Hud Hudson presents an innovative view of the metaphysics of human persons according to which human persons are material objects but not human organisms. In developing his account, he formulates and defends a unique collection of positions on parthood, persistence, vagueness, composition, identity, and various puzzles of material constitution. The author also applies his materialist metaphysics to issues in ethics and in the philosophy of religion. He examines the implications for ethics of his metaphysical views for standard arguments addressing the (...) moral permissibility of our treatment of human persons and their parts, fetuses and infants, the irreversibly comatose, and corpses. He argues that his metaphysics provides the best foundation in the philosophy of religion for the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body. Hudson addresses a broad range of metaphysical issues, but among his most strikingly original contributions are his defense of the "Partist" view and his argument for the compatibility of Christianity with a materialistic theory of human persons. (shrink)
Introduction In the first four chapters of this book, I develop and defend a monistic account of human persons according to which human persons are highly ...
Hud Hudson offers a fascinating examination of philosophical reasons to believe in hyperspace. He explores non-theistic reasons in the first chapter and theistic ones towards the end; in the intervening sections he inquires into a variety of puzzles in the metaphysics of material objects that are either generated by the hypothesis of hyperspace or else informed by it, with discussions of receptacles, boundaries, contact, occupation, and superluminal motion. Anyone engaged with contemporary metaphysics, and many philosophers of religion, will find much (...) to stimulate them here. (shrink)
Hud Hudson shows that apparently irreconcilable conflicts between science and religion often turn out to be misdescribed battles about negotiable philosophical assumptions. He defends an original Hypertime Hypothesis which reconciles the Christian doctrines of The Fall and Original Sin with reigning scientific orthodoxy.
According to the tradition of western theism, God is said to enjoy the attribute of being everywhere present. But what is it, exactly, for God to manifest ubiquitous presence? Well, presumably, it is for God to bear a certain relation – the ‘being present at’ relation – to every place. This article focuses on the ‘being present at’ relation which figures so prominently in the divine attribute of omnipresence, on both fundamental and derivative readings of that relation, and on a (...) host of philosophical problems which arise for each reading. It is divided between a discussion of the historical positions of Anselm and Aquinas; a note on the controversy stirred up by the modern contributions of Hartshorne, Swinburne, Taliaferro, and Wierenga; a brief glance at two curious and underexplored approaches; an investigation of the promising prospects for further inquiry afforded by recent work on the metaphysics of location; and some concluding comments on special problems of occupation for the Christian theist. (shrink)
I begin this study with a review of the 18th-century figures, Leibniz, Wolff, Crusius, Hume and the pre-critical Kant concerning causation, free will and compatibilism. This review provides the background for an investigation into and a reconstruction of Kant's thesis of the compatibility of causal determinism and human freedom. I formulate Kant's argument for causal determinism and present his defense of that argument, devoting an extended discussion to the recent literature regarding its key premise, the Law of Universal Causation. Then (...) I identify and analyze two senses of 'will', the legislative function of practical reason and the executive function of the power of choice, and four senses of 'freedom of the will', spontaneity, independence, autonomy and heteronomy. ;On the strength of these discussions, I attribute to Kant the views that causal determinism obtains and that human beings have free will. After considering and finding unsatisfactory the traditional readings of Kant's resolution of the apparent incompatibility of these two theses, I explicate Kant's often misunderstood distinction between things in themselves and appearances. On the basis of the features of this distinction together with my exposition of Kant's theory of freedom, I ascribe to Kant a token-token identity thesis regarding human actions and natural events, but a type-type irreducibility thesis regarding the sorts of descriptions applicable to human actions and natural events. The consequent compatibilist resolution, in addition to furnishing a way of reading problematic passages underlying standard incompatibilistic interpretations, yields a compatibilism which neither sacrifices the epistemology of the Critique of Pure Reason, nor leaves Kant with only an impoverished theory of human free will. ;Finally, I bring the results of this inquiry into the current debate over the problem of freedom and determinism. Specifically, for the purpose of providing Kantian critiques of current positions and current critiques of the Kantian position, I place Kant's view of token-token identity and type-type irreducibility within the context of contemporary philosophy of mind, aligning him with philosophers who share not only his compatibilism, but also, to a surprising degree, the particulars of his version of compatibilism. (shrink)
