Philosophy in the English-speaking world is dominated by analytic approaches to its problems and projects; but theology has been dominated by alternative approaches. Many would say that the current state in theology is not mere historical accident, but is, rather, how things ought to be. On the other hand, many others would say precisely the opposite: that theology as a discipline has been beguiled and taken captive by 'continental' approaches, and that the effects on the discipline have been largely deleterious. (...) The methodological divide between systematic theologians and analytic philosophers of religion is ripe for exploration. The present volume represents an attempt to begin a much-needed interdisciplinary conversation about the value of analytic philosophical approaches to theological topics. Most of the essays herein are sympathetic toward the enterprise the editors are calling analytic theology; but, with an eye toward balance, the volume also includes essays and an introduction that try to offer more critical perspectives on analytic theology. (shrink)

In this paper I offer an argument against one important version of panentheism, that is, mereological panentheism. Although panentheism has proven difficult to define, I provide a working definition of the view, and proceed to argue that given this way of thinking about the doctrine, mereological accounts of panentheism have serious theological drawbacks. I then explore some of these theological drawbacks. In a concluding section I give some reasons for thinking that the classical theistic alternative to panentheism is preferable, all (...) things considered. (shrink)

The atonement is one of the central and defining doctrines of Christian theology. Yet the nature of the atonement – how it is that Christ's life and death on the cross actually atone for human sin – remains a theological conundrum. This article offers a new argument for an old theory of the atonement, namely, penal substitution. First, it sets out the theological context for the argument. This involves giving some account of alternative theories of the atonement in the tradition, (...) and why penal substitution might be thought a particularly appealing way of thinking about the atonement. The article then presents an argument for a version of penal substitution that involves the application of an idea found in some Augustinian accounts of the transmission of sin from Adam to his progeny. At the end of this exposition, it offers some brief comments on the metaphysics undergirding the theology of this argument. The final section discusses several theological and philosophical objections to this reasoning. (shrink)

Causality in Macroeconomics examines causality while taking macroeconomics seriously. A pragmatic and realistic philosophy is joined to a macroeconomic foundation that refines Herbert Simon's well-known work on causal order to make a case for a structural approach to causality. The structural approach is used to understand modern rational expectations models, regime switching models, Granger causality, vector autoregressions, the Lucas critique, and concept exogeneity. Techniques of causal inference based on patterns of stability and instability in the face of identified regime changes (...) are developed and illustrated in two empirical case studies. (shrink)

Reformed theology is often thought to be antipathetic to virtue theory. However, Jonathan Edwards is a counterexample to this way of thinking. In this article, I offer an account of Edwards’s moral thought as a case study of Reformed theology that is also a species of virtue theory, focusing on what he says about the formation of character. I argue that key doctrinal commitments drive his moral theology, and generate some interesting problems for his ethics. Although his work is not (...) without shortcomings, Edwards is a thinker whose moral theology might be usefully repaired and retrieved by contemporary theologians in the Reformed tradition for whom ‘duties are founded on doctrines’. (shrink)

The concept of divine justice has been the subject of considerable scrutiny in recent philosophical theology, as it bears upon the notion of punishment with respect to the doctrine of eternal damnation. In this essay, I set out a version of the traditional retributive view of divine punishment and defend it against one of the most important and influential contemporary detractors from this position, Thomas Talbott. I will show that, contrary to Talbott’s argument, punishment may satisfy divine justice, and that (...) perfect justice is commensurate with retribution, rather than, as he suggests, reconciliation and restoration. (shrink)

In several recent articles and a monograph, Andrew Loke has outlined a particular model of the Incarnation, which he calls the Divine Preconscious Model. In this article I provide a critique of this model, drawing on recent work by James Arcadi in order to show that there are serious theological costs involved in adopting the DPM.

