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  1. The dispositionalist deity: How God creates laws and why theists should care.Ben Page - 2015 - Zygon 50 (1):113-137.
    How does God govern the world? For many theists “laws of nature” play a vital role. But what are these laws, metaphysically speaking? I shall argue that laws of nature are not external to the objects they govern, but instead should be thought of as reducible to internal features of properties. Recent work in metaphysics and philosophy of science has revived a dispositionalist conception of nature, according to which nature is not passive, but active and dynamic. Disposition theorists see particulars (...)
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  • Louis de La Forge and the 'Non-Transfer Argument' for Occasionalism.Andrea Sangiacomo - 2014 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 22 (1):60-80.
    In this paper, I investigate Louis de La Forge's argument against body–body causation. His general strategy exploits the impossibility of bodies communicating their movement by transfer of motion. I call this the ‘non-transfer’ argument . NT allows La Forge both to reinterpret continuous creation in an occasionalistic fashion and to support his non-occasionalistic view concerning mind–body union. First, I present how NT emerges in Descartes’ own texts. Second, I show how La Forge recasts it to draw an occasionalistic account of (...)
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  • God and the natural world in the seventeenth century: Space, time, and causality.Geoffrey Gorham - 2009 - Philosophy Compass 4 (5):859-872.
    The employment by seventeenth-century natural philosophers of stock theological notions like creation, immensity, and eternity in the articulation and justification of emerging physical programs disrupted a delicate but longstanding balance between transcendent and immanent conceptions of God. By playing a prominent (if not always leading) role in many of the major scientific developments of the period, God became more intimately involved with natural processes than at any time since antiquity. In this discussion, I am particularly concerned with the causal and (...)
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  • Omnipresence and Special Presence.Ben Page - forthcoming - In Ben Page, Anna Marmodoro & Damiano Migliorini (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Omnipresence. Oxford University Press.
    Whilst God is said to be omnipresent, some religions also claim that God is specially present, or more present at/in certain locations. For example, a claim of special presence shared by Christians and Jews is that God was specially present at/in the first Temple. The chapter canvases various ways in which one can make sense of this claim whilst still affirming the omnipresence of God. This includes offering different accounts of special presence relying on derivative notions of presence, and offering (...)
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  • Leibniz's Causal Road to Existential Independence.Tobias Flattery - 2023 - History of Philosophy & Logical Analysis 27 (1):93-120.
    Leibniz thinks that every created substance is causally active, and yet causally independent of every other: none can cause changes in any but itself. This is not controversial. But Leibniz also thinks that every created substance is existentially independent of every other: it is metaphysically possible for any to exist with or without any other. This is controversial. I argue that, given a mainstream reading of Leibniz’s essentialism, if one accepts the former, uncontroversial interpretation concerning causal independence, then one ought (...)
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  • Anne Conway's Atemporal Account of Agency.Hope Sample - 2022 - Ergo 9:47-69.
    This paper aims to resolve an unremarked-upon tension between Anne Conway’s commitment to the moral responsibility of created beings, or creatures, and her commitment to emanative, constant creation. Emanation causation has an atemporal aspect according to which God’s act of will coexists with its effect. There is no before or after, or past or future in God’s causal contribution. Additionally, Conway’s constant creation picture has it that all times are determined via divine emanation. Creaturely agency, by contrast, is fundamentally temporal, (...)
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  • Leibniz’s Lost Argument Against Causal Interaction.Tobias Flattery - 2020 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 7.
    Leibniz accepts causal independence, the claim that no created substance can causally interact with any other. And Leibniz needs causal independence to be true, since his well-known pre-established harmony is premised upon it. So, what is Leibniz’s argument for causal independence? Sometimes he claims that causal interaction between substances is superfluous. Sometimes he claims that it would require the transfer of accidents, and that this is impossible. But when Leibniz finds himself under sustained pressure to defend causal independence, those are (...)
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  • Berkeley on Voluntary Motion: A Conservationist Account.Takaharu Oda - 2018 - Ruch Filozoficzny 74 (4):71–98.
    A plausible reading of Berkeley’s view of voluntary motion is occasionalism; this, however, leads to a specious conclusion against his argument of human action. Differing from an unqualified occasionalist reading, I consider the alternative reading that Berkeley is a conservationist regarding bodily motion by the human mind at will. That is, finite minds (spirits) immediately cause motions in their body parts, albeit under the divine conservation. My argument then comports with the conservationist reading from three perspectives: (i) theodicy that the (...)
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  • Du Châtelet on Freedom, Self-Motion, and Moral Necessity.Julia Jorati - 2019 - Journal of the History of Philosophy 57 (2):255-280.
    This paper explores the theory of freedom that Emilie du Châtelet advances in her essay “On Freedom.” Using contemporary terminology, we can characterize this theory as a version of agent-causal compatibilism. More specifically, the theory has the following elements: (a) freedom consists in the power to act in accordance with one’s choices, (b) freedom requires the ability to suspend desires and master passions, (c) freedom requires a power of self-motion in the agent, and (d) freedom is compatible with moral necessity (...)
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  • Divine Action and God’s Immutability: A Historical Case Study On How To Resist Occasionalism.Andrea Sangiacomo - 2015 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 7 (4):115--135.
