In this article I expound some of the main criticisms by David Hume and Immanuel Kant against the legitimacy of natural theology, the philosophical activity of presenting arguments for or against the existence of God. The aim is not to contribute to the scholarship in history of philosophy, but as a starting point for describing the main lines of Richard Swinburne’s approach to natural theology in terms of inductive probabilistic arguments. His proposal has been part of a (...) current philosophical movement of re-establishing the argumentative debate on the existence and nature of God, an area that has been growing in quantity and quality since the 1970’s. (shrink)

While one strand of ramified natural theology focuses on direct evidence for mira­cles, another avenue to investigate is the argument from prophecy. Events that appear to fulfill prophecy may not be miraculous in themselves, but they can provide confirmation, even substantial confirmation, for a supernatural hypothesis. I examine the details of a small set of passages from the Old Testament and evaluate the probabilistic impact of the occurrence of events surrounding the death of Jesus of Nazareth that appear (...) to fulfill these prophecies. The hypothesis under consideration is M—that Jesus of Nazareth was the prophesied Messiah. Using Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53, historical evidence concerning the death of Jesus, and background evidence concerning Roman and Jewish history and culture, I estimate a cumulative Bayes factor of 2.5 × 107 in favor of M from the fact of Jesus’s crucifixion and four further details concerning his death. Independent confirmation of M is pertinent to the prior probability of miraculous claims such as the claim that Jesus rose from the dead. The examination of Jesus’s putative fulfillment of prophecy thus is an example of an objective treatment of the religious context of a miracle which makes a given putative miracle something other than an isolated and arbitrary wonder. (shrink)

Czy można obronić teizm probabilistyczny? Krytyczne uwagi do książki Dariusza Łukasiewicza Opatrzność Boża, wolność, przypadek Artykuł zawiera krytyczną analizę fragmentu książki Dariusza Łukasiewicza pt. Opatrzność Boża, wolność, przypadek.

There is a well-documented paradigm-shift in eighteenth century Jesuit philosophy and science, at the very least in Central Europe: traditional scholastic version(s) of Aristotelianism were replaced by early modern rationalism (Wolff's systematisation of Leibnizian philosophy) and early modern science and mathematics. In the field of probability, this meant that the traditional Jesuit engagement with probability, uncertainty, and truthlikeness (in particular, as applied to moral theology) could translate into mathematical language, and can be analysed against the background of the accounts (...) of probability, pre-mathematical Jesuit logic, Wolff's conceptual analysis, and Bernoullian mathematisation. The works of two Jesuit philosophers, Berthold Hauser and Sigismund Storchenau, can be related to this context. The core of their logic of (epistemic) probability is the account of negation (or ‘contradiction’) and implication (or ‘argument’), in particular, the algorithms for computing the reliability of one piece of evidence when compared to the respective counter-evidence and for computing the probability of a conclusion given the probability of its premises. (shrink)

William James and Alfred North Whitehead strongly rejected materialism as a metaphysical option. While James lived and wrote only up to the beginning of the revolution in physics that brought to the fore fundamentally different theories such as quantum theory and the special and general theories of relativity, Whitehead, as an accomplished mathematician, was readily conversant with these new developments. Since their respective times, however, much innovation and refinement of theories in physics and other natural sciences has taken place. With (...) these later developments, conceptions of matter and its capabilities have undergone far-reaching explicit and implicit changes. A consequence of these... (shrink)

Teizm probabilistyczny a tradycyjna doktryna actus purus Teizm probabilistyczny Dariusza Łukasiewicza wyrasta z nieklasycznego rozumienia natury Boga, zwłaszcza atrybutów prostoty i wszechmocy. Redefinicja tych atrybutów w kategoriach współczesnej filozofii analitycznej powoduje, że teizm probabilistyczny jest bliższy teizmu otwartego niż klasycznego teizmu. Jednak niezwykle ważną zasługą tego podejścia jest opracowanie wszechstronnego komponentu naukowego dla teizmu otwartego, co powoduje, że teizm probabilistyczny umożliwia poszerzenie teizmu otwartego o perspektywę współczesnej nauki. Fundamentalnym znaczeniem teizmu probabilistycznego jest nie tyle pogodzenie występowania zdarzeń przypadkowych z teorią (...) opatrzności, co raczej danie możliwości teizmowi otwartemu do wypłynięcia na szerokie wody dzisiejszych debat teistycznych, toczonych wśród współczesnych naukowców, a nie tylko wśród filozofów i teologów. Bez tego teizm otwarty pozostaje w ramach wąskiej teologicznej perspektywy, interesującej tylko dla teologów chrześcijańskich lub naukowców wyznających światopogląd chrześcijański. (shrink)

The argument from design stands as one of the most intuitively compelling arguments for the existence of a divine Creator. Yet, for many scientists and philosophers, Hume's critique and Darwin's theory of natural selection have definitely undermined the idea that we can draw any analogy from design in artifacts to design in nature. Here, we examine empirical studies from developmental and experimental psychology to investigate the cognitive basis of the design argument. From this it becomes clear that humans spontaneously discern (...) purpose in nature. When constructed theologically and philosophically correctly, the design argument is not presented as conclusive evidence for God's existence but rather as an abductive, probabilistic argument. We examine the cognitive basis of probabilistic judgments in relationship to natural theology. Placing emphasis on how people assess improbable events, we clarify the intuitive appeal of Paley's watch analogy. We conclude that the reason why some scientists find the design argument compelling and others do not lies not in any intrinsic differences in assessing design in nature but rather in the prior probability they place on complexity being produced by chance events or by a Creator. This difference provides atheists and theists with a rational basis for disagreement. (shrink)

My project is to examine and critically discuss the role of simplicity in Swinburne’s probabilistic natural theology. After describing that role and the details of his theory of simplicity, I challenge Swinburne’s view that the criterion of simplicity is a fundamental criterion for evaluating causal explanations, proposing instead that what is right about that criterion can be derived from a more fundamental criterion of “coherence.” I close by exploring the implications of my proposal for Swinburne’s natural theology.

Especially after the 1610s, Tridentine Catholicism forcefully reasserted itself as a prominent political and intellectual force in the Spanish Netherlands. Integrating this reality into accounts of Spanish-Netherlandish science in the 17th century has been a considerable challenge for historians of science. The latter either turned their gazes elsewhere or assumed a fundamental incompatibility between “science” and “religion,” thus securing one dominant explanation for the classic thesis that the Spanish Netherlands largely “lost the plot” of the so-called Scientific Revolution after the (...) 1620s. This paper turns to a local debate on Thomas Fienus's embryological theses (1620), which has never been studied, to test the underlying assumption that “science” and “religion” can be taken as two distinct and/or opposed categories of historical analysis. I show that this assumption not only fails to capture historical actors' experiences and understandings, but also that it fails to consider how tensions between medicine and theology were positively productive. First, I argue that medical philosophizing was positively motivated by socio-religious concerns of its own. Second, I show that, far from being a protracted battle between two stable positions, the debate constituted an instance of boundary work, where medical philosophers like Fienus progressively tested and repositioned the theological credentials of their preferred theses. This ushered in the adoption of a probabilistic epistemology that increasingly secured Catholic theology's normative credibility and the pursuit of autonomous natural-philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

Uncertainty in Post-Reformation Catholicism provides a historical account of early modern probabilism and its theological, intellectual, and cultural implications. First developed in the second half of the sixteenth century, probabilism represented a significant and controversial novelty in Catholic moral theology. By the second half of the seventeenth century, probabilism became and has since been associated with moral, intellectual, and cultural decadence. Stefania Tutino challenges this understanding and claims that probabilism played a central role in addressing the challenges that geographical (...) and cultural expansions posed to traditional Catholic theology. Tutino argues that early modern theologians used probabilism to integrate major changes within the post-Reformation Catholic theological and intellectual system. Probabilist theologians realized that their time was characterized by many changes that traditional theology was not equipped to deal with, which consequently provoked an exponential growth of uncertainties, doubts, and dilemmas of conscience. Probabilism represented the result of their efforts to appreciate, come to terms with, and manage that uncertainty. Uncertainty in Post-Reformation Catholicism reinterprets probabilism as a way of dealing with moral and epistemological doubts in quickly changing times, a way that still may be useful today. Uncertainty in Post-Reformation Catholicism argues that probabilism played a central role in addressing the challenges that a geographically and intellectually expanding world posed to traditional Catholic theology. Early modern probabilist theologians realized that their time was characterized by many changes and novelties that traditional theology was not equipped to deal with, and that consequently provoked an exponential growth of uncertainties, doubts, and dilemmas of conscience. These theologians used probabilism as a means to integrate changes and novelties within the post-Reformation Catholic theological and intellectual system. Seen in this light, probabilism represented the result of their attempts to appreciate, come to terms with, and manage uncertainty. The problem of uncertainty was not only crucial then, but remains central even today. Despite the unprecedented amount of information available to us, we are becoming less able to formulate arguments based on facts, and more dependent on a cacophony of opinions that often simply reproduce our own implicit or explicit biases, prejudices, and preconceived preferences. (shrink)

Richard Swinburne and Robert Larmer have offered different natural theological arguments for preferring Christian belief over Muslim belief. This paper argues that both arguments are vulnerable to real and imagined Muslim objections and that, while both can be bolstered against such objections, Larmer’s argument from miracle has much better prospects. Swinburne’s probabilistic argument suffers the lack of a strong natural theological argument for the Christian model of divine–human interaction. The argument from miracle, however, can be formulated robustly enough to (...) withstand the challenge of the strongest reasonable Muslim miracle account. (shrink)

Christiaan Huygens’s late writings, ranging from 1686 to 1695, bear witness to his philosophical and theological reflections. In his Cosmotheoros, which was intended for publication, and other late writings that can be regarded as its preparatory drafts, Huygens deals with issues central to seventeenth-century philosophical debates: God’s power, divine and human intelligence, probabilistic epistemology, natural theology, and the plurality of worlds. This paper explains how Huygens’s reflections on animals and their souls, rational or not, play a key role (...) in his epistemological reflections on natural theology. The issue of animal generation, as well as of animal souls, is crucial to identifying elements of continuity between the scientific topics of Huygens’s works, and may be considered as the point of intersection between his understanding of mechanism and of the teleology of nature. This neglected perspective on Huygens’s philosophical-natural animism reveals key elements of his model of rationality and of his attitude towards religion, demonstrating his involvement in the debate over animism, in which he seems to have been strongly influenced by English Protestant empiricism. (shrink)

. In the first part of this essay I sketch a view on cosmogenesis from the perspective of modern science, emphasizing, first, that the laws of nature are outcomes of the history of nature, not imposed on nature from outside of nature; and, second, that the universe, including human beings, is the result of a single, natural process. It consistently brings forth novelty through a probabilistic sequence of syntheses. Consequently, the new emerges from the unification of elements that were (...) previously unified. This universal creative process is both probabilistic and nonlinear. It is probabilistic because each creative event occurs within a cohort of also possible events. It is nonlinear because the new has qualities that its elements in isolation do not possess. I refer to this model of understanding cosmogenesis as strict naturalism. In the second part of the essay I argue that deistic and theistic models of cosmogenesis cannot cope with strict naturalism because they exclude teleology and supernatural interference in the creative process. In contrast to deism and theism, I show that Christianity is capable of integrating strict naturalism. To do that I focus on the Christian notion of incarnation. At the center of this reflection is the attempt to increase the understanding of Christian faith that only the Word of God creates. (shrink)

Probabilistic predictions of future risk govern much of society: healthcare, genetics, social media, national security, and finance. Both policy-makers and private companies are increasingly working to design institutional structures that seek to manage risk by controlling the behavior of citizens and consumers, using new technologies of predictive control that comb through past data to predict and shape future action. These predictions not only control social institutions but also shape individual character and forms of practical reason. Risk-based decision theory shifts (...) people's relationships to the future through knowledge of possible dangers and foregone opportunities, thus inspiring anxious solicitude and deceptive hopes for total security. This book uses virtue ethics to analyze these problems and to suggest ways to enjoy these technologies' positive benefits while constraining their dangerous aspects through a better understanding of practical reasoning and a theological analysis of our responsibility for future risks. (shrink)

The paper argues that the philosophy that was taught in Orthodox schools of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in late 16th – early 17th century and then became the ideological basis for the Moscow “Latinism” can be attributed to so-called Second scholasticism. The main features of Second scholasticism are the rejection of predestination in theology, usage of probabilistic approaches in logic and ethics and confrontation with absolutism in politics. These features made Second scholasticism unacceptable for absolute monarchies emerging in Europe (...) (including the Russian Empire) which utilized universal rationalism of the early Enlightenment as an ideological basis. Both in Western Europe and in Russia Second scholasticism became “a zone of cultural exclusion”. However prevalence of Second scholasticism in Orthodox schools of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth concurred with making up of the Ukrainian cultural originality and in many respects defined characteristic features of the Ukrainian mentality. (shrink)

