We present an analysis of a notion of the meaning of life, according to which our lives have meaning if we spend them intentionally producing what has value for ourselves or others. In this sense our lives can have meaning even if a science-inspired view of the world is correct, and they are only transient phenomena in a vast universe. Our lives are more or less meaningful in this sense due to the difference in value for ourselves and others we (...) intentionally create while leading them. These inequalities are morally unjustifiable because they are ultimately due to factors beyond our responsibility and control. But from the point of view of eternity these differences in meaningfulness and value dwindle to insignificance, and this offers some consolation for the unjustifiable inequalities. (shrink)

Spinoza's doctrine of the eternity of the mind is often understood as the claim that the mind has a part that is eternal. I appeal to two principles that Spinoza takes to govern parthood and causation to raise a new problem for this reading. Spinoza takes the composition of one thing from many to require causal interaction among the many. Yet he also holds that eternal things cannot causally interact, without mediation, with things in duration. So the human mind, (...) since it is the idea of a body existing in duration, cannot have an eternal part. In order to solve this problem, I propose an aspectual reading of Spinoza's doctrine of the eternity of the mind: the mind itself is eternal, under one of its aspects. (shrink)

A difficulty for a view of divine eternity as timelessness is that if time is tensed, then God, in virtue of His omniscience, must know tensed facts. But tensed facts, such as It is now t, can only be known by a temporally located being.Defenders of divine atemporality may attempt to escape the force of this argument by contending either that a timeless being can know tensed facts or else that ignorance of tensed facts is compatible with divine omniscience. (...) Kvanvig, Wierenga, and Leftow adopt both of these strategies in their various defenses of divine timelessness. Their respective solutions are analyzed in detail and shown to be untenable.Thus, if the theist holds to a tensed view of time, he should construe divine eternity in terms of omnitemporality. (shrink)

This article proposes a reconstitution of the philosophical tenor of al-Fb al-Mawdayyira). It is shown that this work is not only a response to book VI of John Philoponus' Contra Aristotelem, but that its real issues can only be grasped in the context of the author's metaphysical system. Although, for al-Fbī, genuine demonstrations proceed from the cause to the caused, thus following the order of being, it will be explained how he also admits a strictly physical proof of the simple (...) fact, independently of its cause, and that the physical demonstration of the eternity of the world pertains to this type of proof. This physical proof is specifically directed against the Kindian doctrine of creation. (shrink)

A difficulty for a view of divine eternity as timelessness is that if time is tensed, then God, in virtue of His omniscience, must know tensed facts. But tensed facts, such as It is now t, can only be known by a temporally located being.Defenders of divine atemporality may attempt to escape the force of this argument by contending either that a timeless being can know tensed facts or else that ignorance of tensed facts is compatible with divine omniscience. (...) Kvanvig, Wierenga, and Leftow adopt both of these strategies in their various defenses of divine timelessness. Their respective solutions are analyzed in detail and shown to be untenable.Thus, if the theist holds to a tensed view of time, he should construe divine eternity in terms of omnitemporality. (shrink)

This book has a twofold purpose: the first is to trace the development of cosmology, the study of the universe, and the second is to demonstrate the limitation of science. Dr. Peacock questions the idea that the universe is infinite, showing that science can answer the hows of the universe, but not the whys.

This book is composed of a series of studies in the history of political thought from late antiquity to the early-eighteenth century.

Thomas Aquinas, along with many other medieval philosophers, believed that God is timeless. Aquinas’s treatment of this doctrine seems to imply a view of time that some commentators have noticed is inescapably tenseless, what we would now call a “B-theory” view of time. This is problematic because Aquinas also seems to affirm that tense and temporal becoming are real, implying that what we would now call an “A-theory” of time is correct. In this essay I attempt to adjudicate this apparent (...) conceptual tension in Aquinas’s thought. After analyzing some of the relevant passages I conclude that these passages inescapably, though perhaps inadvertently, commit Aquinas to what is fundamentally a B-theoretic notion of time. I move on to criticize some philosophers’ attempts to reconcile Aquinas’s treatment of divine timelessness with the A-theory. I argue that all these attempts are unsuccessful. I conclude with what I believe are the implications of my interpretation of Aquinas for his broader system of philosophy. (shrink)

In this volume _Grace M. Jantzen_ continues her groundbreaking analysis of death and beauty in western thought by examining the religious roots of death and violence in the Jewish and Christian tradition, which underlie contemporary values. She shows how man’s fear of the female is often implicated in religious violence and in her critique of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament she examines a range of themes that show the western preoccupation with necrophilia. She examines the relation of (...) death to the Jewish covenant, the nature of monotheism, Holy War and the Christian covenant and kingdom. However, Jantzen recognises that submerged beneath these themes in Judaism and Christianity are traces of an alternative world of beauty and life. Jantzen’s internationally recognised feminist philosophy of religion puts forward a powerful analysis of patriarchy and violence and reveals the hidden power of natality. Her work is a searching challenge for our times and one that gives hope in a violent world. This work is the first of two posthumous publications to complete her impressive genealogy death and beauty of western thought. (shrink)