    Today’s debates present ”occasionalism’ as the position that any satisfying account of divine action must avoid. In this paper I discuss how a leading Cartesian author of the end of the seventeenth century, Pierre-Sylvain Régis, attempted to avoid occasionalism. Régis’s case is illuminating because it stresses both the difficulties connected with the traditional alternatives to occasionalism and also those aspects embedded in the occasionalist position that should be taken into due account. The paper focuses on Régis’s own account of secondary (...)
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  • Leibniz on Divine Concurrence.John Whipple - 2010 - Philosophy Compass 5 (10):865-879.
    In this paper I examine G. W. Leibniz’s view on the debate between occasionalists, mere conservationists, and concurrentists. Although commentators agree that Leibniz wants to reject occasionalism and mere conservationism, there is considerable disagreement about whether Leibniz is committed to a theory of divine concurrence that differs from occasionalism and mere conservationism in principled ways. I critically assess three interpretations of Leibniz’s theory in this paper. The first two (those of Robert Adams and Sukjae Lee) differ with respect to important (...)
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  • God, evil, and occasionalism.Matthew Shea & C. P. Ragland - 2018 - Religious Studies 54 (2):265-283.
    In a recent paper, Alvin Plantinga defends occasionalism against an important moral objection: if God is the sole direct cause of all the suffering that results from immoral human choices, this causal role is difficult to reconcile with God’s perfect goodness. Plantinga argues that this problem is no worse for occasionalism than for any of the competing views of divine causality; in particular, there is no morally relevant difference between God directly causing suffering and God indirectly causing it. First, we (...)
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  • The Concurrentism of Thomas Aquinas: Divine Causation and Human Freedom.Petr Dvořák - 2013 - Philosophia 41 (3):617-634.
    The paper deals with the problem of divine causation in relation to created agents in general and human rational agents in particular. Beyond creation and conservation, Aquinas specifies divine contribution to created agents’ operation as application in the role of the first cause and the operation of the principal cause employing an instrumental cause. It is especially the latter which is open to varying interpretation and which might be potentially threatening to human freedom. There are different readings of what it (...)
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  • Thomas d’Aquin, l’étiologie proclusienne, et la théorie du concours de Dieu à la causalité naturelle.Jean-Luc Solère - 2022 - In Dragos Calma (ed.), Reading Proclus and the _Book of Causes_, Volume 3: On Causes and the Noetic Triad. BRILL. pp. 303-337.
    Bringing together two aspects of Thomas Aquinas's thought that have been studied separately: his theory of God's concurrence and his theory of instrumental causality, I show how he uses the latter (which I discuss first) to clarify the Proclusian principle that the first cause has a greater influence on an effect than the proximate causes. Thanks to this theory, Aquinas accounts for the fact that it is God who confers existence to every new being that is produced by natural processes, (...)
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  • Spinoza on Action and Immanent Causation.Stephen Zylstra - 2020 - Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 102 (1):29-55.
    I address an apparent conflict between Spinoza’s concepts of immanent causation and acting/doing [agere]. Spinoza apparently holds that an immanent cause undergoes [patitur] whatever it does. Yet according to his stated definition of acting and undergoing in the Ethics, this is impossible; to act is to be an adequate cause, while to undergo is to be merely a partial cause. Spinoza also seems committed to God’s being the adequate cause of all things, and, in a well-known passage, appears to deny (...)
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  • Peter of Palude and the Fiery Furnace.Zita V. Toth - 2020 - History of Philosophy Quarterly 37 (2):121-142.
    According to most medieval thinkers, whenever something causally acts on another thing, God also acts with it. Durand of St.-Pourçain, an early fourteenth-century Dominican philosopher, disagrees. This paper is about a fourteenth-century objection to Durand’s view, which I will call the Fiery Furnace Objection, as formulated by Durand’s contemporary, Peter of Palude. Although Peter of Palude is not usu- ally regarded as a particularly original thinker, this paper calls attention to one of his more interesting controversies with his fellow friar, (...)
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  • Sine qua non Causes and Their Discontents.Zita V. Toth - 2022 - Res Philosophica 99 (2):139-167.
    For theological reasons, medieval thinkers maintained that sacraments “effect what they figure”—that is, they are more than mere signs of grace; and yet, they also maintained that they are not proper causes of grace in the way fire is the proper cause of heat. One way to reconcile these requirements is to explicate sacramental causation in terms of sine qua non causes, which were distinguished from accidental causes on the one hand, and from proper efficient causes on the other hand. (...)
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  • Epicurean and galilean motion in gassendi's physics.Antonia LoLordo - 2008 - Philosophy Compass 3 (2):301–314.
    This is about the tension between Epicurean and Galilean accounts of motion in Gassendi. For my more recent thoughts on this, see http://philpapers.org/rec/LOLCEG.
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  • Causation, dispositions, and physical occasionalism.Walter J. Schultz & Lisanne D'Andrea-Winslow - 2017 - Zygon 52 (4):962-983.
    Even though theistic philosophers and scientists agree that God created, sustains, and providentially governs the physical universe and even though much has been published in general regarding divine action, what is needed is a fine-grained, conceptually coherent account of divine action, causation, dispositions, and laws of nature consistent with divine aseity, satisfying the widely recognized adequacy conditions for any account of dispositions.1 Such an account would be a basic part of a more comprehensive theory of divine action in relation to (...)
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