Science has demonstrated that the universe creates itself through its own history. This history is the result of a probabilistic process, not a deterministic execution of a plan. Science has also documented that human beings are a result of this universal, probabilistic process of general evolution. At first sight, these results seem to contradict Christian teaching. According to the Bible, history is essentially the history of salvation. Human beings therefore are not an “accident of nature” but special creations (...) to be saved. With deeper theological probing, it becomes clearer, however, that creation must create itself. The Christian God is the loving God who enters into a loving relationship with human beings if they desire to reciprocate. If creation could not create itself, human beings could not be free. Without freedom to ignore or reject God's love, the central act of the Christian God, the drama of salvation, would become a parody played by marionettes in the hands of a supernatural manipulator. Christians should welcome the fundamental insight brought forth by science that the universe, including human beings, created itself through its own history. This article will try to show that this scientific insistence is required and confirmed by the intrinsic character of the orthodox, Judeo‐Christian concept of God. That nature has to create itself, including human beings, secures human freedom and with it, the responsibility for human actions. From this perspective one might better understand the Bible in the light of God's revelation through the book of nature. (shrink)

Dawkins’ Ballet in the Garden of Theology. A Critical Assessment of Richard Dawkins’ Epistemological Theses on Theistic Beliefs from the God Delusion. Part II My paper presents an analysis and assessment of Richard Dawkins’ assumption from his book The God Delusion that there are no reason against treating belief in God as a scientific hypothesis, because even if the God existence is not disprovable, we could and maybe should ask if His existence is probable or highly improbable. My first (...) aim is to examine Dawkins' argumentation against if he is aware multiple possible ways interpretation of the claim that religious belief in God, construed as the hypothesis that existence of Creator may be treated as a scientific kind of hypothesis. My second aim is to show a nature of relation between his scientific God-hypothesis and his criticism of Thomas Henry Huxley agnosticism. I maintain that the he can't treat his probabilistic account of theism/atheism controversy as a ground for possible evidence for his controversial claim, that scientific knowledge could solve the problem of God's existence. As the matter of facts , things are just the opposite. I argue for claim that his construal of belief in God in terms of probabilistic scientific hypothesis is normatively weak and he can't use it in argumentation against rationality of belief in God even if he would be succesfully show that God-hypothesis is very weak and improbable explanation of origins and complexity of life. (shrink)

One is occasionally reminded of Foucault's proclamation in a 1970 interview that "perhaps, one day this century will be known as Deleuzian." Less often is one compelled to update and restart with a supplementary counter-proclamation of the mathematician, David Lindley: "the twenty-first century would be a Bayesian era..." The verb tenses of both are conspicuous. // To critically attend to what is today often feared and demonized, but also revered, deployed, and commonly referred to as algorithm(s), one cannot avoid the (...) mathematical and philosophical legacies of probability. // But attending to these probabilistic or Bayesian legacies must include an undeniable theological legacy in which they remain entangled. // We are not, today, discovering quirky theological metaphors in contemporary technics. It's the other way around. The technologies are mere metaphors of past theologies. (shrink)

Philosophical theologians have in recent years revived and cast in sophisticated form a non‐theodical approach to defeating probabilistic arguments from evil. In this article I consider and reject the claim that their emphasis on the epistemic gap separating us from God entails a radical form of scepticism. I then argue, however, that proponents of this view cannot escape and unattractive theological scepticism.

Human reasoning often involves explanation. In everyday affairs, people reason to hypotheses based on the explanatory power these hypotheses afford; I might, for example, surmise that my toddler has been playing in my office because I judge that this hypothesis delivers a good explanation of the disarranged state of the books on my shelves. But such explanatory reasoning also has relevance far beyond the commonplace. Indeed, explanatory reasoning plays an important role in such varied fields as the sciences, philosophy, (...) class='Hi'>theology, medicine, forensics, and law. -/- This dissertation provides an extended study into the logic of explanatory reasoning via two general questions. First, I approach the question of what exactly we have in mind when we make judgments pertaining to the explanatory power that a hypothesis has over some evidence. This question is important to this study because these are the sorts of judgments that we constantly rely on when we use explanations to reason about the world. Ultimately, I introduce and defend an explication of the concept of explanatory power in the form of a probabilistic measure. This formal explication allows us to articulate precisely some of the various ways in which we might reason explanatorily. -/- The second question this dissertation examines is whether explanatory reasoning constitutes an epistemically respectable means of gaining knowledge. I defend the following ideas: The probability theory can be used to describe the logic of explanatory reasoning, the normative standard to which such reasoning attains. Explanatory judgments, on the other hand, constitute heuristics that allow us to approximate reasoning in accordance with this logical standard while staying within our human bounds. The most well known model of explanatory reasoning, Inference to the Best Explanation, describes a cogent, nondeductive inference form. And reasoning by Inference to the Best Explanation approximates reasoning directly via the probability theory in the real world. Finally, I respond to some possible objections to my work, and then to some more general, classic criticisms of Inference to the Best Explanation. In the end, this dissertation puts forward a clearer articulation and novel defense of explanatory reasoning. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Christian Ethics: A Very Short Introduction, and: Christian Ethics: A Brief History, and: Behaving in Public: How to Do Christian EthicsBeth K. HaileChristian Ethics: A Very Short Introduction D. Stephen Long Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. 144 pp. $11.95Christian Ethics: A Brief History Michael Banner West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. 160 pp. $24.95Behaving in Public: How to Do Christian Ethics Nigel Biggar Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2011. 142 (...) pp. $16.00In calling ethics “Christian,” the question of distinctiveness, or the normative force of theological claims, inevitably arises. Three new books explore what Christian ethics looks like if it is to take seriously its theological basis for engaging the world.Stephen D. Long, professor of systematic theology at Marquette University, attends to the difficulties in predicating “Christian” of “ethics,” yet he is concerned more with explaining how Christianity can be ethical rather than vice versa. His Christian Ethics: A Very Short Introduction opens with a quote from Christopher Hitchens and later dedicates almost an entire chapter to analyzing the failures of Christian ethics. From the Crusades to colonialism, the Galileo affair to slavery, Long provocatively asks whether modern ethics emerges as a result of the failure of Christian moral claims. While not sidestepping the difficulties in Christian history, Long is careful to note how this history is often distorted to serve the goals of contemporary secular politics, goals which he points out have resulted in the bloody failures of the twentieth century. Perhaps a renewed interest in Christian ethics, Long notes, is a result of the failures of secularism.Long manages to cover a surprising breadth of material in his brief book, from a sweeping historical overview of Christian theology to a final chapter on [End Page 195] the practical matters of sex, money, and political power. Long also summarizes some important theological differences among Christians that lead to practical disagreements about the nature of Christian ethics. His overview of the Catholic-Lutheran convergence on matters of faith and works is particularly helpful in establishing the theological basis for an ecumenical Christian ethics. This historical survey serves to illustrate that ethics is both an integral part of and a contradiction to Christianity. Still, argues Long, while Christianity may claim to be more than ethical, it may never claim to be less.While commendable in breadth, the genre of the “very short introduction” precludes depth and must necessarily omit important information. In his summary of Catholic ethics, for example, Long addresses nominalism and probabilism but omits the Catholic social tradition, a particularly glaring omission given his topic. In the end, the target audience is the educated and curious layperson, more suitable for a church group than a classroom, though this is reflective of the nature of “the very short introduction” series and does not indicate any limitation in Long’s skill as a scholar.In the spirit of brevity, Michael Banner, Fellow of Trinity College in Cambridge, offers Christian Ethics: A Brief History, which, like any brief history, paints with broad and admittedly selective strokes. The aim of this work is not to evaluate the normative value of Christian claims but rather to establish the ethical implications of Christian belief. Unlike Long, who directly addresses the ethical failures of the church, Banner is more apologetic. In clarifying the difficulties of writing a text such as this one, he observes that Christian history has not been guided by texts as much as by action. In this vein, Banner begins not chronologically but with the Rule of St. Benedict and its call to live in a relationship with God and neighbor characterized by love.Banner grounds the theoretical dimension of Christian ethics in this emphasis on practice. Given the way of life Christians are called to, what are its limitations and possibilities? Banner turns to Augustine’s notion of the weakness of the will and the human creature’s need for grace, which he then places in creative tension with Aquinas’s emphasis on the harmony between faith and reason. In somewhat breathtaking conciseness, Banner describes how the Scholastic emphasis on natural law, casuistry, and the categorizing of sins led to what he calls... (shrink)

Résumé — La controverse religieuse qui a suivi l’essor du luthéranisme est ordinairement présentée comme le moteur principal de la reviviscence du pyrrhonisme à l’âge moderne. Au XVIe siècle, la religion aurait fait du pyrrhonisme un outil apologétique puissant, véritable arme que s’opposeraient les diverses confessions. Pourtant, comme le note Bayle dans son Dictionnaire, les rapports entre le scepticisme et la théologie sont extrêmement ambigus : un rapide tableau des appréciations portées par les théologiens chrétiens montrent que, chez les Réformés (...) comme chez les catholiques, l’humiliation des lumières naturelles est pensée comme une entrave à l’instauration de la foi. Seuls les courants pauliniens et mystiques voient dans cette philosophie un moyen bénéfique à la vie spirituelle. Pour devenir un outil intellectuel reconnu dans les milieux catholiques tridentins, le pyrrhonisme a dû subir une métamorphose radicale : Omer Talon, suivi par Gentian Hervet, ont reconfiguré le pyrrhonisme à partir du modèle probabiliste de la Nouvelle Académie, pourtant récusé par Sextus Empiricus. Assoupli, le scepticisme a alors été pensé comme le moyen privilégié d’une refondation de la dialectique rationaliste et de la défense de la foi.— The religious controversy which followed the development of Lutheranism is usually presented as the main engine of the revivescence of the Pyrrhonism in early modern period. In the sixteenth century, religion would have made by Pyrrhonism a powerful apologetic tool, true weapon that adverse confessions would have set against each other. Nevertheless, as Bayle notes it in its Dictionary, the connection between scepticism and theology is extremely ambiguous : a fast outline of the appreciations carried by the Christian theologians shows that, by protestants as well as by Catholics, the humiliation of natural lights is thought as an obstacle of the institution of faith. Only the Paulinian and mystic currents see in such a philosophy a beneficial resource for spiritual life. To become an intellectual tool recognized in the catholic Tridentin circles, Pyrrhonism must have been subjected to a radical transformation : Omer Talon, followed by Gentian Hervet, has restructured Pyrrhonism from the probabilistic model of the New Academy, even though such a model was rejected by Sextus Empiricus. Such mitigated, scepticism has then been considered as one of the privileged means of the refondation of rationalistic dialectic, and of the defence of faith. (shrink)

