Online research in philosophy

The paper discusses al-Kindi's response to doctrines held by contemporary theologians of the Mu‘tazilite school: divine attributes, creation, and freedom. In the first section it is argued that, despite his broadly negative theology, al-Kindi recognizes a special kind of “essential” positive attribute belonging to God. The second section argues that al-Kindi agreed with the Mu‘tazila in holding that something may not yet exist but still be an object of God's knowledge and power (as the Mu‘tazila put it, that “non-being” is a “thing”). Also it presents a new parallel between al-Kindi and John Philoponus. The third section gives an interpretation of al-Kindi as a compatibilist, in other words as holding that humans may be free even though their actions are necessitated. In all three cases, it is argued, al-Kindi is close to the Mu‘tazilite point of view, though he departs from them in the arguments he gives for that point of view.

In his lectures, Kant suggested to his students that the freedom of a divine holy will is “easier to comprehend than that of the human will,”(28:609) but this suggestion has remained neglected. After a review of some of Kant’s familiar claims about the will (in general), and about the divine holy will in particular, I consider how these claims give rise to some initial objections to that conception. Then I defend an interpretation of Kant’s conception of the divine will, and of its historical development in relation to Leibniz and Spinoza, that identifies the content, origin, and role of God’s representations in a way that is responsive to some of the historical and contemporary problems. Finally, I trace a few of the implications of this account of the divine will for our understanding Kant’s account of freedom more generally, including human freedom.

God’s providence appears to threaten the existence of human freedom. This paper examines why Descartes considered this threat merelyapparent. Section one argues that Descartes did not reconcile providence and freedom by adopting a compatibilist conception of freedom. Sections two and three argue that for Descartes, God’s superior knowledge allows God to providentially arrange free choices without causally determining them. Descartes’ position thus strongly resembles the “middle knowledge” solution of the Jesuits. Section four examines the problematic relationship between this solution and the creation of the eternal truths, arguing that Descartes’ position depends on his unique understanding of divine simplicity.

Alvin Plantinga’s reply to the grounding objection to propositions now called counterfactuals of freedom, originally made by Robert Adams, can be interpretedas follows: if, for the sake of argument, we require counterfactuals of freedom to be grounded in something that makes them true, we can simply (and trivially) say that there are corresponding counterfactual facts that ground them. I argue that such facts, together with the facts about the situations in which moral agents find themselves, would ontologically determine that the agents perform their acts, rendering these acts unfree. Thus, I maintain that, contrary to Plantinga’s intent, allowing the grounding facts into the divine creation situation entails the falsity of Molinism. If there is no other way that God can know what free creatures would do than through counterfactuals of freedom, divine foreknowledge of human acts is inconsistent with human freedom and moral responsibility.

Does the act of creation show itself anywhere within the creation? A common contemporary ontology tends to see two possibilities for those who want to defend a notion of creation. The first is to argue that an original set of materials was brought into existence out of nothing by divine action a long time ago. The second, in the tradition of Paley, posits a specific divine action that oversees the development of some of the materials into entities with an end-directedness. Much contemporary energy focuses on the second possibility. The argument of the paper is that the ontology behind both of these possibilities, which limits itself to the notions of a creation of materials and the building of some of the materials into end-directed entities, conceals rather than reveals the idea of creation. The paper tries to show how an Aristotelian sense of nature, with its recognition of internal teleology and original spontaneity, offers a better starting point for coming up against the mystery of divine creative activity.

The argument according to which there can be no demonstration that divine creative causality precludes human freedom unfolds in the context of St. Thomas’s understanding of choice and of the relation of God to the world. The gist of the argument is that any demonstration of the nature or characteristics of some effect from the cause of that effect supposes some knowledge of the nature ofthe cause. To the contrary, we know nothing of the nature of the divine causality, which is one with the divine being, and therefore etc. Before the argument, there is a word on God and second causes; on necessity and contingence; on transcendent causality; and on why it seems that creation precludes human freedom.

In this paper I seek to show how God's freedom is not reduced or His power diminished by His inability to be less than perfectly good even though ours would be. That ours would be explains why it might prima facie appear to us that there is a ‘conceptual tension’ between some of the claims of traditional theism and reveals some interesting (well, to me anyway) differences between human freedom and divine freedom.

Michael Bergmann and Jan Cover summarize the essence of their paper as follows: “We argue that divine responsibility is sufficient for divine thankworthiness and consistent with the absence of divine freedom. We do this while insisting on the view that both freedom and responsibility are incompatible with causal determinism.” In this response I argue that while it makes sense for believers to be thankful that God exists, it makes no sense for them to thank him for doing the best act he can, given the circumstances.

In this article I explore Leibniz's claim in the Theodicy that on the essential points Malebranche's theodicy "reduces to" his own view. This judgment may seem to be warranted given that both thinkers emphasize that evils are justified by the fact that they follow from the simple and uniform laws that govern that world which is worthy of divine creation. However, I argue that Leibniz's theodicy differs in several crucial respects from Malebranche's. I begin with a qualified endorsement of Charles Larmore's recent claim that remarks in Malebranche's correspondence with Leibniz indicate that their theodicies rely on incompatible conceptions of the moral rationality of divine action. I also attempt to go beyond Larmore's discussion in highlighting further differences concerning the sort of freedom involved in the divine act of creation. My conclusion is that these differing conceptions of divine morality and divine freedom reveal that in contrast to the case of Leibniz, Malebranche's theodicy not only does not require that God create anything at all, but also is compatible with the result that the world he decides to create is not uniquely the best possible.