This article considers several problems concerning the origin of the soul in the work of the nineteenth century American theologian, William G. T. Shedd. He opts for the traducian position, which is, that the soul is passed down from parents to child, in a way similar to the passing of physical seed from two human parents that fuse in syngamy to form a genetically distinct entity. The essay considers three problems with this view. The first concerns the composition of human (...) natures; the second, whether souls are fissiparous; and the third, the relationship between traducianism, creationism and Augustinian realism. (shrink)

In this article I assess the coherence of Jonathan Edwards's doctrine of divine simplicity as an instance of an actus purus account of perfect-being theology. Edwards's view is an idiosyncratic version of this doctrine. This is due to a number of factors including his idealism and the Trinitarian context from which he developed his notion of simplicity. These complicating factors lead to a number of serious problems for his account, particularly with respect to the opera extra sunt indivisa principle. I (...) conclude that Edwards sets out an interesting and subtle version of the doctrine, but one which appears mired in difficulties from which he is unable to extract himself. (shrink)

In recent systematic theology versions of the Ransom account of the atonement have proliferated. Much of this work uses Gustav Aulén's Christus Victor as a point of departure. In this paper I first distinguish between models and theories of atonement. Then I discuss three recent theological perorations of the Ransom model as a prelude to setting out four interpretive strategies for understanding this view of atonement. I then offer some critical remarks on these strategies, concluding that the Ransom view as (...) set forth here does not provide a complete model of atonement. (shrink)

In modern theology the doctrine of the Virgin Birth of Christ, including the doctrine of his Virginal Conception, has been the subject of considerable scepticism. One line of criticism has been that the traditional doctrine of the Virgin Birth seems unnecessary to the Incarnation. In this essay I lay out one construal of the traditional argument for the doctrine and show that, although one can offer an account of the Incarnation without the Virgin Birth which, in other respects, is perfectly (...) in accord with catholic Christianity, such a doctrine is still contrary to the plain teaching of Scripture and the Creeds on the question of the mode of the Incarnation. It might still be thought that the Incarnation was an ‘unfitting’ means of Incarnation. In a final section I draw upon Anselm's arguments in defence of the Incarnation to show that this objection can also be overcome. (shrink)

In his recent two‐volume Systematic Theology, Robert Jenson offers an account of Christ's pre‐existence that is, in several important respects, an original contribution to the literature. In this article, I offer a critical interaction with Jenson's doctrine. In particular, I show that what Jenson has to say about divine eternity and the relationship between philosophy and theology, have important bearings on his construal of Christ's pre‐existence and, in the final analysis, skew what he has to say on the matter. I (...) conclude that Jenson's account of this doctrine, though suggestive and insightful in several respects, is unsuccessful, indeed, incoherent, as it stands. (shrink)

In this essay I respond to my interlocutors in the symposium on my monograph, Analyzing Doctrine. Addressing each of them in the order in which their essays are printed, I consider and reply to comments by William Lane Craig, Steven Nemes, N. Gray Sutanto, Jordan Wessling and Joanna Leidenhag.

This volume offers an array of newly commissioned essays, addressing the topic of love in the Christian tradition. Drawn from a range of expert theologians and philosophers in contemporary analytic and non-analytic theology, these essays join current debates within the theology of love, and aim to propose new avenues for future research. Including the last essay written by Marilyn McCord Adams, Love, Divine and Human deals with a rich variety of issues related to divine and human love. The broad scope (...) of the book includes divine transcendence and its methodological bearing on the doctrine of divine love, the nature and scope of divine love, the interrelation between God's love and wrath, the plausibility of an impassable God of love, and the application of various conceptions of divine love to the problem of divine hiddenness, human ethics, and human free will, among other topics. This unified collection of cutting-edge papers will advance discussion for all those focused on the theology of love. (shrink)

The Laches features two Athenian generals (Laches and Nicias) and Socrates discussing the essential meaning of courage. Laches defines it as “a certain perseverance of the soul,” while Nicias argues that it consists in “knowledge of what is to be feared and hoped for both in war and in all other matters.” This paper, with the aid of several Plato scholars, argues that although most scholars agree that Socrates does not present his own view of the matter, hence leaving the (...) dialogue without a proper resolution, it may still be surmised that for Socrates, courage means willful yet wise perseverance. (shrink)

