Online research in philosophy

AN OCCURRENT THOUGHT IS DISTINGUISHED FROM BELIEF, INTELLIGENT BEHAVIOR, AND THE ACTIVE PROCESS OF THINKING. THE OCCURRENCE OF THOUGHTS IS NOT TO BE ANALYZED IN TERMS OF THE OCCURRENCE OF IMAGES OF WORDS OF SENTENCES WHICH EXPRESS THEM AND OFTEN ACCOMPANY THEM. THOUGHTS HAVE INBUILT INTENTIONALITY.

Richard Swinburne is one of the most distinguished philosophers of religion of our day. In this volume, many notable British and American philosophers unite to honor him and to discuss various topics to which he has contributed significantly. These include general topics in the philosophy of religion such as revelation, and faith and reason, and the specifically Christian doctrines of the Trinity, the Incarnation, and atonement. In the spirit of the movement which Swinburne spearheaded, the essays use analytic philosophical methods to examine doctrines in particular religious traditions, expanding upon traditional discussions of theism. As such, this volume represents a field-report on the interaction of philosophy and Christian thought in the English-speaking world. Swinburne has himself contributed an individual and personal Intellectual Autobiography.

Richard Swinburne’s argument in The Existence of God discusses many probabilities, ultimately concluding that God probably exists. Swinburne gives exact values to almost none of these probabilities. I attempted to assign values to the probabilities that met that weak condition that they could be correct. In this paper, I first present a brief outline of Swinburne’s argument in The Existence of God. I then present the problems I encountered in Swinburne’s argument, specifically problems that interfered with my attempt to arrive at values for the probabilities discussed by Swinburne. Finally, I suggest that Swinburne’s argument would be more persuasive if he assigned exact values to his probabilities.

This paper examines Richard Swinburne's definitions of 'mental property' and 'physical property'. After some preliminary tidying up (Section 1), the paper introduces eight putative counter-examples to Swinburne's definitions (Section 2). The paper then considers amendments to Swinburne's account of 'mental property' (Section 3) and 'physical property' (Section 4) which deal with these counter-examples. Finally, the paper closes with some brief remarks about the metaphysics of properties (Appendix). Along the way, the paper provides various reasons for thinking that Swinburne's definitions are hardly likely to be acceptable to non-theists.

Swinburne relies on principle P in The Existence of God to argue that God is simple and thus likely to exist. In this paper, I argue that Swinburne does not support P. In particular, his arguments from mathematical simplicity and scientists’ preferences both fail. Given the central role P plays in Swinburne’s overall argument in The Existence of God , I conclude that Swinburne should further support P if his argument that God likely exists is to be persuasive.

This interdisciplinary work contains the most sustained attempt at developing and defending one of the few genuine theories of consciousness.

In "The Existence of God," Richard Swinburne presents a detailed examination of the various arguments for and against God's existence. Methodologically, Swinburne's approach is to develop a cumulative case argument wherein the various theistic arguments constitute the accumulated evidences. Additionally, Swinburne attempts to utilise the formal probability calculus (Bayes's Theorem) to quantify the probability of God's existence in light of the various evidences. However, many have been disappointed with the anticlimactic nature of Swinburne's conclusion. This essay suggest that a much more positive conclusion follows directly from Swinburne's arguments.

In recent philosophy of mind, it is often assumed that consciousness and self-consciousness are two separate phenomena. In this paper, I argue that this is not quite right. The argument proceeds in two phases. First, I draw a distinction between (i) being self-conscious of a thought that p and (ii) self-consciously thinking that p. I call the former transitive self-consciousness and the latter intransitive self-consciousness. I then argue that consciousness does depend on intransitive self-consciousness, and that the common reasons for denying the dependence of consciousness upon self-consciousness apply only to transitive self-consciousness.