In this essay I wish to defend the intuition that God transcends time, of which he is the Creator. To do this, I will develop a new understanding of the term ‘timeless eternity’ as it applies to God. This assumes the inadequacy of the traditional notion of divine eternity, as it is found in Boethius, Anselm and Aquinas. Very briefly, the reasons for this inadequacy are as follows. God sustains the universe, which means in part that he is (...) responsible for the fundamental ontological status of things. Because the universe is an everchanging reality, things do change in their fundamental ontological status at different times – a change we must ascribe to God, and cannot ascribe to the objects themselves, since this has to do with their very existence. God himself, therefore, does different things at different times. This implies change in God. Whenever a change occurs, a duration occurs. Therefore, God is in time. But I do not think it is proper to say that God is in our time. God transcends time, and he is the Creator of our space-time. It is theologically more proper to say that we are in God's time, and I will adopt this language here. (shrink)

Craig claims that my treatment of temporal indexicals such as ‘now’ is inadequate, and that my theory gives no general account of tense. Craig’s argument misunderstands the theory of indexicals I give, and I show how to extend the theory to give a general account of tense.

Name der Zeitschrift: Byzantinische Zeitschrift Jahrgang: 111 Heft: 3 Seiten: 659-720.

In chapters 12-18 of "Against Proclus," Philoponus continues to do battle against Proclus' arguments for the beginninglessness and everlastingness of the ordered universe. In this final section there are three notable issues under discussion. The first concerns the composition of the heavens and its manner of movement. Philoponus argues against the Aristotelian thesis that there is a fifth heavenly body that has a natural circular motion. He concludes that even though the celestial region is composed of fire and the other (...) three elements, it can move in a circle by the agency of its soul, and that this circular motion is not compromised in any way by the innate natural motion of the fire. Chapter 16 contains an extended discussion of the will of God and His relation to particulars. Here Philoponus addresses issues that become central to medieval philosophical and theological discussions, including the unity, timelessness and indivisibility of God's will. Finally, throughout these seven chapters Philoponus is engaged in a detailed exegesis of Plato's Timaeus which aims to settle a number of familiar interpretive problems, notably how we should properly understand the pre-cosmic state of disorderly motion, and the statement that the visible cosmos is an image of the paradigm. Philoponus' exegetical concerns culminate in chapter 18 with an extensive discussion of Plato's attitude to poetry and myth. (shrink)

How to understand Saint Anselm of Canterbury on time and divine eternity is subject to debate. Katherin Rogers argues that Anselm is a four‐dimensionalist, whereas Brian Leftow argues that he is a presentist. Despite the disagreement, both scholars assume that Anselm has a positive account of time and divine eternity to offer. I challenge this assumption, arguing that Anselm is not interested in offering an account of the metaphysics of time and divine eternity. The reading defended here (...) is deflationary in the following sense: Anselm is trying to purify, so to speak, the notion of ‘divine eternity’ from creaturely imperfections that are suggested by our language. (shrink)

This is the introduction to the Question 10 (The Eternity of God) of St. Thomas Aquinas' "Summa Theologiae".

Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption culminates in an aesthetic configuration of simultaneous presences: world, man, God, creation, revelation, and redemption are viewed in a metahistorical side-by-side, connected by the “factualizing power of the And.” But the idea of simultaneity, which is central to Rosenzweig’s configurative thinking, belongs to the historical imagination as much as it belongs to the theological “breaking through the shackles of time.” Rosenzweig’s “and” belongs to both a tradition of cosmic-aesthetic historicism and the philosophical reconstitution of time (...) as a simultaneous perception. In the co-presence of all historical moments, history’s hidden Gestalt, which only a people that is at once old and young can envision, connects the “and” of history with what Hegel considered history’s end—its ultimate self-recognition. Eternity, then, means neither flight from, nor resistance to, history’s naked fact, but the recognition of history’s Gestalt as an image that “does not tolerate epochs.”. (shrink)