Is contemporary media society still interested in truth? This paper will try to unravel the vaguely suspicious epistemic relationship between information marketers and information consumers in today's society. There seems to have been forged a feeling of quasi-omniscience within the private and public spheres wherein people, due to the sheer volume of inforntation readily accessible for viewing at any time, become predisposed to exhibit an intriguingly relaxed relationship with knowledge. If the current systems of information seem to trivialize the question (...) of truth or falsehood, and since the public is apparently just interested in spectacles, then how must we view epistemologically the status of contemporary media discourse? Does it still reveal truth or is it simply empry talk? To address this question, the paper explores a possible parallelism between Plato's critique of rhetoric in his dialogue, Gorgias, and Jean Baudrillard's critique of contemporary media society. (shrink)

Elliot Sober ([2001]) forcefully restates his well-known counterexample to Reichenbach's principle of the common cause: bread prices in Britain and sea levels in Venice both rise over time and are, therefore, correlated; yet they are ex hypothesi not causally connected, which violates the principle of the common cause. The counterexample employs nonstationary data—i.e., data with time-dependent population moments. Common measures of statistical association do not generally reflect probabilistic dependence among nonstationary data. I demonstrate the inadequacy of the counterexample and of (...) some previous responses to it, as well as illustrating more appropriate measures of probabilistic dependence in the nonstationary case. A challenge to the principle of the common causeSober's argument and the attempts to rescue the principleProbabilistic dependenceNonstationary time seriesProbabilistic dependence in nonstationary time seriesDo Venetian sea levels and British bread prices violate the principle of the common cause? (shrink)

Three experiments explored the effects of word problem cueing on debiasing versions of the bat-and-ball problem. In the experimental condition order, participants solved a simpler isomorphic version of the problem prior to solving a standard version that, critically, had the same item-and-dollar amounts. Conversely, in the control condition order, participants solved the standard version prior to solving the isomorph. Across the first 2 experiments, participants cued with the isomorph were more likely to correctly solve the standard version of the problem. (...) In the third experiment, this cueing effect was not replicated, but importantly cued participants were more likely to correctly solve the standard version of the problem with other item-and-dollar amounts, indicating near transfer. Far transfer was evident in faster response times to other problems in the Cognitive Reflection Test following practice. Along with providing converging evidence for the cueing account, these results are consistent with recent attentional debiasing findings. (shrink)

Macroeconomists overwhelmingly believe that macroeconomics requires microfoundations, typically understood as a strong eliminativist reductionism. Microfoundations aims to recover intentionality. In the face of technical and data constraints macroeconomists typically employ a representative-agent model, in which a single agent solves the microeconomic optimization problem for the whole economy, and take it to be microfoundationally adequate. The characteristic argument for the representative-agent model holds that the possibility of the sequential elaboration of the model to cover any number of individual agents justifies treating (...) the policy conclusions of the single-agent model as practically relevant. This eschatological justification is examined and rejected. (shrink)

The Methodology of Empirical Macroeconomics stakes out a pragmatic middle-ground between traditional, prescriptive economic methodology and recent descriptive methodology. The former is sometimes seen as arrogantly telling economists how to do their work and the latter as irrelevant to their practice. The lectures are built around a case study of a concrete example of macroeconomic analysis. They demonstrate that economic methodology and the philosophy of science offer insights that help to resolve the genuine concerns of macroeconomists. Some examples of questions (...) addressed include: What is the relationship between theoretical models and empirical observations? What is the relevance of macroeconomics to policy? Should macroeconomics be viewed as a special case of microeconomics? What is the place of long-standing philosophical issues in macroeconomics, such as the scope and nature of economic laws, the role of idealizations, methodological individualism, and the problem of causality? (shrink)

Argues that ontological reduction of macroeconomics to microeconomics is untenable. Existence of macroeconomic aggregates; Microfoundations of macroeconomics; Examinations of the general price level; Limits of the scientific development of microeconomics.

