and how theological cases-the doctrines of the (...) Trinity, the Incarnation, and of the human soul's separate survival between death and resurrection-call into question how and to what extent supposits are metaphysically special. I conclude with some reflections on various senses of being metaphysically special and how they pertain to primary substances and supposits. /// [Richard Cross] Scotus's belief that any created substance can depend on the divine essence and/or divine persons as a subject requires him to abandon the plausible Aristotelian principle that there is no merely relational change. I argue that Scotus's various counterexamples to the principle can be rebutted. For reasons related to those that arise in Scotus's failed attempt to refute the principle, the principle also entails that properties cannot be universals. (shrink)

The argument that(1) God exists, and is omniscient, omnipotent, and perfectly goodand(2) Evil existsare logically incompatible, can be construed aporetically (as generating a puzzle and posing the constructive challenge of finding a solution that displays their compatibility) or atheologically (as a positive proof of the non-existence of God). I note that analytic philosophers of religion over the last thirty years or so have focused on the atheological deployment of the argument from evil, and have met its onslaughts from the posture (...) of defense. I take Nelson Pike (in his article “Hume on Evil”) and Alvin Plantinga (in The Nature of Necessity, “Self-Profile,” and other pieces) as paradigm defenders, analyse their approaches, and try to make explicit parameters and assumptions within which these defenses have been conducted. In particular, both writers seem to attempt a reply within the parameters of a religion-neutral value theory and on the assumption that God has obligations to do one thing rather than another in creation-both of which conspire to defend God as a producer of global goods and shift attention off the more pressing question of His agent-centered goodness. I then argue that value-theory pluralism explodes the myth of shared values, and so complicates the structure of fair-minded debate about the problem of evil as to significantly limit the utility of defense. I invite Christian philosophers to approach the problem aporetically, and to exhibit the compossibility of (1) and (2) by formulating their own beliefs about how God is solving the problem of evil using the valuables within a Christian value theory to defeat evils. After sketching a strategy for doing this, I answer the objection that my recommendation conflates Christian philosophy and theology, and try to show how it affords a continuity between the so-called philosophical and existential problems of evil. (shrink)

This world contains horrendous evils. It is also partly populated by realistic, purpose‐driven optimists. In this chapter, I mount an ad hominem argument that it is unreasonable for people to strike the latter life posture apart from belief in God. I review nontheistic alternatives – life postures that qualify realism, dampen hopes, curtail on meaning‐making, or aim at getting beyond personality altogether. I conclude that my argument should have force with those who are robustly realistic, robustly optimistic, and firmly committed (...) to finding value in personal life. (shrink)

L'A. propone una lettura critica della questione De grammatico di Anselmo in contrasto con l'interpretazione già proposta da D.P. Henry, per il quale l'opera intende sviluppare una teoria del significato dei paronimi. Dopo un esame del testo e della teoria di Henry, l'A. propone la tesi che lo scritto sia un'introduzione alla lettura delle Categorie di Aristotele ad uso del lettore/studente. Una sezione dello studio verte sulla distinzione fra quaestio, lectio e disputatio nella seconda metà del sec. XII, che giustifica (...) la collocazione dell'opera esaminata. (shrink)