Augustine’s account of time is often praised as unique among the philosophical doctrines found in late antiquity, but in the same laudatory breath, commentators almost always reject his ideas. This dual response finds popular voice in Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy, in which he states that although he disagrees with Augustine’s conclusions, it is a “great advance on anything to be found on the subject in Greek philosophy.” According to this traditional interpretation, Augustine argues for a subjective idealism (...) regarding time wherein time is dependent on the human mind and is upheld by the mental attitudes of expectation, attention, and memory. Philosophers claim that a purely subjectivist conception of time, though intriguing, is unable to make sense of our best scientific theories. And theologians like Robert W. Jenson have even described Augustine’s account of time as a deeply confused artifact of his incompatible commitments to Neoplatonism and Christianity. -/- In contrast, I argue that Augustine’s view of time is both similar to our current scientific understanding of time and theologically useful. Once we understand Augustine’s approach, both in the context of his time and our own, I believe we can find insight about time as such and learn an important lesson about appropriate methodology for Christian philosophers and theologians. (shrink)

There are two ways in which Ghazali contributes to the discussion of whether God exists: by arguing for the existence of God, and by arguing against certain views which, in his opinion, stand in the way of truly believing that God exists. In this paper I examine Ghazali’s argument from creation and his refutation or the philosophers’ second proof for the eternity or the world. My purpose will be to argue that: firstly, Ghazali’s argument and his refutation are based (...) on incompatible views of time, and cannot, therefore, both be maintained. Secondly, Ghazali fails to establish the one interesting premiss which he employs in his argument from creation. (shrink)

The following examines the concept of time in Gadamer’s work, looking specifically at the role of artwork and festival as focal points of his temporal analysis. It is argued that the usual way of understanding Gadamer’s reflections on time as either “empty” or “fulfilled,” while accurate, need to be supplemented by a third species of time which is neither “full” nor “empty,” pointing instead to the underappreciated role of eternity in his thought. Eternity in this instance is not (...) the other or the outside of time, as one finds in various traditional metaphysical determinations. It is rather intended as the vast and unending time of the cosmos, hinted at in the experience of artwork and festival. (shrink)

_An intimate, philosophic quest for eternity, amidst the disenchantments and disappointments of our time “Anyone who, in our age of disbelief, longs to believe in God will find Mr. Kronman worth reading.”—Andrew Stark, _Wall Street Journal___ “Aims to persuade America’s ‘relentlessly rational’ elites to acknowledge the existence of ‘divinity.’... Kronman’s ambition is to repair ‘the schism between those for whom religion continues to matter and those who view it with amusement or contempt.’”—Tunku Varadarajan, _Wall Street Journal__ Many people of (...) faith believe the meaning of life depends on our connection to an eternal order of some kind. Atheists deride this belief as a childish superstition. In this wise and profound book, Anthony Kronman offers an alternative to these two entrenched positions, arguing that neither addresses the complexities of the human condition. We can never reach God, as religion promises, but cannot give up the longing to do so either. We are condemned by our nature to set goals we can neither abandon nor fulfill, yet paradoxically are able to approach more closely if we try. The human condition is one of inevitable disappointment tempered by moments of joy. Resolutely humanistic and theologically inspired, this moving book offers a rational path to the love of God amidst the disenchantments of our time. (shrink)

This paper investigates the attitudes of two Islamic and Christian thinkers, Saint Aquinas and Mulla Sadra Shirazi, about occurrence and eternity hypothesis issue. Aquinas faces two ideas. The first approach is eternity of the world based on Aristotle's theory and his followers another approach is the world temporal occurrence derived from Christian scriptures. Aquinas believes that the reasons presented for proving the world's occurrence are not convincing and therefore criticizes them. Although he accepts the universe occurrence he has (...) a worshiping view to it and finally regards the world's eternity and occurrence as an antinomical problem. In contrast, Mulla Sadra who has accepted the occurrence does not consider a starting point for the issue and in turn tries to prove it by Substantial Motion approach and therefore regardless of worship aspect of the issue and by employing a rational approach he gains a higher status than Aquinas. (shrink)

The essay proposes a notion of “icon” understood, according to the paradigm born of the Second Council of Nicaea, as a visible image of the invisible qua invisible. In this light, the distinctive feature of the icon-image is its ability to manifest the paradoxical identity-difference relationship that links visible and invisible, and, consequently, representable and unrepresentable, immanence and transcendence, eternity and time. By offering itself as the privileged place for the presentation of an absence and of a “withdrawal”, the (...) icon is distinguished in the first place by its apophatic and kenotic character. In this sense, the salient trait of the icon is its constitutive disquiet: it is founded on the “relational economy” of the image, which implies the need of an incessant articulation of the relation between visible and invisible. We can thus see in the icon the paradigm itself of “great art”: indeed, like the icon, great art is always primarily characterised by its disquiet, that is its ability to make transcendence appear in immanence, the Other of the visible appear in the visible. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Descartes's earliest proclamation of his curious modal theory supports the conceptualist analysis of it, according to which the eternity of the eternal truths is a conceptual matter, not something more profound than that.