Sprat situated his analysis of the Royal Society within an emerging Anglican Royalist narrative of the longue durée of post-Reformation England. A closer examination of Sprat's own religious views reveals that his principal interest in the History of the Royal Society, as in the closely related reply to Samuel de Sorbière, the Observations, was to appropriate the advantages and benefits of the Royal Society as support for a re-established, anti-Calvinist Church of England. Sprat connected the two through a reformulation of (...) the powerful conventions of ‘Reformation’ and ‘Israel’, both of which still resonated strongly in the religious politics of the 1660s. Applying his voluntarist theology, Sprat changed especially the representation of the chosen nation from a tale of divine castigation and punishment to a rational and probabilistic covenant based on material success as the indicator of God's pleasure. Sprat proposed that the knowledge and application of nature, through the experimental labours of the Royal Society, could build an increasingly wealthy nation and so a permanent home for the reconfigured Israel. Attaching this to a renewed monarchical and Anglican state also meant security for the traditional forms of rule. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Current State of Vico ScholarshipDavid L. MarshallGiambattista Vico is one of those chameleon figures in the history of ideas who is so intellectually rich that he can be constantly reinvented. It is indicative of the rich ambiguity of his thought that two of the most prominent intellectual historians working today should have come to opposite conclusions about his relationship to the master-category of eighteenth-century intellectual history: for Mark (...) Lilla, Vico was a Counter-Enlightenment thinker; for Jonathan Israel, he was a figure in the Radical Enlightenment.1 Vico’s fungibility gives reason for pause. Someone who can be folded into all manner of intellectual projects may be suspect. But Vico is more colonizing than colonized and, thus, the diversity of his receptions is evidence of creativity, and not merely malleability. The only way to deal with Vico is to dive into the multiplicity of plausible interpretations and find in them the makings of a new line of inquiry. Vico’s moment of flourishing in the Anglophone world came initially in the 1960s and 1970s, but if the diversity and quality of receptions in the last five years is anything to go by then we can say that Vico remains—especially in Italian, French, and German— an intellectual historical provocateur.This review essay surveys such literature and makes a single recurring observation: the various specifications of Vico’s place in intellectual history come into alignment as dimensions of what one might term Vico’s reinvention of rhetoric. As a professor of rhetoric in a culture that possessed—for [End Page 141] the most part—very weak oratorical institutions, Vico found himself in a particularly paradoxical situation. Recent research on Vico suggests that this paradox worked itself out in Vico’s thought in a number of highly interesting ways. First, Vico constitutes an opportunity for intellectual historians of the scientific revolution by offering a simultaneously rhetorical and pragmatic gloss of the early modern logic of experiment. Second, for intellectual historians of religion, Vico constitutes a study in how early moderns could examine the rhetorical functioning of theological vocabularies without necessarily committing themselves to the independent existence of the referents of those vocabularies. Third, for intellectual historians of Enlightenment, Vico confirms that encyclopedism was not a merely French practice in the eighteenth century and that the kind of omnicompetence implicit in encyclopedic multidisciplinarity had roots in rhetorical criticism. Fourth, intellectual historians of Counter-Enlightenment cannot easily fold Vico into their narratives, in part because his legal works (which have been read as a call for cultural retrenchment in response to early modern skepticism) are in fact an account of how Greek rhetoric found its analogue in Roman jurisprudence. Fifth, for historians of the idea of language, Vico demonstrates that there were powerful alternatives in early modernity to the dominant contractualist account of the origin of language (offered by Hobbes, Locke, and others) that were rhetorical and yet did not emphasize the priority of speech over writing.When it appeared in 1961, Nicola Badaloni’s Introduzione a G.B. Vico was the most sophisticated attempt to locate Vico in the Neapolitan philosophical tradition. In many ways, it remains the best attempt at contextualizing a thinker who is notoriously difficult to situate among his contemporaries. John Robertson’s recent Case for the Enlightenment has many virtues (not least its revealing supposition that Vico ought to be read alongside Hume), but as an attempt at contextualization Robertson’s work is not as rich as Badaloni’s.2 In particular, Badaloni did a great deal to reconstruct the history of natural philosophical inquiry at Naples in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In Badaloni’s description, Naples was a place in which a strong culture of natural philosophical investigation set the foundation for concepts such as experimentalism and pantheism. Furthermore, Badaloni argued that, although such concepts originated in natural philosophy, they cross-pollinated with ideas prominent in the Neapolitan schools of jurisprudence—particularly probabilism. In the [End Page 142] broadest terms, Badaloni argued that Vico’s intellectual project was an examination of the pantheistic principle that Jovis omnia plena (“all things are made of Jove”) in the domains of law, poetry, and history... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Aquinas on Faith, Reason, and Charity by Roberto Di CeglieGregory StaceyDI CEGLIE, Roberto. Aquinas on Faith, Reason, and Charity. New York: Routledge, 2022. x + 196 pp. Cloth, $160.00Suppose one wishes to argue that Christian faith (that is, supernatural belief in propositions insofar as they are divinely revealed) is compatible with the proper exercise of reason (that is, forming beliefs through natural cognitive processes). Two strategies suggest themselves. (...) First, one could argue that faith is itself a natural cognitive process or else meets criteria by which natural beliefs are considered rational or appropriate. Alternatively, one might contend that faith can meet its own, independent criteria for rationality or propriety. Thomas Aquinas, whose natural theology and discussion of public evidence that God has revealed himself in Christ are famously robust, may appear to be an exponent of the former strategy. Yet in this volume, Roberto Di Ceglie advances a reading of Thomas that illustrates how faith can support rational enquiry, while remaining independent of it. On this view, faith is "caused mainly by God" and is therefore "at least partly unresponsive to rational criteria."Part 1 begins Di Ceglie's case obliquely, by criticizing both efforts to argue (following Gilson and Maritain) that philosophy can be influenced by Christian faith and recent attempts to explain Aquinas's account of faith and reason. Reviewing the work of commentators including Anthony Kenny, Richard Swinburne, and Eleonore Stump, the author objects that many philosophers hold that for Thomas, faith is primarily a form of propositional belief that should be evaluated for propriety in the same way as natural beliefs. He alleges that this understanding of faith is inherited from Locke, who endorsed "methodological naturalism": the view that appropriate "religious belief can only be taken as the outcome, if any, of a rational exploration of our experience." While this material usefully outlines views which Di Ceglie means to oppose, readers unfamiliar with scholarship on Aquinas and Locke may find these initial chapters difficult to follow.The argument becomes easier to follow in part 2, which provides Di Ceglie's own interpretation of Aquinas. The key third chapter explores Aquinas's definition of faith as "an act of the intellect assenting to the Divine Truth at the command of the will moved by the grace of God" (ST II-II, q. 2, a. 9). It demonstrates that while for Aquinas faith involves firm propositional belief, its certitude derives not from believers' assessment of signs that God has revealed the articles of faith but from their free choice—itself a gift of grace—to embrace those articles. More precisely, in cases of "formed" faith, this choice is motivated by supernatural love for God (charity). Charity's role in Aquinas's religious epistemology is [End Page 547] highlighted in two subsequent chapters. Inter alia, Di Ceglie charges that faith is meritorious principally due to its grounds in charity rather than because the articles of faith are not evidently true. He further claims that Aquinas understood "unformed" faith as merely "faith commonly so called"—that is, natural belief in propositions because one judges that they are testified to by a competent authority. Accordingly, unformed faith lacks perfect confidence because it is merely based on probabilistic evidence that God has revealed the articles of faith, rather than on a strong, loving will to trust God. More generally, the certitude of one's faith is proportionate to the perfection of one's charity.Having developed a reading of Aquinas's religious epistemology that stresses the distinction between faith and reason, in part 3 Di Ceglie considers their positive relationship. First, he attempts to reconcile the apparently opposing views that Aquinas's philosophy is purely an exercise of natural reason, and that his philosophical work was influenced by his Christian faith. Broadly, the charity that grounds formed faith also inspires and enhances rational investigation, although philosophical arguments cannot presume faith's truth. Believers with formed faith, however, should reject positions that contradict faith and seek to revise their philosophical reasoning accordingly. The final chapter argues that Christian faith affords a better position from which to engage in rational reflection than atheism or agnosticism. Among other advantages, faith... (shrink)

Chapter 9 is the first of two chapters that apply the findings of the previous eight chapters of The Nature of Necessity to some traditional problems in natural theology. The Problem of Evil is the objection to theism that holds that the conjunction of the propositions, God is omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good and There is evil in the world, is necessarily false. The Free Will Defense is an effort to show the two propositions are compatible, and in the (...) process of the defence, I use the concept of transworld depravity. I then prove that the possibility that every essence suffers from such depravity entails that it is possible both that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good and that there is evil in the world. I conclude by addressing special problems caused by natural evil and by arguing that the Probabilistic Problem of Evil is unsuccessful. (shrink)

This dissertation is the first comprehensive study of human freedom in the philosophy of Pierre Gassendi, a 17th century natural scientist, Catholic priest, and one of the founders of Early Modern philosophy. The key postulate of this dissertation is that the epistemology of probabilism, which represents Gassendi's skeptical stance toward the possibility of certain knowledge, is also the foundation of human freedom: the uncertain and merely probable nature of all our knowledge serves as a guarantee of the multiplicity of options (...) open to us, and thereby ensures freedom. ;The first part of the dissertation investigates the sources on which Gassendi drew to elaborate his notion of freedom. The main sources are Aristotle's ethical theory and discussion of necessity, chance, and choice, as well as the Epicureans' theory of freedom. In conjunction with the latter, I consider the possibility that Gassendi conceives of the human mind---the seat of freedom---as corporeal, and thereby capable of generating autonomous developments on the basis of the natural motions of its atoms. ;The second part is devoted to studying Gassendi's epistemology of probabilism as the foundation of freedom. I look at the process of judgment that underlies choice, and consider the various manifestations of the freedom of indifference in the process of acquiring knowledge or preparing for a practical decision. I also look at the roles of the will and the intellect throughout these activities. ;The third part looks at theological issues in Gassendi's philosophy that relate to human freedom: divine concurrence with created beings, divine providence, and the limitations that faith imposes on the scope of our inquiry. ;The fourth and final part presents a study of Gassendi's ethics from the perspective of freedom. I investigate the role of temperament, passions, and opinions in human behaviour, and study the role of freedom in shaping these factors. I also consider the concept of pleasure as the central motive of human actions, and its various manifestations in Gassendi's ethics. (shrink)

Evolutionary biology since Darwin has seen a dramatic entrenchment and elaboration of the role of chance in evolution. It is nearly impossible to discuss contemporary evolutionary theory in any depth at all without making reference to at least some concept of “chance” or “randomness.” Many processes are described as chancy, outcomes are characterized as random, and many evolutionary phenomena are thought to be best described by stochastic or probabilistic models. Chance is taken by various authors to be central to (...) the understanding of fitness, genetic drift, macroevolution, mutation, foraging theory, and environmental variation, to take but a few examples. And for each of these notions, there are yet more stories to tell. Each weaves itself into the various branches of evolutionary theory in myriad different ways, with a wide variety of effects on the history and current state of life on Earth. Each is grounded in a particular trajectory in the history of philosophy and the history of biology, and has inspired a variety of responses throughout science and culture. This book endeavors to offer a cross-section of biological, historical, philosophical, and theological approaches to understanding chance in evolutionary theory. (shrink)

The issue of infinity appeared in cosmology in the form of a question on spatial and time finiteness or infinity of the universe. Recently, more and more talking is going on about “other universes” (different ones from “our”), the number of which may be infinite. Speculations on this topic emerged in effect of the discussions on the issue of the anthropic principle, and the so-called inflation scenario. In truth, this kind of speculations are hardly recognized as scientific theories, however, they (...) may be included in a sort of “scientific fringe” fulfilling a beneficial heuristic function.All of the speculations regarding numerous universes boil down to the juggling of probabilities, i.e. to the applying of the theory of probability to the universes’ set. However, without probabilistic measure being introduced onto this “set” (as it is not known whether it is a set in a technical sense of this term)—and there is no knowledge at all as to how to do this—such considerations may not go beyond a vague intuition.The producing of other universes usually results from an assumption that the disturbing of original circumstances, of values of physical constants, or of other parameters characterizing the universe is possible. On the other hand, the idea of the final theory seems to assume that the mathematical structure of this theory should be rigid, i.e. that the disturbing of its parameters leads on to the very same structure. This would have eliminated the possibility of the existence of other universes.The idea of infinite number of universes sometimes has an anti-theological undertone: there is no need for assuming purposeful acting of the Creator, since all possibilities are fulfilled. The reaction of a theologian may be as follows: Just the same, God may create just a single universe, as much as an infinite number of universes. What’s more, one may risk saying that God is not interested in nothing that may be short of infinity. (shrink)

ZUSAMMENFASSUNGIm religionsphilosophischen Kontext wurde die Quantenmechanik vielfach bemht, das Argument der Willensfreiheit als naturwissenschaftliche Theorie zu sttzen. Der probabilistische Charakter der Theorie schien eine natrliche Basis fr den Indeterminismus und somit fr sittlich relevante Willensfreiheit zu bieten. Dieser Position wurde jedoch des fteren entgegen gehalten, dass erstens nur bestimmte Interpretationen der Quantenmechanik indeterministisch sind. Zweitens sollen mikroskopische Quanten-Effekte die makroskopische Hirndynamik nicht beeinflussen. Inzwischen mutet die Diskussion immer undurchschaubarer und themenspezifischer an, so dass eine sachgerechte Beurteilung geradezu als undurchfhrbar erscheint. (...) Die vorliegende Untersuchung zielt darauf, durch Klrung der Begrifflichkeit bestehende Konfusionen zu entwirren und konzeptionelle Konturen zu zeichnen, die es ermglichen, bisherige Debatten zu systematisieren sowie fr zuknftige Untersuchungen als methodisch-strukturelle Grundlage zu dienen.SUMMARYIt is often claimed that the probabilistic character of quantum mechanics supports ontological indeterminism and in consequence free will. Theologians especially believe that they have found an empirical argument for the free will defense. Critics argue, however, that there is no evidence that microscopic quantum phenomena could affect macroscopic brain dynamics, nor does the probabilistic character of quantum formalism necessarily imply ontological indeterminism. In the present paper I shall examine whether the critique holds, and point out the relevance of quantum mechanics for theological investigations. (shrink)

Pascal, in his Pensées, applies philosophy to a theological problem: reconciling (a) Christianity’s demand for absolute faith with both (b) the motives of credibility’s inability to justify absolute faith on their own and (c) the moral obligation to avoid superstition. This reconciliation hinges upon distinguishing two cognitive faculties: reason, and the heart. I will first discuss Pascal’s view of the difference between reason and the heart, and specifically how they each relate to evidence and certainty: reason discursively and probabilistically, the (...) heart holistically and with certitude. Then I turn to Pascal’s view of the role which the heart plays in religious faith, and apply this view to the problem of basing absolute assent on limited evidence. Finally, I will examine Pascal’s view of reason’s important supporting role in faith, and apply it to the obligation to avoid superstitious belief. (shrink)

Divine Action and Modern Science considers the relationship between the natural sciences and the concept of God acting in the world. Nicholas Saunders examines the Biblical motivations for asserting a continuing notion of divine action and identifies several different theological approaches to the problem. He considers their theoretical relationships with the laws of nature, indeterminism, and probabilistic causation. His book then embarks on a radical critique of current attempts to reconcile special divine action with quantum theory, chaos theory and (...) quantum chaos. As well as considering the implications of these problems for common interpretations of divine action, Saunders also surveys and codifies the many different theological, philosophical and scientific responses to divine action. The conclusion reached is that we are still far from a satisfactory account of how God might act in a manner that is consonant with modern science despite the copious recent scholarship in this area. (shrink)

