Online research in philosophy

Most accounts of miracles assume that a necessary condition for an event's being miraculous is that it be, as Hume put it, “a violation of the laws of nature.” However, any account of this sort will be ill-suited for defending the major Western religious traditions because, as I will argue, classical theists should not believe in violations of the laws of nature. In place of the rejected Humean accounts, this paper seeks to develop and defend a Leibnizian conception of miracles (...) on which an event is said to be miraculous just in case we can discover its final cause but not its efficient cause. (shrink)

Despite the current popularity of 'Kantian' ethical theory, Kant's applied ethical conclusions receive little respect. Kantians provide a variety of reasons for rejecting Kant's own application of his ethical theory, but the justification repeated perhaps most frequently, with varying degrees of bluntness, is that in arguing for his (allegedly) objectionable results, Kant abuses his theory to rationalize prevailing cultural norms. Against this view, this paper argues that Kant is not guilty of widespread misapplication of his meta-ethical theory. This paper considers (...) a number of applied results contemporary Kantians are eager to rid themselves of and shows how Kant provides support for each of them by considering the crucial concept of personality. Because of the central role this concept plays in Kant's theory and the strength of the support it provides for his conclusions, it will be difficult for any Kantian theory to jettison Kant's unpopular applied ethics without seriously distorting his understanding of the Categorical Imperative. (shrink)

Berkeley's main aim in his well-known early works was to identify and refute "the grounds of Scepticism, Atheism, and irreligion." This appears to place Berkeley within a well-established tradition of religious critics of Locke's epistemology, including, most famously, Stillingfleet. I argue that these appearances are deceiving. Berkeley is, in fact, in important respects an opponent of this tradition. According to Berkeley, Locke's earlier critics, including Stillingfleet, had misidentified the grounds of irreligion in Locke's philosophy while all the while endorsing the (...) true grounds of irreligion themselves. Locke's epistemology is innocent; matter and abstraction are to blame. (shrink)

An omnipotent being would be a being whose power was unlimited. The power of human beings is limited in two distinct ways: we are limited with respect to our freedom of will, and we are limited in our ability to execute what we have willed. These two distinct sources of limitation suggest a simple definition of omnipotence: an omnipotent being is one that has both perfect freedom of will and perfect efficacy of will. In this paper we further explicate this (...) definition and show that it escapes the standard objections to divine omnipotence. (shrink)

George Berkeley's linguistic account of sense perception is one of the most central tenets of his philosophy. It is intended as a solution to a wide range of critical issues in both metaphysics and theology. However, it is not clear from Berkeley's writings just how this ‘universal language of the Author of Nature’ is to be interpreted. This paper discusses the nature of the theory of sense perception as language, together with its metaphysical and theological motivations, then proceeds to develop (...) an account of the semantics of the perceptual language, using Berkeley's theory of reference for human language as a guide. (shrink)