The question of ontological foundation has undergone a noteworthy revival in recent years: metaphysicians today quarrel about how exactly to understand the asymmetrical and hyperintensional relationship of grounding. One of the reasons for this revival is that the old quantificationalist meta-ontology inherited from Quine has been effectively criticised by leading philosophers favourable to a meta-ontology, the aim of which is to come to know “which facts/items ground (constitute the base of) which other facts/items”, thus to examine the relation of ontological (...) dependence between beings (e.g. chemical properties depend on physical properties, the economic situation on the behaviour of individuals etc.), i.e. to explore the hierarchical structure of reality. I shall not discuss here the relationship of grounding in itself, but make some historical-formal remarks on the properties of the ultimate ontological foundational item itself and its aporetic nature. To do so I explore various more or less exotic philosophical ecosystems in the following order: Heidegger (Seyn), Plato (ἕν), Wáng Bi (道, dào). On the way I shall propose a new interpretation both of certain hypotheses in the Parmenides and of the nature of the opposition between Wáng Bì and Guō Xiàng in regard to the logical grammar of the expression “nothing (無, wú)” (transl. J. Dudley). (shrink)

Intelligent activity requires the use of various intellectual skills. While these skills are connected to knowledge, they should not be identified with knowledge. There are realistic examples where the skills in question come apart from knowledge. That is, there are realistic cases of knowledge without skill, and of skill without knowledge. Whether a person is intelligent depends, in part, on whether they have these skills. Whether a particular action is intelligent depends, in part, on whether it was produced by an (...) exercise of skill. These claims promote a picture of intelligence that is in tension with a strongly intellectualist picture, though they are not in tension with a number of prominent claims recently made by intellectualists. (shrink)

This is the text of my OBO entry on arguments for the existence of God.

This paper discusses the treatment of "infinity" in philosophy of religion, including its use in discussions of divine attributes, and its use in various arguments about the existence of God (including the kalam cosmological argument and Pascal's wager). The aim of the paper is to set out -- and where possible, to resolve -- various foundational problems about infinity.

Ordinal polytheism is motivated by the cosmological and design arguments. It is also motivated by Leibnizian–Lewisian modal realism. Just as there are many universes, so there are many gods. Gods are necessary concrete grounds of universes. The god-universe relation is one-to-one. Ordinal polytheism argues for a hierarchy of ranks of ever more perfect gods, one rank for every ordinal number. Since there are no maximally perfect gods, ordinal polytheism avoids many of the familiar problems of monotheism. It links theology with (...) counterpart theory, mathematics and computer science. And it entails that the system of universes has an attractive axiological structure. (shrink)

This paper provides a taxonomy of cosmological arguments and givesgeneral reasons for thinking that arguments that belong to a given category do not succeed.

ABSTRACTThis paper consists of a story about unorthodox assessment procedures in theology, and a discussion of their implications. Among the issues raised are the possibility of testing values, the relationship of test validity to test reliability and ethical questions involved in assessment.

Assume, for fun, that temporal parts theory is true, and that some kind of modal realism (perhaps based on ersatz worlds) is true. Within this grand metaphysical picture, what are the ordinary objects? Do they have many temporal parts, or just one? Do they have many modal parts, or just one? I survey the issues involved in answering this question, including the problem of temporary intrinsics, the problem of the many, Kripke's objections to counterpart theory and quantifier domain restrictions.

I shall respond to Michael Hand’s rejoinder in respect of the two ‘difficulties’ he has identified with my arguments.

According to a common view, belief in God cannot be proved and is an issue that must be left to faith. Kant went even further and argued that he can prove this unprovability. But any argument implying that a certain sentence is not provable is challenged by Gödel’s second theorem. Indeed, one trivial consequence of GST is that for any formal system F that satisfies certain conditions and for every sentence K that is formulated in F it is impossible to (...) prove, from F, that K is not provable. In the article, I explore the general issue of proving the unprovability of the existence of God. Of special interest is the question of the relation between the existence of God and the conditions that F must satisfy in order to allow for its subjection to GST. (shrink)

I present an argument for causal fundamentality, understood as the thesis that the causal history of every being, whose existence has a causal explanation, includes some uncaused beings. I argue that this thesis is a consequence of an actualist account of metaphysical modality whose novelty lies in its hybrid dispositional-essentialist foundation. I argue that my modal theory is extensionally correct and minimalistic. Its range of metaphysical necessities and possibilities is just as wide as needed to capture the pre-theoretical notion of (...) modality. Moreover, my theory is immune from the necessitism of standard essentialist accounts of modality and addresses the challenge of global possibilities facing dispositionalist modal theories thanks to its essentialist component. (shrink)