This book tells the story of modern ethics, namely the story of a discourse that, after the Renaissance, went through a methodological revolution giving birth to Grotius’s and Pufendorf’s new science of natural law, leaving room for two centuries of explorations of the possible developments and implications of this new paradigm, up to the crisis of the Eighties of the eighteenth century, a crisis that carried a kind of mitosis, the act of birth of both basic paradigms of the two (...) following centuries: Kantian ethics and utilitarianism. The new science of natural law carried a fresh start for ethics, resulting from a mixture of the Old and the New. It was, as suggested by Schneewind, an attempt at rescuing the content of Scholastic and Stoic doctrines on a new methodological basis. The former was the claim of existence of objective and universal moral laws; the latter was the self-aware attempt at justifying a minimal kernel of such laws facing skeptical doubt. What Bentham and Kant did was precisely carrying this strategy further on, even if restructuring it each of them around one out of two alternative basic claims. The nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics of the Enlightenment attacked both not on their alleged failure in carrying out their own projects, but precisely on having adopted Grotius’s and Pufendorf’s project. What counter-enlightenment has been unable to spell out is which alternative project could be carried out facing the modern condition of pluralism, while on the contrary, if we takes a closer look at developments in twentieth-century ethics or at on-going discussions on practical issues, we might feel inclined to believe that Grotius’s and Pufendorf’s project is as up-to-date as ever. -/- Table of Contents -/- Preface I. Fathers of the Reformation and Schoolmen 1.1. Luther: passive justice and the good deeds; 1.2. Calvin: voluntarism and predestination; 1.3. Baroque Scholasticism; 1.4. Casuistry and Institutiones morales -/- II Neo-Platonists, neo-Stoics, neo-Sceptics 2.1. Aristotelian, neo-Platonic, neo-Epicurean and neo-Cynic Humanists; 2.2. Oeconomica and the art of living; 2.3. Neo-Stoics; 2.4. Neo-Sceptics; 2.5. Moralistic literature -/- III Neo-Augustinians 3.l. The Jansenists on natura lapsa, sufficient grace, pure love; 3.2. Nicole on the impossibility of self-knowledge; 3.3. Nicole on self-love and charity; 3.4. Nicole against civic virtue, for Christian civility; 3.5. Malebranche on general laws and necessary evil; 3.6. Malebranche on Neo-Augustinianism and Platonism. -/- IV Grotius, Pufendorf and the new moral science 4.1. Grotius against Aristotle and the sceptics; 4.2. Mersenne and Gassendi; 4.3. Descartes on ethics as the last branch of philosophy’s tree; 4.4. Hobbes on scepticism and the new moral science; 4.5. Spinoza on the new moral science as a descriptive science;4.6. Locke on voluntarism and probabilism; 4.7. Pufendorf on natural law as an exact science; 4.8. Pufendorf on physical and moral entities; 10. Pufendorf on self-preservation -/- V The empiricist version of the new moral science: from Cumberland to Paley 5.1. Cumberland against Hobbesian voluntarism; 5.2. Cumberland and theological consequentialism; 5.3. Cumberland on universal benevolence and self-love; 5.4. Shaftesbury on the moral sense; 5.5. Hutcheson on natural law and moral faculties; 5.6. Gay, Brown, Paley and theological consequentialism. -/- VI The rationalist version of the new moral science: from Cudworth to Price 6.1. The Cambridge Platonists; 6.2. Shaftesbury on the moral sense; 6.3. Butler and a third way between voluntarism and scepticism; 6.4. Price and the rational character of moral truths; -/- VII Leibniz’s compromise between the new moral science and Aristotelianism 1.Leibniz against voluntarism; 2.Leibniz against the division between the physical and the moral good; 3.Leibniz on la place d’autrui and theological consequentialism; 4.Thomasius, Wolff, Crusius -/- VIII French eighteenth-century philosophers without the new moral science 8.1. The genealogy of our ideas of virtue and vice; 8.2. Maupertuis and moral arithmetic 8.3. The philosophes and the harmony of interests; 8.4. Rousseau on corruption, self-love, and virtue; 8.5. Sade on the merits of vice -/- IX Experimental moral science: Hume and Adam Smith 9.1. Mandeville’s paradox; 9.2. Hutcheson on the law of nature and moral faculties; 9.3. Hume on experimental moral philosophy and the intermediate principles; 9.4. Hume’s Law; 9.5. Hume on the fellow-feeling; 9.6. Hume on natural and artificial virtues and disinterested pleasure for utility; 9.7. Adam Smith’s anti-realist metaethics; 9.8. Adam Smith on self-deception and the paradox of happiness; 9.9. Adam Smith on sympathy and the impartial spectator; 9.10. Adam Smith on the twofold criterion for moral judgement and its paradox; 9.11. Reid on the refutation of scepticism and the self-evidence of duty -/- X Kantian ethics 10.1. Kantian metaethics: moral epistemology; 10.2. Kantian metaethics: moral ontology; 10.3. Kantian metaethics: moral psychology; 10.4. Kantian normative ethics; 10.5. Kant on the impracticability of applied ethics; 10.6. Kantian moral anthropology; 10.7. Civilisation and moralisation; 10.8. Theology on a moral basis and the origins of evil; 10.9. Fichte and the transformation of theoretical philosophy into practical philosophy XI Bentham and utilitarianism 11.1. Bentham’s linguistic theory; 11.2. Bentham’s moral ontology, psychology, and theory of action; 11.3. The principle of greatest happiness; 11.4. The critique of religious ethics; 11.5. The new morality; 11.6. Interest and duty; 11.7. Virtues; 11.8. Private ethics and legislation -/- XII Followers of the Enlightenment: liberal Judaism and Liberal Theology 12.1. Mendelssohn; 12.2. Salomon Maimon; 12.3. Haskalā and liberal Judaism; 12.4. Liberal Theology. -/- XIII Counter-Enlighteners 13.1.Romanticism and the fulfilment of individuality as the Summum Bonum; 13.2. Hegel on history as the making of liberty; 13.3. Hegel on the unhappy consciousness and the beautiful soul; 13.4. Hegel on Morality and Sittlichkeit; 13.5. Marx on ideology, alienation, and praxis; 13.6. Schopenhauer on compassion; 13.7. Kierkegaard on faith beyond ethics. -/- XIV Followers of the Enlightenment: intuitionists and utilitarian 14.1 Whewell‘s criticism of utilitarianism; 14.2 Whewell on morality and the philosophy of morality; 14.3 Whewell on the Supreme Norm; 14.4 Whewell on the conflict between duties; 14.5 Mill and the proof of the principle of utility; 14.6 Mill’s eudemonistic utilitarianism; 14.7 Mill on rules -/- XV Followers of the Enlightenment: neo-Kantians and positivists 15.1. French spiritualism; 15.2. Neo-Kantians: the Marburg school; 15.3. Neo-Kantians: the Marburg school; 15.4. Comte’s positivism and the invention of altruism; 15.5. Social Darwinism; 15.6. Wundt and an ethic of humankind -/- XVI Post-enlighteners: Sidgwick 16.1. Criticism of intuitionism; 16.2. On ethical egoism; 16.3. Criticism of utilitarianism -/- XVII Post-enlighteners: Durkheim 17.1. Sociology as physics of customs; 17.2. Morality as physics of customs and as practical science; 17.3. On Kantian ethics and utilitarianism; 17.4. The variability of moralities;17.5. Social solidarity as end and justification of morality; 17.6. Secular morality as “sociodicy”; XVIII Post-enlighteners: Nietzsche 18.1. On the Dionysian; 18.2. On the deconstruction of the world of values 18.3 On the twofold genealogy of moralities; 18.4. On ascetics and nihilism; 18.5. Normative ethics of self-fulfilment -/- Bibliography / Index of names / Index of concepts -/- . (shrink)

As Mormonism comes to the forefront of American culture, some people may be tempted to assume that the past philosophical victories of Christian theism can be equally applied to the version of theism of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. In this paper I attempt to show that there are differences in the LDS worldview, and in the LDS conception of the Divine Nature that make the problem of evil, both in its logical and probabilistic form, a (...) very live threat to its brand of theism. This paper is a project of ramified natural theology that attempts to demonstrate that Christian theism is in a much better philosophical position than LDS theism with regards to the logical and probabilistic problem of evil. (shrink)

A clearer case of a horrible event in nature, a natural evil, has never been presented to me. It seemed to me self evident that the natural law that animals must savagely kill and devour each other in order to survive was an evil natural law and that the obtaining of this law was sufficient evidence that God did not exist. If I held a certain epistemological theory about "basic beliefs", I might conclude from this experience that my intuition that (...) there is no God co existing with th is horror was a "basic belief" and thus that I am epistemically entitled to be an atheist without needing to justify this intuition, But I do not hold such an epistemological theory and believe that intuitive atheological beliefs, such as the one I experienced (and the corresponding intuitive theological beliefs, such as that God is providentially watching over this gruesome event) require justification if they are to be epistemically warranted. The following sections of this article present a justification for the atheological intuition I experienced that dark night. My justification will consist mostly in providing reasons to believe premise (3) in the following probabilistic argument.. (shrink)

This paper is a response to Tyler Wunder’s ‘The modality of theism and probabilistic natural theology: a tension in Alvin Plantinga's philosophy’ (this journal). In his article, Wunder argues that if the proponent of the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN) holds theism to be non-contingent and frames the argument in terms of objective probability, that the EAAN is either unsound or theism is necessarily false. I argue that a modest revision of the EAAN renders Wunder’s objection irrelevant, and (...) that this revision actually widens the scope of the argument. (shrink)

