INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION最新文献

In this paper, we suggest that those asking contemporary moral questions involving the punishment of groups, such as the justice of requiring corporations to make recompense for past wrongs or whether one race ought to make reparation payments to another, would find it fruitful to consider an older response to the question of moral substitution. We argue that Anselm of Canterbury’s theory of substitutionary atonement offers some surprising insights into the conditions under which one moral agent making recompense for another’s wrong is morally permissible. Anselm’s consideration of the problem may yield new insights for contemporary theories addressing moral substitution.

In this critical review I outline the three main themes of Gellman’s The People, The Torah, The God, and explore the extent to which it lives up to its subtitle, as a “neo-traditional Jewish Theology.” The book is a summary of three volumes of Gellman’s previous work. The summary and the trilogy make an important contribution to contemporary Jewish thought. On some matters, I argue, Gellman’s thinking is more traditional than he realises. But irrespective of whether his theories live up to his own subtitle, they are eminently worthy of our attention.

Plantinga’s free will defense is sometimes regarded as a successful response to the logical problem of evil. Still, a recent objection concludes Plantinga’s defense and theodicy are incompatible. According to this objection, in Plantinga’s defense, Jesus’ having a creaturely essence entails that Jesus suffers from transworld depravity and sins in the actual world, but this result conflicts with Plantinga’s theodicy and with Christian theism, where Jesus is sinless. In this paper, I argue that this objection is unsound, because creaturely essences suffer from transworld depravity only contingently, so it is not necessarily true that their instantiations go wrong in the actual world. Hence, Plantinga’s defense and theodicy are not incompatible, so both answers to the problem of evil can be endorsed in conjunction.

With the goal of explaining the maldistribution of evil in the world, Asha Lancaster-Thomas has recently (2023) expounded upon the idea of a fluctuating maximal God (FMG) that she and others developed (Jeffrey et al. (2020)) from the idea of a maximal God originally proposed by Yujin Nagasawa (2017). Lancaster-Thomas uses this model to answer what I and my co-author, Daniel Linford, have called the problem of geography (Linford and Patterson (2015)). The problem of geography points to the geographically unequal distribution of suffering in the world and argues that this aggravates the original problem of evil (POE) and undermines the primary theodicies offered as solutions to it. I subsequently (2021) added to this problem by pointing out that evil is also maldistributed across race, gender and time. This larger problem may be referred to as the problem of the distribution of evil (PODE). Lancaster-Thomas argues that the FMG, especially under her modified version, is not susceptible to the problem of geography or to temporal inequalities of well-being. In this article I will demonstrate how the FMG, even on Lancaster-Thomas? updated model, fails to undermine either the problem of geography or the more broadly conceived PODE.

Avicenna holds that since God has existed from all eternity and is immutable and impassible, he cannot come to have an attribute or feature that he has not had from all eternity. He also claims for the simultaneous causation. A puzzle arises when we consider God’s creating this world. If God is immutable and impassible, then his attributes associated with his creating this world are unchanging. So, God must have been creating the world from all eternity. But then God’s creative act, one might object, seems to be no different from a matter of natural necessity. This is a threat to divine freedom, for God would then have no choice concerning his creative action. Anthony Ruffus and Jon McGinnis argue that this puzzle can be solved in such a way that Avicenna can consistently affirm divine freedom along with divine simplicity. They suggest that Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī’s interpretation might help to show that it is false that Avicenna’s God cannot choose absolutely. For it is still open to him to choose either to create eternally or to refrain from creating anything at all. Ruffus and McGinnis argue that since creating or not creating anything at all do not correspond to two distinct concepts, Avicenna’s account of divine simplicity, which denies any multiplicity in divine mind, is safeguarded along with divine freedom. I claim that God’s omnirationality requiring that he always acts for reasons is a serious threat to such an interpretation.

The following article will examine three argumentative strategies to address a recent topic of debate in the philosophy of religion known as the “Gap Problem.” It aims to study the “Stage II” of cosmological arguments, where the goal is to establish the theistic properties or attributes that identify the first cause or necessary being with the concept of God. The unique contribution of this study lies in the formalized and systematic presentation of the various solutions proposed by authors in the philosophical field, synthesizing their central ideas and presenting them in the form of arguments.

In a recent paper in this journal, McIntosh (2021) argues that a modalized version of an epistemic principle of phenomenal conservativism can be used to successfully defend the key possibility premise of the modal ontological argument for the existence of God. I argue, however, that such a defense of the possibility premise is not going to be successful even if one concedes a number of contentious claims to McIntosh.

Abstract

Perfect being theism is the view that the perfect being exists and the property being-perfect is the property being-God. According to the strong analysis of perfection, a being is perfect just in case it exemplifies all perfections. On the other hand, the weak analysis of perfection says that a being is perfect just in case it exemplifies the best possible combination of compatible perfections. Strong perfect being theism accepts the former analysis while weak perfect being theism accepts the latter. In this paper, I argue that there are good reasons to reject both versions of perfect being theism. On the one hand, strong perfect being theism is false if there are incompatible perfections; I argue that there are. On the other hand, if either no comparison can be made between sets of perfections, or they are equally good, then there is no best possible set of perfections. I argue for the antecedent of this conditional statement, concluding that weak perfect being theism is false. In the absence of other analyses of perfection, I conclude that we have reason to reject perfect being theism.

This article undertakes a crucial examination of Kant’s depiction of the interconnectedness between human reason and the divine. The argument posits that Kant conceptualizes reason as inherently founded on a divine basis. The primary objective of this article is not to delve into whether Kant endorses or dismisses specific Christian doctrines, or if his portrayal of reason aligns with a particular strand of Christian thought. Instead, the aim is to chart an interpretive middle path – one that embraces the profound philosophical underpinnings embedded in Kant’s rationalist legacy while recognizing the inherent limitations he imposes on human reason. The conclusion drawn is that Kant’s account of reason tends towards the divine, though the precise nature of this interconnectedness remains shrouded in mystery.

This paper discusses the nonconceptual theory of mystical ineffability which claims that mystical experiences can’t be expressed linguistically because they can’t be conceptualized. I discuss and refute two objections against it: (a) that unconceptualized experiences are impossible, and (b) that the theory is ad hoc because it provides no reason for why mystical experiences should be unconceptualizable. I argue against (a) that distinguishing different meanings of ‘object of experience’ leaves open the possibility of non-empty but objectless nonconceptual experiences. I show that (b) is a valid objection but can be countered by a new theory of mystical non-conceptuality: mystical experiences are not conceptual because the specific mode of mystical consciousness prevents conceptualization. The dissolution of the subjectivity of consciousness during mystical experiences undermines the very foundation of the possibility of conceptual thought and thus renders them ineffable.