Anyone who endorses Universalism and Four Dimensionalism owes us an argument for those controversial mereological theses. One may put forth David Lewis’s and Ted Sider’s arguments from vagueness. However, the success of those arguments depends on the rejection of the epistemic view of vagueness, and thus opens the door to a fatal confrontation with one particularly troubling version of The Problem of the Many. The alternative for friends of Universalism and Four Dimensionalism is to abandon those currently fashionable arguments in (...) favor of others which are consistent with the epistemic view of vagueness and with the elegant solution it furnishes to that problem. (shrink)
Anyone who endorses Universalism and Four Dimensionalism owes us an argument for those controversial mereological theses. One may put forth David Lewis's and Ted Sider's arguments from vagueness. However, the success of those arguments depends on the rejection of the epistemic view of vagueness, and thus opens the door to a fatal confrontation with one particularly troubling version of The Problem of the Many. The alternative for friends of Universalism and Four Dimensionalism is to abandon those currently fashionable arguments in (...) favor of others which are consistent with the epistemic view of vagueness and with the elegant solution it furnishes to that problem. (shrink)
Three Dimensionalists and Four Dimensionalists are engaged in a debate on the topics of persistence and mereology. In this paper, I explore implications of Four Dimensionalism for the formulation of the criterion of personhood and on the question of which individuals satisfy that criterion. In my discussion I argue that the Four Dimensionalist has reason to identify a human person with a proper part of a human organism, and that the Four Dimensionalist has reason to believe that if there is (...) something morally wrong with human abortion or infanticide, it cannot be grounded in claims about the moral status of persons. (shrink)
In this essay, I shall scold a Jinn, recommend a position in Islamic theology to my Muslim neighbors, explore a famous dilemma recounted in Genesis, and participate in a debate occasioned by an interpretive puzzle in Kierkegaard studies. I investigate two opposed ways of understanding the phrase, ‘the teleological suspension of the ethical’, offer some critical remarks on the interpretation of that phrase in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, and defend a range of considerations that speak in favor of one of (...) the options over the other. Finally, I show how one may invoke my preferred interpretation to confront the puzzle common to Jewish, Christian, and Islamic theology presented by the story of Abraham and the binding of Isaac and also how a related strategy can be invoked to address the story of Iblis and the puzzle peculiar to Islamic theology to which it gives rise. (shrink)
Despite its first page this paper is not yet another piece on Kant! Rather, the paper is a contribution to the literature on incongruent counterparts. Specifically, it concerns the question of whether we can construct a temporal version of the puzzle of incongruent counterparts--a question which (as far as I can tell) has been thoroughly neglected. I maintain that we can construct such a version of the puzzle, and that this temporal variant on the phenomenon has something to teach us (...) about popular arguments for the possibility (or even actuality) of four-dimensional space. (shrink)
Despite an impressive tradition, modern literalists about the Garden of Eden have come under severe criticism and ridicule on the grounds that contemporary science has thoroughly discredited such a view. Accordingly, the prevailing trend in modern theology is to dehistoricize the Fall. I am no fan of literalism, but in this paper I argue that these grounds are in need of supplementation by a piece of metaphysics that has not been adequately defended. Absent the additional metaphysical thesis, it is possible (...) to grant all the alleged implications of our modern worldview informed by physics, astronomy, chemistry, geology, and biology and nevertheless remain a proponent of literalism—without becoming a proper object of ridicule. Or, if still ridiculous, this status will have to be established by discrediting a piece of metaphysics and not by admiring the fruits of empirical science. (shrink)