Determinism, causality, chance, free will and divine providence form a class of interlaced problems lying in three domains: philosophy, theology, and physics. Recent article by Dariusz Łukasiewicz in Roczniki Filozoficzne (no. 3, 2020) is a great example. Classical physics, that of Newton and Laplace, may lead to deism: God created the world, but then it goes like a mechanical clock. Quantum mechanics brought some “hope” for a rather naïve theology: God acts in gaps between quanta of indetermination. Obviously, (...) any strict determinism jeopardizes the existence of free will. Yes, but only if human mind follows the laws of physics and only if nothing exists outside the physical limits of space and time. We argue that human action lies in-between two worlds: “earth” and “heavens” using the language of Genesis. In that immaterial world, outside time and space constraints, there is no place for the chain of deterministic events. We discuss, in turn, that the principle of causality, a superior law even in physics, reigns also in the non-material world. Though, determinism in the material universe and causality in both worlds seem to be sufficient conditions, to eliminate “chaotic”, or probabilistic causes from human (and divine) action. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 78-91. This article consists of three parts. First, I will review the major themes of Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude . Since some of my readers will have read this book and others not, I will try to strike a balance between clear summary and fresh critique. Second, I discuss an unpublished book by Meillassoux unfamiliar to all readers of this article, except those scant few that may have gone digging in the microfilm archives of the École normale (...) supérieure. The book in question is Meillassoux’s revised doctoral dissertation L’Inexistence divine (or The Divine Inexistence ), with its seemingly bizarre vision of a God who does not yet exist but might exist in the future. Without literally accepting this view, I will claim that it is philosophically interesting in ways that even a hardened sceptic might be able to appreciate. Third and finally, I will speculate on the possible future of Meillassoux’s speculative materialism itself. And here I mean its future development not by Meillassoux, but by those readers who might be inspired by his book. Plato could never have predicted the emergence of Aristotle’s philosophy, despite the obvious debt of the latter to the former. Nor could Descartes have predicted Spinoza and Leibniz, nor Kant the German Idealists, and neither could Husserl in 1901 have foreseen the later emergence of Heidegger. How are the works of interesting philosophers transformed by later thinkers of comparable importance? While it may seem that there are countless ways to do this, I think there are only two basic ways in which this happens: you can radicalize your predecessors, or you can reverse them. I will close this article with a few words about these two methods, and try to imagine how Meillassoux might be radicalized or reversed by some future admirer. My view is that the more important thinkers are, the easier they are to radicalize or reverse. This helps explain why the great philosophers of the West have so often appeared in clusters, succeeding one another at relatively brief intervals during periods of especial ferment. 1. After Finitude After Finitude is unusually short for such an influential book of philosophy: running to just 178 pages in the original French, and an even more compact 128 pages in the English version, despite the introduction of roughly eight pages of new material for the English edition. Rather than summarizing Meillassoux’s book in the order he intended, I will focus on six points that strike me as the pillars of his debut book. Along the way, I will offer a few criticisms as well. The first pillar of the book is Meillassoux’s own term “correlationism.”1 Although he introduces this term as the name for an enemy, it is striking that Meillassoux remains impressed by correlationism much more than his fellow speculative realists are. This continued appreciation for his great enemy influences the shape of his own ontology. Is there a world outside our thinking of it, or does the world consist entirely in being thought? Traditionally, this dispute between realism and idealism has been dismissed in continental philosophy as a “pseudo-problem,” in a strategy pioneered by Husserl and extended by Heidegger. We cannot be realists, since following Kant we have no direct access to things-in-themselves. But neither are we idealists, since the human being is always already outside itself, aiming at objects in intentional experience, deeply engaged with practical implements, or stationed in some particular world-disclosing mood. The centuries-old dispute between realism and idealism is dissolved by saying that we cannot think either real or ideal in isolation from the other. There is neither human without world nor world without human, but only a primordial correlation or rapport between the two. This is what “correlationism” means: philosophy trapped in a permanent meditation on the human-world correlate, trying to find the best model of the correlate: is it language, intentionality, embodiment, or some other form of correlation between human and world? Among other problems, this generates some friction between philosophy and the literal meaning of science. When cosmologists say that the universe originated 13.5 billion years ago, they do not mean “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” but literally 13.5 billion years ago, well before conscious life existed, and thus at a time when there was no such thing as a correlate. Meillassoux also coins the term “ancestrality” (10) for the reality that predated the correlate, and later expands this term to “dia-chronicity,” (112) to refer to events occurring after the extinction of human beings no less than to those occurring before we existed. Up to this point, Meillassoux’s focus on ancestral entities existing prior to consciousness might seem like a straightforward realist who wants to unmask correlationism as just another form of idealism. Yet Meillassoux also admires the correlationist maneuver, which can obviously be traced back to Kant. Unlike a thinker such as Whitehead, Meillassoux feels no nostalgia for the pre-critical realism that came before Kant: “we cannot but be heirs of Kantianism,” he says (29). What impresses Meillassoux about correlationism is something both simple and familiar. If we attempt to think a tree outside thought, this is itself a thought . Any form of realism which thinks it can simply and directly address the world the way it is fails to escape the correlational circle, since the attempt to think something outside of thought is itself nothing other than a thought, and thereby collapses back into the very human-world correlate that it pretends to escape. For Meillassoux this step, suggested by Kant but first refined by the ensuing figures of German Idealism, marks decisive forward progress in the history of philosophy that must not be abolished. Any attempt to break free from the correlate must first acknowledge its mighty intellectual power. Realist though he may seem, Meillassoux’s works are filled with praise of such figures as Fichte and Hegel, not of so-called “naïve realists.” It is also the case that for Meillassoux, not all correlationisms are the same. The second pillar of his book is a distinction between various positions that I have termed “Meillassoux’s Spectrum,” though of course he is never so immodest as to name it after himself. He distinguishes between at least six different possible positions, and perhaps we could add even subtler variations if we wished. But in its simplest form, Meillassoux’s Spectrum allows for just four basic outlooks on the question of realism vs. anti-realism. Three of these are easy to understand, since we have already been discussing them. At one extreme is so-called “naïve realism,” which holds that a world exists outside the mind, and that we can know this world. Meillassoux rejects this naïve realism as having been overthrown by Kant’s critical philosophy. At the other extreme is subjective idealism, in which nothing exists outside the mind. For to think a dog outside thought immediately turns it into a thought, and therefore there cannot be anything outside; the very notion is meaningless. In between these two is what we have called correlationism. And here comes a crucial moment for Meillassoux, since he distinguishes between the two forms of “weak” and “strong” correlationism, and chooses the strong form as the launching pad for his own philosophy. Weak correlationism is easy to explain, since we all know it from the philosophy of Kant. The things-in-themselves can be thought but not known. They certainly must exist, since there cannot be appearances without something that appears. And we can think about them, which idealism holds to be impossible. They are simply unknowable due to the finitude of human thought. Strong correlationism is the new position introduced by Meillassoux (though he sees it at work in numerous twentieth century thinkers), midway between weak correlationism and subjective idealism. The major difference between the three positions is as follows. Weak correlationism says: “The things-in-themselves exist, but we cannot know them.” The subjective idealist says: “This is a contradiction in terms, since when we think the things-in-themselves, we already turn them into thoughts.” But the strong correlationist says: “Just because ‘things-in-themselves’ is a meaningless notion does not mean that they cannot exist. No one has ever traveled to the world-in-itself and come back to make a report on it. Thus, the fact that we cannot think things-in-themselves without contradiction does not prove that they do not exist anyway. There may be things-in-themselves, we simply are not capable of thinking them without contradiction form within the correlational circle.” This step is crucial for Meillassoux, since strong correlationism is the position he attempts to radicalize into his own new standpoint: speculative materialism. As I see it, this step of the argument fails. Strong correlationism cannot avoid collapsing into subjective idealism, since the statements of the strong correlationist are rendered meaningless from within. All three of the other positions in the Spectrum make perfectly good sense even for those who disagree with them. The naïve realist says that things-in-themselves exist and we can know them; the meaning of this statement is clear. The weak correlationist can say that things-in-themselves exist but lie forever beyond our grasp; this too makes perfect sense, even though the German Idealists try to show a contradiction at work here. We can also understand the claim of the subjective idealist that to think anything outside thought turns it into a thought, and that for this reason we cannot think the unthought. The strong correlationist, alone among the four, speaks nonsense . This person says “I cannot think the unthought without turning it into a thought, and yet the unthought might exist anyway.” But notice that the final phrase “the unthought might exist anyway” is fruitless for this purpose. For we have already heard that to think any unthought turns it into a thought. But now the strong correlationist wants to do two incompatible things simultaneously with this unthought. On the one hand, he neutralizes the unthought by showing that it instantly changes into just another thought. But on the other hand, he wants to appeal to the unthought as a haunting residue that might exist outside thought, thereby undercutting the absolute status of the human-world correlate found in idealism. But this is impossible. If you accept the argument that thinking the unthought turns it into a thought, you cannot also add “but maybe there is something outside that prevents this conversion from being absolutely true,” because this “something outside” is immediately converted into nothing but a thought for us. In short, Meillassoux here seems to be offering a kind of Zen koan: his “strong correlationism” is reminiscent of the gateless gate, or the sound of one hand clapping, or the command to punch Hegel in the jaw when meeting him on the road. We cannot at the same time both destroy the realist challenge of the things-in-themselves in order to undercut realism and reintroduce that very realist sense in order to undercut idealism. In a world where everything is instantly converted into thought, we cannot claim that there might be something extra-mental anyway, because this “might be something” is itself converted into a thought by the same rules that condemned dogs, trees, and houses to the idealist prison. This brings us to the third pillar of Meillassoux’s argument, which is the key to all the rest: the necessity of contingency. His strategy is to transform our supposed ignorance of things-in-themselves into an absolute knowledge that they exist without reason, and that the laws of nature can change at any time for no reason at all. In this way the cautious agnosticism of Kantian philosophies is avoided, but so is the collapse of reality into thought as found in German Idealism. Meillassoux does try to prove the existence of things-in-themselves existing outside thought; he simply holds that they must be proven after passing through the rigors of the correlationist challenge, not just arbitrarily decreed to exist in the manner of naïve realism. As he puts it, “Everything could actually collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and this not by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what, from perishing” (53). If idealism thinks that the human-world correlate is absolute, for Meillassoux it is the facticity of the correlate that is absolute. He tries to show this with a nice brief dialogue between five separate characters (55-59) which is covered in detail in my forthcoming book,2 but which I will simplify here for reasons of time. In this simplified version, we first imagine a dogmatic realist arguing with a dogmatic idealist. The realist says that we can know the truth about the things-in-themselves; the idealist counters that we can only the truth about thought, since all statements about reality must be turned into statements concerning our thoughts about reality. Here the correlationist enters and proclaims that both of these positions are equally dogmatic. For although we have access to nothing but thoughts, we cannot be sure that these thoughts are all that exist; there could be a reality outside thought, there is simply no way to know for sure. And this latter position is the one that Meillassoux attempts to transform from an agnostic, skeptical point into an ontological claim about the contingency of everything. Consider it this way. How does the correlationist defeat the idealist? The idealist holds that the existence of anything outside thought is impossible. The correlationist, by contrast, holds that something might exist outside the human-world correlate. But this “something might” has to be an absolute possibility. It cannot mean that “something outside thought might exist for thought ,” because that is what the idealist already says. No, the correlationist must mean that something might exist outside thought quite independently of thought. In other words, the correlationist says that idealism might be wrong, and this means it is absolutely true that idealism might be wrong. Thus, correlationism is no longer just a skeptical position. It holds that all the possibilities of the world are absolute possibilities. We have absolute knowledge that any of the possibilities about the existence or non-existence of things-in-themselves might be true, and this means that correlationism flips into Meillassoux’s own position: speculative materialism. As Meillassoux sees it, there are only two options here. Option A is to absolutize the human-world correlate, which is what the idealist does: there absolutely cannot be anything outside thought. Option B, by contrast, is to absolutize the facticity of the correlate: its character of simply being given to us, without any inherent necessity. The correlationist cannot have it both ways by saying: “there absolutely might be something outside thought, yet maybe this is absolutely impossible.” In other words, once we escape dogmatism we can only be idealists or speculative materialists, not correlationists. The human-world correlate is merely a fact, not an absolute necessity. But this facticity itself cannot be merely factical: it must be absolute. Here Meillassoux coins the French neologism factualité , which has been suitably translated into the English neologism “factiality.” (7, 122-3) Factialty means that for everything that exists, it is absolutely possible that it might be otherwise, not just that we cannot know whether or not it might be otherwise. Just as Kant transformed philosophy into a meditation on the categories governing human finitude, Meillassoux wishes to turn philosophy into a meditation on the necessary conditions of factiality, which he calls “figures”—a new technical term for him. (80) One such figure is that the law of non-contradiction must be true, and for an unusual reason. Since everything is proven to be contingent, nothing that exists can be contradictory, for whatever is contradictory has no opposite into which it might be transformed, and thus contingency would be impossible.3 Another such figure is that there must be something rather than nothing: for since contingency exists, something must exist in order to be contingent. It is a daring high-wire act, one that sacrifices realism to the correlational circle in order to rebuild it from out of its own ashes. Some might conclude that the lack of reason in things is a byproduct of the ignorance of finite humans, Meillassoux is making precisely the opposite point. For in fact, the doctrine of finitude usually leads directly to belief in a hidden reason. The fact that it lies beyond human comprehension merely increases our belief in this arbitrarily chosen concealed ground. By defending anew the concept of absolute knowledge Meillassoux evacuates the world of everything hidden. The reason for things having no reason is not that the reason is hidden, but that no reason exists. Thus, even while insisting on the necessity of non-contradiction, he rejects the other Leibnizian principle: sufficient reason. Everything simply is what it is, in purely immanent form, without deeply hidden causes. Or as Meillassoux puts it: “There is nothing beneath or beyond the manifest gratuitousness of the given—nothing but the limitless and lawless power of its destruction, emergence, or persistence” (63).The world is a “hyper-chaos”(64). But this is not the same thing as flux. For the chaos of the world is such that stability might occur just as easily as constant, turbulent change. Let’s now digress a bit, and return to the question of ancestrality, which Meillassoux transforms later in the book into “dia-chronicity.” Correlationism holds that all talk of a world outside the correlate is immediately recuperated by the correlate. The phrase “13.5 billion years ago” becomes “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” and the phrase “the universe following the extinction of humans” becomes “the universe following the extinction of humans for humans .” But notice that whether we talk about the world before or after humans, in both cases it is time that is used to challenge the correlate. Meillassoux has no interest in challenges that might be posed by space. For example, what about a vase in a lonely country house that topples to the floor and smashes when no one is there to watch it? Isn’t this also a challenge to correlationism, no less than the Big Bang or the heat death of the universe long after humans have vanished? In an eight-page supplement to the English translation of After Finitude ,4 possibly in response to my own 2007 review of the French original,5 Meillassoux bluntly denies that space is of any relevance to the question. Spatial distance is a merely harmless challenge to the human-world correlate. After all, even though no one is there in the lonely country house to witness the shattering of the vase, we can say that had there been an observer , that observer would have witnessed the toppling and destruction of the vase. For this event still occurs in a world in which the human-world correlate already exists, whereas the diachronicity of events both before and after the existence of humans makes it impossible to say that had there been an observer they would have witnessed the Big Bang occurring in such and such a fashion. However, it seems to me that Meillassoux merely asserts that the temporal simultaneity of our existence with that of the vase in the lonely country house is enough to render it harmless. It is true that the house does not exist prior to the correlate, but nonetheless it exists outside the correlate, and that is enough to make the same challenge. It is difficult to see why the “had there been an observer” maneuver succeeds in the case of a vase in the countryside in April 2011 but fails in the case of the Big Bang. This is not just a matter of nitpicking Meillassoux’s argumentative style: the fact that he bases his argument on time has at least two important consequences for his position. For in the first place, even though Meillassoux insists that the laws of nature are absolutely contingent, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense. That is to say, it is a paradoxical feature of Meillassoux’s philosophy that he does allow for the existence of laws of nature, and simply believes that they can change at any moment without reason. Within any given moment, laws of nature do exist. He never suggests that different parts of the universe can have different laws at the same time, nor does he have any interest in the laws of part/whole composition that take place within any given instant. Could it be the case that rather than being made of gold atoms, a small chunk of gold could be made of silver atoms, cotton, horses, or that this same small piece of gold could be made of gigantic vaults filled with even more gold? These are not topics that draw Meillassoux’s attention, since he is focused solely on how the laws of nature might change or endure from one moment to the next . Another implication for Meillassoux’s system is that his concept of things-in-themselves turns out to be to be inadequate. For when he proves that things-in-themselves can exist without humans, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense as well. Namely, things-in-themselves existed ten billion years ago, and they will continue to exist after all humans have succeeded in exterminating themselves. However, being able to exist before our births and after our deaths is just one small part of what it means to be a thing-in-itself. The more important part is that even if a thing is sitting on a table right now, in front of me, even if I stroke it lovingly or press my face up against it directly, I am still dealing only with a phenomenal version of the thing; the thing-in-itself continues to withdraw from all access. Yet no such thing is acknowledged by Meillassoux. For him finitude is a disaster, and absolute knowledge is in fact possible. Meillassoux’s thing-in-itself exists in independence only of the human lifespan , not of human knowledge. The fifth pillar of Meillassoux’s argument is his use of Cantor’s transfinite mathematics to show that even if the laws of nature are contingent, they need not be unstable, and thus we cannot use the apparent stability of nature to disprove his metaphysics of absolute contingency. What Cantor showed is that there are different sizes of infinity, and that all these infinities cannot be totalized in a single infinite number of infinities. Meillassoux sees this as crucial, since it allows him to discredit any “probabilistic” argument against his theory. The probabilistic argument (as defended quite clearly by Jean-René Vernes)6 would say this: given that the laws of nature seem so stable, it it is extremely improbable that there is no hidden reason for their remaining so stable. As Meillassoux sees it, probability is of value only when we can index an accessible total of cases. These can even be infinite: for example, there are an infinite number of points where a rope can break when stretched tight, but this does not stop us from calculating probabilities for various sections of the rope to break. By contrast, there is no way to sum up the number of possible laws of nature. For here there is no way to totalize; we cannot stand outside of nature and calculate the possible number of laws so as to determine the probabilities that any one of them might change. Therefore, although we can speak of probability when dealing with intraworldly events such as elections, horse races, and coin-flips, we cannot use the words “probable” or “improbable” when describing alterations at the level of nature as a whole. Rather than commenting on the validity of this argument and its use of Cantor, let me simply note that it once again creates a dualistic ontology. We already saw that Meillassoux treats time differently from space. In analogous fashion, he now treats the level of world differently from that of intraworldly events. The emergence of worlds is purely contingent and virtual and governed by no probability at all, while events within the world necessarily follow laws (even if these laws can change at any moment without reason), and thus their probabilities can be calculated. It is a strategy deeply reminiscent of Badiou’s (2005) own dualism between the normal “state of the situation” and the rare and intermittent “event.” The sixth and final pillar of Meillassoux’s book can be dealt with briefly, since we have already touched on it elsewhere. It comes at the very beginning of the book, when Meillassoux says that we must revive the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, and that the primary qualities are the ones that can be mathematized. He admits that he has not yet published a proof of this idea, though in fact it is already known as one of his primary doctrines. And here we encounter the familiar problem with Meillassoux’s inadequate conception of things-in-themselves. “Primary qualities” refers to those qualities that a thing has independently of its relations with us or anything else. But if the primary qualities can be mathematized, this means that they are not entirely independent of us, since our knowledge can get right to the bottom of them. The mathematized qualities of things are independent of us only in Meillassoux’s sense that they will still have those qualities even when all humans are dead. But to repeat, autonomy from the human lifespan is not the same as autonomy from human access. Here once more Meillassoux is concerned only with independence from the human-world correlate across time, not in any given instant. 