Citations of:
Add citations
You must login to add citations.
|
|
Seventeenth century scholastics had a rich debate about the ontological status and nature of lacks, negations, and privations. Realists in this debate posit irreducible negative entities responsible for the non-existence of positive entities. One of the first scholastics to develop a realist position on negative entities was Thomas Compton Carleton. In this paper I explain Carleton's theory of negative entities, including what it is for something to be negative, how negative entities are individuated, whether they are abstract or concrete, and (...) |
|
European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView. |
|
This paper explores a PSR-connected trail leading from theistic idealism to a form of substance monism. In particular, I argue that the same style of argument available for a Leibnizian form of metaphysical idealism actually leads beyond idealism to something closer to Spinozistic monism. This path begins with a set of theological commitments about the nature and perfection of God that were widely shared among leading early modern philosophers. From these commitments, there arises an interesting case for metaphysical idealism, roughly (...) |
|
Evil poses a particular problem to early modern thinkers. Late scholasticism, while itself variegated, provided a number of resources for dispelling concerns about the justice of God raised by the existence of evil. With much of the metaphysics of the scholastics rejected, the new philosophers needed either to find inventive ways to make the old solutions fit into their new systems, to come up with new resources for dispelling the difficulties, or to accept the difficulties as insurmountable, likely via fideism (...) |
|
I argue that Leibniz's treatment of void or empty space in the appendix to his fourth letter to Clarke conflicts with the way he elsewhere treats (metaphysical) evil, insofar as he allows that God has created a world with the one kind of privation (evil), while insisting that God would not have created a world with the other kind of privation (void). I consider three respects in which the moral case might be thought to differ relevantly from the physical one, (...) |
|
|