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)

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)

[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)

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

[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)

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)

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)

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.

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.

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 his article ‘A Critique of the Doctrine of Universal Salvation’, J. D. Bettis criticises the argument that all men will be saved because ‘God's love is both absolutely good and absolutely sovereign’ . I would like to argue that either some of Bettis's criticisms are confused, or else that he is not using ‘love’ in anything like its ordinary sense. I will not attempt a full defence of universalism here, however. In particular, I will not try to defend it (...) against the sort of criticisms Bettis says an Arminian might raise. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Ockham’s seemingly pessimistic epistemological assessments of what we can know about the human soul and its relation to the body reflect a sound appreciation of what is involved in the theoretical development of philosophy and natural science. In order to make my argument, I first undermine the idea that demonstration was a norm that scholastic disputation regularly expected to achieve; and second, I examine Ockham’s treatment of three major topics in psychology (thus illustrating how (...) alternative intellectual standards were in play in scholastic disputation). (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.

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)

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)

In their article “Structuring a Written Examination to Assess ASBH Health Care Ethics Consultation Core Competencies” (2014), White, Jankowski, and Shelton argue that a written examination to evalu...