2. L’Inexistence divine In 1997, the same year in which he turned thirty years old, Meillassoux earned his doctorate at the École normale supériuere with a brazen dissertation entitled L’Inexistence divine ( The Divine Inexistence ). The work was substantially revised in 2003. But even then, with typical fastidiousness, Meillassoux decided that the work was not yet ready for press. It has now been scrapped in favor of some future, multi-volume work bearing the same title. While writing my book on Meillassoux for Edinburgh University Press, I was permitted to translate excerpts from this unpublished work for use as an appendix in my own book; in total, the appendix contains approximately twenty percent of Meillassoux’s 2003 manuscript, the first time any of it will be published in any language. Nonetheless, a portion of the argument was already tested in the article “Spectral Dilemma,” published in English in the journal Collapse (2008: 261-75). There the philosophical motives for the virtual God are already made clear. What troubles us most are early deaths, brutal deaths, deaths of especial injustice– the sorts of deaths in which the brutal twentieth century was so abundant. And here, neither the atheist nor the believer can help us. The atheist can offer nothing but a sad and cynical resignation when reflecting on the victims of these terrible crimes. The believer does little better, being unable to explain how God could have allowed such things to happen, due to the famous intractability of the problem of evil. The solution offered to this dilemma by Meillassoux is bold, and all the more so given that he emerges from such a deeply Leftist, materialist, and unreligious background. His solution is that God does not yet exist, and therefore is not blameworthy for these catastrophes. Given that everything is contingent in Meillassoux’s philosophy, this God and divine justice might never exist, but they can at least exist as an object of hope. Let’s begin by jumping to the end of L’Inexistence divine , where the alternatives are laid out so nicely. There are four basic attitudes that humans can have towards God, Meillassoux says. First, we can believe in God because he exists. This is the classical theist attitude, rejected for the simple reason that it would be amoral and blasphemous to believe in a God who allows children to be eaten by dogs, to use Dostoevsky’s example. Second, we can disbelieve in God because he does not exist: the classical atheist attitude. But this leads to sadness, cynicism, and a sneering contempt for the greatness of human capacity. The third option, rather more complex, is to disbelieve in God because he does exist: in other words, to exist in rebellion against God as the one who must be blamed for the evils of the earth. The examples here might range from Lucifer himself, to the more human figure of Captain Ahab in Melville’s Moby-Dick , to Werner Herzog’s even more recent catchphrase, “Every man for himself, and God against all.” That leaves only the fourth option: believing in God because he does not exist. Meillassoux closes his book by saying that the fourth option has now been tried (namely, in the course of his own book), and that now that all four have been specified, we must choose. The first reaction to this theory of the inexistent God will be laughter. Few readers will ever be literally convinced by it, and probably none will immediately be convinced by it. But if we ask ourselves why we laugh, the answer is because it sounds so improbable that an inexistent God might suddenly emerge and resurrect the dead. It obviously sounds more like a gullible theology than a rigorous piece of philosophical work. Yet two things need to be kept in mind. First, Meillassoux’s theories are hardly more unlikely than those of great philosophers of the past such as Plato, Plotinus, Avicenna, Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche, or Whitehead. We read the great philosophers not because their systems are plausible in commonsense terms that can be measured by the laws of probability. Instead, we read them precisely because they shatter the existing framework of common sense and open up new window on the universe. Second, and even more importantly, Meillassoux has already rejected probability as a valid measuring stick in philosophy. Or rather, he accepts probability in the intra-worldly realm (where it is linked with potentiality), and rejects it at the level of the world itself (where potentiality is replaced with what he calls virtuality). The virtual God can appear at any moment for no reason at all, just as any other new configuration of laws of nature can appear: in a manner that the laws of probability cannot calculate. Responding to those who might ridicule the idea of a sudden emergence of God and a resurrection of the dead, Meillassoux cites Pascal, who asserts that the resurrection of the dead would be far less incredible than the fact that we were born in the first place. This shifts philosophy onto new ground. Rather than concerning ourselves with what is likely to happen in the world as we know it, we focus instead on the most important things that could happen. For this reason, the expected objection that a virtual God is no more likely to appear than a virtual unicorn or a virtual flying spaghetti monster misses the point. Unicorns and spaghetti monsters could also appear, just like any other non-contradictory thing. But these would just be novel bizarre entities among others, not the heralds of completely new worlds. For Meillassoux, the emergence of matter, life, and thought have been the three truly amazing advents of the world so far, each of them dependent on the advent(s) preceding them. As he sees it, there can be no greater intraworldly entity than the human beings who already exist, since nothing in the world is better than the absolute knowledge of which humans alone are capable. This means that the next great advent must be something that perfects human beings rather than superseding them. And this can only be the world of justice, in which the dead are resurrected and their horrible deaths partially cancelled (Meillassoux never considers the possibility of a God who would literally erase the pre-divine past so that it never happened at all). The only immortality worth having is an immortality of this life, not an existence in some ill-defined afterworld. Human existence, he holds, must always be governed by a “symbol” that gives us the “immanent and comprehensible inscription of values in a world.” And just as cosmic history made the three great contingent leaps of matter, life, and thought, with a leap to justice as the only one still to come, a similar structure occurs within human culture and its symbols, which consist so far of the cosmological, naturalistic, and historical symbols, with a “factial” symbol still to come. We can review each of these symbols briefly. The cosmological symbol refers to the ancient dualism between the terrestrial and celestial spheres. Here below everything is conflict, corruption, and decay; but in the heavens nothing is perishable, all movement is circular, and everything is arranged in mutual harmony. This symbol is ended by modern physics when Galileo discovers such blemishes as sunspots and craters on the moon, and when Newton integrates both celestial and terrestrial movement into a single gravitational law. Next comes the naturalistic or romantic symbol, in which perfection comes not from the sky but from nature itself. The world is filled with pretty flowers (Meillassoux claims that the ancients never discussed the beauty of flowers until Plotinus in the third century) and with living creatures naturally moved by pity, at least until society corrupts them. This symbol collapses in the face of reality as we know it, since pity is no more common than war, corruption, and violence. This brings us to the historical symbol, which only now is passing away. Bad things may happen, but history has an inner logic of its own, such that everything works out in the end. The ultimate form of the historical symbol is the economic symbol, whether in a Marxist or neo-liberal form. Just as the Marxist holds that the inner economic logic of the capitalists will inexorably lead them to self-destruction, the neo-liberal assumes that the sum total of individual selfish actions will lead, in the long run, to the greatest possible good. We worship the economy and let it guide history for us, just as the ancients worshipped celestial bodies and held them to be free from blemish. The final remaining symbol is the factial symbol, which Meillassoux hopes will now emerge. Factiality, we recall, is his term for the absolute contingency of everything that exists. Once we have grasped this absolute contingency, we are free to expect the dramatic advent of the coming fourth World: the world of justice, inaugurated by a virtual God and even mediated by a messianic human figure. There is the added feature, however, that this messiah must abandon all claims to special status once the messianic realm of justice is achieved. The messianic figure will then be no more special than any person on the street, since a reign of human equality will have arisen. Although this focus on human being might seem like a return to standard humanism, Meillassoux holds that human pre-eminence has never truly been maintained. Previously, humans have been treated as special only because they contemplate the Good, because they resemble their omnipotent creator, or because they happen to be the temporary victors in a cruel Darwinian death-match between millions of living species. For Meillassoux, by contrast, humans have value because they know the eternal. But it is not the eternal that is important, since this merely represents the blind, anonymous contingency of each thing. What is important is not knowledge of the eternal , but knowledge of the eternal. We should not admire Prometheus for stealing fire from the gods; Prometheus is simply as bad as all the gods, no matter how much he increased our power. Feuerbach and Marx were wrong to say that God is a projection of the human essence, since for Meillassoux the usual concept of God represents the degradation of the human essence. If the traditional God was allowed to inflict plagues and tsunamis on the human race, the Promethean human of the twentieth century simply assumes the right to inflict death camps and atomic fireballs instead. In this respect, we have simply begun to imitate the degradation of humanity that was formerly invested in an omnipotent and arbitrary God. In response to charges that absolute contingency might lead to political quietism, Meillassoux counters that the World of justice would mean nothing unless we had already hoped for it beforehand. A World of justice that came along at random would merely be an improved third World of thought: indeed, a perfect one. But it would have satisfied no craving, and would therefore have no redemptive power. For this reason, we must actively hope for the fourth World of justice for such a fourth World ever to arise. Not only justice, but beauty is dependent on such hope: for Meillassoux, who is here somewhat dependent on Kant, beauty means an accord between our human symbolization and the actual world, which could never be present in a World of the blessed any more than justice could. And just as a messianic figure is needed to incarnate our hope and then abandon power once the World of justice is realized, it is the figure of the child whose fragile contingency shows us a dignity and a demand for justice beyond all power. 3. Meillassoux Radicalized or Reversed Given the promising reception of Meillassoux’s first book, it would not be groundless to engage in early speculation about what it might take to earn him a place in the history of philosophy. Maybe this will never happen—who knows?—but quite possibly it will: his lucid argumentative methods and sheer philosophical imagination at least make him a good candidate to be read well into the future, especially following further elaboration in print of his mature system. Philosophy is often practiced as thought it were nothing more than the amassing of “knockdown arguments.” But this is no more insightful than saying that good architecture is the amassing of steal beams. It is true that poorly constructed building cannot stand for long, but sound construction is merely the first, indispensable step in building. In fact, I am inclined to say that what really makes a philosopher important is not being right, but being wrong . I mean this in a very specific sense. I once heard the interesting remark about twentieth century culture that “you have to remember that the sixties really happened in the seventies.” That is to say, it was in the 1970’s rather than the more honored 1960’s that civil rights, free love, long hair, and the rock and roll drug culture really took root. With respect to the history of philosophy, we might just as easily say: “you have to remember that Plato really happened in Aristotle,” that “Kant really happened in Hegel” or “Hume really happened in Kant,” or that “Husserl’s phenomenology first achieved its truth in Heidegger.” One becomes an important philosopher not by being right, but by attracting rebellious admirers who tell you that you are wrong , even as their own careers silently orbit around your own. To recruit faithful disciples may be comforting and flattering, but the greatest thinkers have generally had to experience refutation at the hands of their most talented heirs. For this reason, I would propose that we size up the magnitude of living thinkers not by deciding how many times they are right and wrong, but by asking instead: who would take the trouble to refute this author? For this reason I do not ask: “Is Meillassoux right?”, since I do not believe in the virtual God myself, nor am I convinced by any important aspect of Meillassoux’s philosophy. Instead, I ask if there are interesting ways to overturn him. Only by being overturned, by no longer remaining a contemporary, does one become a classic. Let’s begin with a simple model of refutation, which can be refined further at a later date once the basic point is established. One kind of refutation simply consists in saying: “This author is a complete idiot.” The refuter now walks away in celebration, and no link between the present and the future is built; all is reduced to rubble. But this sort of mediocre triumphalism is generally practiced by those who achieve little of their own, and is not especially interesting. Much more interesting is the sort of refutation that does not take its target to be a complete idiot. I would like to suggest that there are just two basic ways in which this can be done: radicalization and reversal . It has not escaped my notice that this is a fairly good match for the Deleuzian distinction between irony and humor. Whereas irony critiques and adopts the opposite principle of what it attacks, humor accepts what it confronts but pushes it into highly exaggerated form. The ironist is like the worker who sows chaos by rebeling and contradicting the boss, while the humorist is like the worker who follows orders to an absurdly literal degree, with equally chaotic results. Let’s start with a few examples. In Aristotle’s treatment of Plato, and Heidegger’s of Husserl, we find reversal. Plato’s eidei are transformed by Aristotle into mere secondary substances, and the individual worldly things despised by Plato become what is primary. For Husserl what is primary is whatever is present to consciousness, while for Heidegger this is precisely what is secondary, since the primary stuff of the world withdraws from any form of presence at all. As for radicalization, it is most easily found in the transformation of Kant by German Idealism: “Kant was right to wall off the things-in-themselves from human access, and simply should have realized that the thought of the Ding an sich is also a thought, and thereby the noumena are just special cases of the phenomena,” with much following from this discovery. It would also be easy to read Spinoza as a radicalizer of Descartes, and Berkeley and Hume as radicalized versions of Locke. Perhaps the distinction is now sufficiently clear. Admiring refutations are not those that say “Professor X is an idiot,” which is merely the flip side of the eager disciple’s fruitless “Professor X got everything right.” Instead, it will be some variant of one of the following two options: “Professor X is important, but got it backwards,” or “Professor X is important, but didn’t push things far enough.” In the history of philosophy these two latter cases have often been painful in purely human terms: Aristotle expresses sadness at refuting Plato, Kant is openly annoyed at Fichte, and Husserl feels betrayed and used by Heidegger. Rude handling from later figures almost seems to be the sine qua non of being a great philosopher. Now, it has already been claimed that Meillassoux is an emerging philosopher of the first importance, and by no less a figure than Alain Badiou: “It would be no exaggeration to say that Quentin Meillassoux has opened up a new path in the history of philosophy…” (Preface, vii). But rather than taking Badiou’s word for it, or rejecting his word, we might experiment by asking how Meillassoux could be radicalized or reversed. Are there interesting ways of doing this that might launch whole new schools of philosophy, unexpected or even condemned by Meillassoux himself? While no one can see the future, the present is poor when it is not riddled with virtual futures. The relation between philosophers and their predecessors and successors is always somewhat complicated, of course. But generally there is one central divergence at stake, which might be taken as the key to all the others. On this basis we could say that new thinkers primarily radicalize or primarily reverse the main ideas of their chief philosophical forerunner. There may be specific historical conditions and perhaps even personality traits connected with these two types, but this question can be left aside for now. More important for us is that radicalizers will generally be followed by reversers, and vice versa. Consider the textbook example of a reversal in the history of philosophy: Kant’s Copernican Revolution, which inverts the so-called dogmatic tradition that addresses the world itself, and makes the world revolve instead around the conditions by which it is known. While it is not completely impossible that Kant’s successors might have re-reversed this principle back into a new and stronger dogmatic realism, conditions were premature for such a move. Anyone doing this too early would likely have been an angry anti-Kantian reactionary rather than an original thinker in command of a genuinely new realist principle. The far more likely outcome is the one that actually happened: Kant’s reversal of his predecessors was viewed as incomplete, or as retaining lamentable bits of the traditional view, which despite his admirable breakthrough he was unable to shake off. This was the view of German Idealism, anyway. In similar fashion, Spinoza could also be viewed as a radicalizer of Descartes, who is equally accused of preserving various Scholastic dogmas in an otherwise radical project of philosophical reversal. The point is this: reversals in the history of thought tend to be followed soon thereafter by radicalizations of those reversals. The same may hold true in reverse: radicalizations might generally be followed by reversals, given that it is not always possible to be more radical than the radicals have already been. Consider the case of Husserl, who radicalizes Brentano’s early vagueness about what lies beyond immanent objectivity, and Twardowski’s assertion that there must be an external object lying outside the intentional content, by collapsing everything into the intentional sphere: there is no difference between the Berlin in my consciousness and the actual Berlin that is home to millions of people. It is difficult to see how one could be even more radical than Husserl’s idealist turn here. And thus the road is paved to Heidegger’s reversal of classical phenomenology, in which the key point is what lies deeper than any presence to consciousness: the Sein whose power and obscurity cannot be made exhaustively present, but only sends itself in historical epochs. In similar fashion we might also read Leibniz as a reverser of Spinoza’s radicalization, retrieving a strong sense of individual substance and a certain validity of what the Scholastics had said. Returning to Meillassoux, we might ask which kind of philosopher he is: a radicalizer or a reverser? At present, Meillassoux looks to me like a radicalizer (though for now his future remains shrouded in mist). He takes the correlationist tradition, which allows us to speak only of the relation between human and world, and tries to raise it into an even more extreme claim about the absolute contingency of everything. But whereas German Idealism did this by trying to collapse the distinction between thought and world entirely into the “thought” side, Meillassoux does it by trying to shift the non-absolute contingency of the thought-world correlate from epistemology to ontology. It is no longer a question of the inability of human knowledge to know what lies outside the correlate, but the inability of reality itself to be rooted in any definite laws. Furthermore, if we look at the various features of Meillassoux’s philosophy identified earlier tonight, all but one are already so radical that there is no obvious way to push them further. The one exception would be his claim that the world as a whole can change for no reason at any moment, coupled with the inconsistent claim that within a given world there are laws of nature that everything must follow. If gravitational attraction between all masses is a current law in our world, then for Meillassoux there can be no exceptions to this law for as long as it remains in force. A toppled vase will fall to the floor every time for sure,unless there is a cosmic change by which the laws of nature as a whole have altered. (This is reminiscent of the late medieval distinction between the absolute and ordained power of God, according to which God has the power to set or change the laws of nature, but not to contravene those laws locally once they are set.) On this point, to radicalize Meillassoux would simply be to say: there are no laws of nature even in the local sense. Everything that happens, even in the world here and now, is purely contingent and not governed by even a trace of law. And while this would be a more consistent development of Meillassoux’s thoughts on contingency, it is difficult to see how it could lead to a new philosophy. Instead, the admiring successors of Meillassoux are more likely to reverse one of his already sufficiently radical points. At least four candidates come to mind: *First, we have seen that Meillassoux thinks correlationism is challenged by a time before or after consciousness, but not by a space lying outside it. Perhaps this could be reversed into saying that spatial exteriority is the really crucial point. The arguments on this point are perhaps the least convincing in After Finitude (and do not even occur in the original French edition), and therefore it might be a candidate for the “blind spot” of which no philosopher is ever free. *Second, Meillassoux uses Cantor to claim that the contingency of laws of nature would not entail that they are unstable. A successor of Meillassoux might claim that it does make them unstable, and celebrate this fact. This person would then have to explain why common sense seems to encounter a relatively stable world despite its truly rampant instability. Whereas Meillassoux’s problem is to show how stability might exist despite contingency, this successor’s problem would be slightly different: to show why actual, full-blown instability might have the appearance of stability. *Third, Meillassoux claims that the primary qualities of things are those that can be mathematized. He might be reversed by a successor who says the opposite: the mathematizable qualities are the secondary ones, and the primary ones are those that elude symbolic formulation. While this is a perfectly valid possible objection to Meillassoux, it is one that is made in advance by some of his predecessors and is still made by some of his peers, making it less interesting for futurology than some of his other points. *Fourth and finally, whereas Meillassoux claims that God does not exist but might exist in the future, a successor might argue even more bizarrely that God has always existed but might vanish in the future. Let’s arbitrarily select the first of these possibilities, and imagine briefly where it might lead, if pursued in the future by admiring detractors. Meillassoux comes from the circle of Badiou, and some of Badiou’s most ardent admirers are found in Latin America. So, let’s imagine that towards mid-century some ingenious reversers of Meillassoux emerge in that portion of the Spanish-speaking world. Just for fun, let’s call them Castro and Chávez. And in order to avoid any confusion with the present-day politicians of those names, we will stipulate that Meillassoux’s great successors are both women. The philosopher Castro (we will suppose she comes from Peru) reverses Meillassoux’s argument that the ancestral or diachronic are what most threaten the human-world correlate. Instead, she claims that the diachronic does not threaten the correlate at all, and that we must instead look at space as what ruins the correlate and demands a strange new realism. What would such a philosophy look like? In order to determine this, we might ask what price Meillassoux pays for doing it the opposite way. As I see it, he pays in two separate ways. One is that laws of nature for him are contingent over time . The laws of nature apply to the universe as a whole at any given moment, and would be changed globally if they are ever changed at all. The second price he pays is that Meillassoux has no mereology , or theory of parts and wholes. Everything for him is on the level of the given, or immanent in experience, with the sole proviso that the laws governing this immanence might change without notice at any given moment. In reversing Meillassoux, Castro makes the following claims in the preface to her stunning debut book of 2045, The Cosmos and its Neighborhoods , rapidly translated from Spanish into all the languages of the world: Despite his brilliant analysis of the contingency of laws of nature over time, Meillassoux gets two important assumptions wrong. First, he allows for only one set of contingent laws to govern nature as a whole. Second, he allows laws to govern only the world that is immanent in experience, and thereby fails to explore the contingency among part-whole relations. In this book I will argue, first, that the laws of nature vary in any given instant between one region of the universe and the next; and second, that the world is made up of layers of parts and wholes that are also contingent with respect to one another. Those are the words of Castro. This may sound like a hopeless free-for-all of chaos, yet the book somehow succeeds in drawing some compelling deductions about how laws must vary from one place or level in the world to the next. Trapped in the limited horizon of 2011, and not yet inspired by the heavily balkanized political and technological situation of 2050 that somehow lends additional credence to Castro’s vision, we can only vaguely grasp what such a philosophy might look like. After this reversal of Meillassoux by Castro, the usual pattern leads us to expect a radicalization by Chávez, a young Argentine student of Castro. How could the already strange theories of Castro be radicalized? Perhaps as follows, in a disturbing new book entitled The Implosion of the Neighborhoods , which argues as follows: Castro was right to shift the Meillassouxian framework of contingency from time to space. However, in this respect she retained a surprisingly traditional opposition between the two. In this book I will show that time and space collapse into one another. This may sound too much like the discredited four-dimensional block universe of twentieth century physics and philosophy. However, the four-dimensional universe is a model biased in favor of space, merely adding an extra dimension to the commonsense spatial continuum while stipulating that the serial passage of time is an illusion. In this book I will argue instead for a one-dimensional space-time modeled after our experience of time, in which there is no simultaneous co-existence at all between different parts of the universe, or ‘neighborhoods’ as my esteemed teacher Castro has called them. Instead, the various portions of the universe link to one another by succession rather than by coexistence. Buenos Aires, New York, and Amsterdam do not exist simultaneously in the same landscape, but one after the other in the mind of some observer, and this observer can only be an observer much larger than any human. Against Meillassoux’s notion of a virtual God that does not exist now but might exist in the future, I will argue for an actual God that surveys the universe in sequence, thereby generating the illusion of spatial diversity and even the illusion of individual minds located within that diversity. Once this divine observer dies, the universe as a whole must perish. Again, these ideas are so bizarre that we of 2011 can barely comprehend them, just as Aristotle would have had a difficult time grasping the theories of Descartes. We could then perhaps imagine a further reversal of this theory, emanating from the intellectually resurgent Philippines of the twenty-second century. The Filipino School might argue that the universe is already dead, given the collapse of its spatial richness into the serial observations of a flimsy and mortal God. The virtual universe does not yet exist, but might exist in fully spatial form in the future, and this would require the death of God and the resulting liberation of God’s succession of images as independent, spatially situated realities. With a bit of sharpening, we might be able to make all of these imaginary thinkers more intuitively clear. Along with the history of philosophy, there might arise a new discipline generating imaginary futures for philosophy. The richness of Meillassoux’s system comes not from the fact that he is plausibly right about so many things, but because his philosophy offers such a treasury of bold statements ripe for being radicalized or reversed. He is a rich target for many still-unborn intellectual heirs, and this is what gives him the chance to be an important figure. NOTES 1. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude . Trans. R Brassier. (London: Continuum, 2008.) Page 5. The word “correlationism” does not appear in his doctoral thesis. As Meillassoux informed me in an email of February 8, 2011, he first coined this term in 2003 or 2004, while editing for publication a lecture he had given at the École normale supérieure on a day devoted to the theme of “Philosophy and Mathematics,” an event including Alain Badiou as one of the participants. 2. Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making . (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2011). 3. In an email of December 6, 2010, Meillassoux clarifies that in After Finitude he only deduces the impossibility of a “universal contradiction,” not of a determinate contradiction. In the same email he suggests that he can also prove the latter, though the proof is somewhat lengthier than the one found in After Finitude . 4. After Finitude (18-26), in the passage falling between the two sets of triple asterisks. These pages were sent by Meillassoux to translator Ray Brassier (in French) during the translation process, and do not appear in the original French version of the book. 5. Graham Harman, “Quentin Meillassoux: A New French Philosopher.” Philosophy Today 51.1 (2007): Pages 104-117. The passage where I raise the question of space can be found in the first column of page 107. 6. Vernes is first cited on p. 95 of After Finitude . See Jean-René Vernes, Critique de la raison aléatoire, ou Descartes contra Kant . (Paris: Aubier, 1982).  . (shrink)

The problem of God's action in the world is at the heart of debates today on the relationship between science and religion. By analysing the issue through the lens of analytic philosophy, Marek Slomka reveals how philosophy can successfully bridge science and theology to bring greater clarity to divine action. This book identifies essential aspects from various branches of theism, starting with traditional Thomistic approaches, through to their modified forms such as Molinism and contemporary varieties such as free-will theism (...) and probabilistic theism. Analysing crucial elements of God's nature including omnipotence, omniscience, his relation to time and the tension between immanence and transcendence, Slomka reveals the difficulties in proposing a single conception of God through one theistic tradition. Instead of simplistically juxtaposing particular theistic trends, he highlights the value of pluralistic insights that also draw on important scientific theories, including Darwin's evolution, quantum mechanics and cosmology. By taking a renewed stance on theism that takes into account modern scientific knowledge, this book argues for a new presentation of the problem of God's action in the world and justifies the need for further discussion on contemporary manifestations of internal and external criticism of theism. (shrink)

The limitations and unsuitability of the twentieth century intellectual marvel, the quantum mechanics for the task of unraveling working of human consciousness is critically analyzed. The inbuilt traits of the probabilistic, approximate and imprecise nature of quantum mechanical approach are brought out. -/- The limitations and the unsuitability of using such knowledge for the understanding of precise, correct, finite and definite happenings of activities relating to human consciousness and mind, which are not quantum in nature, are pointed out. -/- (...) Analytical methods interpreting philosophical and Indian spiritual analyses suiting the unraveling of working of human consciousness and mind over the deductive approach of quantum physics and advanced mathematics are highlighted. A model of human consciousness and mental functions is presented taking ideas from the Upanishads and related texts. -/- Comparisons with theological interpretations of Upanishadic insight are dealt with to have an idea of working of human consciousness and mind in relation to spirituality. (shrink)

Karl Pearson is the leading figure of XX century statistics. He and his co-workers crafted the core of the theory, methods and language of frequentist or classical statistics – the prevalent inductive logic of contemporary science. However, before working in statistics, K. Pearson had other interests in life, namely, in this order, philosophy, physics, and biological heredity. Key concepts of his philosophical and epistemological system of anti-Spinozism (a form of transcendental idealism) are carried over to his subsequent works on the (...) logic of scientific discovery. This article’s main goal is to analyze K. Pearson early philosophical and theological ideas and to investigate how the same ideas came to influence contemporary science, either directly or indirectly – by the use of variant theories, methods and dialects of statistics, corresponding to variant statistical inference procedures and their specific belief calculi. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:556 BOOK REVIEWS actions ag'ainst the subject as battery. A further problem with creating embryos for research is that so doing violates the rights of ·the person or person-to-be to its parents and family. Crea.ting these embryos treats them as means and as nothing more than scientifically interesting material, but with no rights against harmful assaults. University of Illinois Chanipaign-Urbana FR. ROBERT BARRY, O.P. Evolution ana Creation. Edited by (...) ERNAN MoMULLIN. Notre Dame, Indiana : Notre Dame Press, 1986. Pp. 304. $24.96 (cloth). This book offers a stimulating array of perspectives on the one thing about evolutionary theory that directly concerns Christian thinkers: its reconciliation with the Judeo-Christian account of creation. The essays were originally papers delivered at a symposium held at the University of Notr.e Dame. Besides bringing them together in a single volume, the editor, Ernan McMullin, has himself contributed a lucid introductory essay for the sake of historical context. Still, at the book's end, I found myself left with the question that books on this topic always seems to leave me with: Where are the philosophical and theological problems posed by evolutionary theory? To be sure, the cultural and historical impact of Darwin's theory raised questions of reconciliation between biblical claims and scientific evidence, but the perceived philosophical and theological problems were more apparent than real. What gave them bite was the absence of a proper understanding of the difference between philosophical and scientific knowledge created by the collapse of the Aristotelian system in the sixteenth century. The insufficiencies of the Aristotelian science, rendered glaring by the steady emergence of the new science, not only led to the rejection of Aristotelianism vn toto but left an intellectual vacuum which the new science filled. Soon this science was enshrined as the standard of all knowledge. This state of affairs understandably conferred upon the scientific challenge to Christian doctrine an absoluteness that seemed to demand a scientific defense of the biblical account of creation. When, however, the distinction between philosophical and scientific knowledge is observed (I speak here of a philosophy that is a realism), the challenge of evolutionary theories to Christian doctrine evaporates. What "challenges" remain are pseudo-scientific in that they are assertions of philosophical theories of materialism decked out in the clothes of science. Cases in point are the contributions to Evolution and Crea- BOOK REVIEWS 557 tion by John Leslie, "Modern Cosmology and the Creation of Life," James l!,. Ross, "Christians Get the Best of Evolution," and Phillip R. Sloan, " The Question of Natural Purpose." Leslie attempts to cast the design argument in a form that creation scientists would accept. What inspires the project is his fear that the standard objections to design arguments jeopardize scientific development. His is a creative and at times brilliant approach,to the defense of the design argument, which defense he unfortunately weakens, however, by failing to establish a clear line,of demarcation between science and philosophy. He argues that the emergence of life forms bespeaks a fine-tuning and delicacy of balance of nature's laws which demand explanation. He cites as the only plausible alternatives that either the universe is a product of design or there are multiple universes. For if you reject design in favor of proba.bility as the explanation for delicately balanced laws on which life depends, you must argue that this universe of ours is an occurrence of such and such a degree of probability, while other universes represent different probable occurences with different laws, etc. For example, " a 1 percent increase or decrease in the power of the strong nuclear force ruins stellar synthesis of carbon " and "for chemistry to be possible the mass of the neutron must exceed that of the proton, but by no more than approximately a tenth of 1 percent..." But Leslie finds the plausibility of the many universes account weakened by the "serious horizon problems": 66 For as far out as our telescopes can reach, our universe consists of particles with the same relative strengths, and so on. Suppose that these masses and strengths and such were settled probabilistically at some early stage. How came they to be... (shrink)

Aristotle divided arguments that persuade into the rhetorical (which happen to persuade), the dialectical (which are strong so ought to persuade to some degree) and the demonstrative (which must persuade if rightly understood). Dialectical arguments were long neglected, partly because Aristotle did not write a book about them. But in the sixteenth and seventeenth century late scholastic authors such as Medina, Cano and Soto developed a sound theory of probable arguments, those that have logical and not merely psychological force but (...) fall short of demonstration. Informed by late medieval treatments of the law of evidence and problems in moral theology and aleatory contracts, they considered the reasons that could render legal, moral, theological, commercial and historical arguments strong though not demonstrative. At the same time, demonstrative arguments became better understood as Galileo and other figures of the Scientific Revolution used mathematical proof in arguments in physics. Galileo moved both dialectical and demonstrative arguments into mathematical territory. (shrink)

Although there are several monistic and dualistic approaches to the mind-body problem on the basis of classical or quantum mechanics, thus far no consensus exists about a solution. Recently, the Elementary Process Theory (EPT) has been developed: this corresponds with a fundamentally new disciplinary matrix for the study of physical reality. The purpose of the present research was to investigate the mind-body problem within this newly developed disciplinary matrix. The main finding is that the idea of a duality of body (...) and mind has to be rejected as an incomplete representation of reality: in the universe of the EPT, man hás to be a trinity of body, spirit and soul, where ‘body’, ‘spirit’ and ‘soul’ are names for distinct physical things. The mind is then a mere idea that arises from (self-)experience, but without onto-logical connotation. In addition a mechanism for mental causation, which implies a principle of choice, is rigorously formulated. The main conclusion is that a fundamentally new physicalist approach to the mind-body problem, according to which man has a free will, has been formulated strictly within the language of the EPT. Further physical research is then required to describe how the interaction between body, spirit and soul is to be understood in terms of fundamental interactions. In addition, further philosophical-theological research has to establish whether the presently discussed trinity and the trinities of body, spirit and soul mentioned in the Bible and the Vedic texts are one and the same thing. -/- Edit: a revised version of this preprint has been published as a book chapter. (shrink)

Institutions of higher learning have continued to record high cases of gender-based violence (GBV) despite all efforts put in place to fight the vice. The most common forms of GBV are physical, sexual assault and psychological violence. Women and girls make up the majority of the GBV victims worldwide. For many years, institutions of higher learning have proved to be fertile environments for GBV cases. The purpose of this study was to investigate effects of GBV on the well-being of students (...) in institutions of higher learning in Zambia. The study employed a mixed research methodology, and it was anchored on pragmatic philosophical paradigm. An explorative study design was used. Data were collected using both probabilistic and non-probabilistic methods, and the sample size was 150 respondents. The main findings of the study showed both academic and non-academic effects of GBV on students and included stigma, low academic performance, mental and psychological trauma as well as high drop outs. Contribution: The study highlighted effects of GBV as being both academic and non-academic in nature. Once students and staff ignore the word of God spoken in scriptures and begin to follow their egos, the consequences are devastating. For scriptures says love one another, forgive each other and bear each other’s burdens in love. Do unto others as you would want then to do unto you. For where there is love, no one will desire to hurt others. Where there is no love of God or forgiveness, there is pain and damage that can spoil someone’s future, especially that of the youth. (shrink)

In the context of reproductive health, policies focused on decriminalising abortion that resulted in religious beliefs, attitudes and behaviours being affected. The main purpose of this article was to identify the religious beliefs of abortion in the emergency situations such as COVID-19. Although there is no general consensus regarding abortion, there is almost ‘general opposition to causing harm to life’ in most religions. In the current study, 28 indicators and four factors (seven for each factor) related to pregnancy termination were (...) explored through an exploratory factor structure. The study was therefore non-experimental, cross-sectional and exploratory, with 100 students selected in a non-probabilistic way. Contribution: The main contribution of this research is to find the variable effects on abortion in emergency conditions regarding religious beliefs. Given the results, behavioural intentions determine a structural model, but religious beliefs explain the solution. Furthermore, data generalisation is not possible due to the context, sample selection and type of analysis. In the local population, a confirmatory factor analysis should be performed with a probabilistic sample selection. (shrink)

Pruss (2016) argues that Christian philosophers should reject Open Futurism, where Open Futurism is the thesis that “there are no true undetermined contingent propositions about the future” (461). First, Pruss argues “on probabilistic grounds that there are some statements about infinite futures that Open Futurism cannot handle” (461). In other words, he argues that either the future is finite or that Open Futurism is false. Next, Pruss argues that since Christians are committed to a belief in everlasting life, they (...) must deny that the future is finite. From here, Pruss concludes that Christians must reject Open Futurism. In practice, Pruss’s argument extends to anyone who endorses everlasting life. In this essay, I respond to Pruss’s argument on behalf of Open Futurism: pace Pruss, the open futurist can consistently believe in everlasting life while also accepting the basic principles of probability theory. (shrink)