Discontented people might talk of corruption in the Commons, closeness in the Commons and the necessity of reforming the Commons, said Mr. Spenlow solemnly, in conclusion; but when the price of wheat per bushel had been the highest, the Commons had been the busiest; and a man might lay his hand upon his heart, and say this to the whole world, – ‘Touch the Commons, and down comes the country!’.

Recent debates over the nature of causation, casual inference, and the uses of causal models in counterfactual analysis, involving inter alia Nancy Cartwright (Hunting Causes and Using Them), James Woodward (Making Things Happen), and Judea Pearl (Causation), hinge on how causality is represented in models. Economists’ indigenous approach to causal representation goes back to the work of Herbert Simon with the Cowles Commission in the early 1950s. The paper explicates a scheme for the representation of causal structure, inspired by Simon, (...) and shows how this representation sheds light on some important debates in the philosophy of causation. This structural account is compared to Woodward’s manipulability account. It is used to evaluate the recent debates – particularly, with respect to the nature of causal structure, the identity of causes, causal independence, and modularity. Special attention is given to modeling issues that arise in empirical economics. (shrink)

Economics prefers complete explanations: general over partial equilibrium, microfoundational over aggregate. Similarly, probabilistic accounts of causation frequently prefer greater detail to less as in typical resolutions of Simpson’s paradox. Strategies of causal refinement equally aim to distinguish direct from indirect causes. Yet, there are countervailing practices in economics. Representative-agent models aim to capture economic motivation but not to reduce the level of aggregation. Small structural vector-autoregression and dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium models are practically preferred to larger ones. The distinction between exogenous (...) and endogenous variables suggests partitioning the world into distinct subsystems. The tension in these practices is addressed within a structural account of causation inspired by the work of Herbert Simon’s, which defines cause with reference to complete systems adapted to deal with incomplete systems and piecemeal evidence. The focus is on understanding the constraints that a structural account of causation places on the freedom to model complex or lower-order systems as simpler or higher-order systems and on to what degree piecemeal evidence can be incorporated into a structural account. (shrink)

In the eyes of its practitioners, economics is both a deductive science and an empirical science. The starting point of its deductions might be thought of as first principles. But what is the status of such principles? The tension between foundationalism, the idea that there are necessary and secure first principles for economic inquiry, and fallibilism, the idea that no belief can be certified as true beyond the possibility of doubt, is explored. Empirical disciplines require some sort of falsifiability. Yet, (...) empirical inquiries also require a starting place—if not a necessarily true one, at least an indubitable one, that is, one that is not actually doubted. Indubitability appears to have necessary consequences, undercutting fallibilism, while fallibilism threatens confidence in the de facto first principles that begin inquiry. This tension is examined in three well-known attempts to define economics and its method: John Stuart Mill’s economics as the science of wealth, Lionel Robbins’s economics as constrained optimization; and George Stigler and Becker’s attempt to reformulate neoclassical economics to square empiricism with Robbins’ deductivism. (shrink)

The difficulty of conducting relevant experiments has long been regarded as the central challenge to learning about the economy from data. The standard solution, going back to Haavelmo's famous “The Probability Approach in Econometrics” (1944), involved two elements: first, it placed substantial weight on a priori theory as a source of structural information, reducing econometric estimates to measurements of causally articulated systems; second, it emphasized the need for an appropriate statistical model of the data. These elements are usually seen as (...) tightly linked. I argue that they are, to a large extent, separable. Careful attention to the role of an empirically justified statistical model in underwriting probability explains puzzles not only in economics, but more generally with respect to recent criticisms of Reichenbach's principle of the common cause, which lies behind graph-theoretic causal search algorithms. And it provides an antidote to the pessimistic understanding of the possibilities for passive observation of causal structure in econometrics and related areas of Nancy Cartwright and others. (shrink)

Although the relevance and importance of his work has been recognized only belatedly, Charles Sanders Peirce was, throughout his life, a careful student and significant contributor to the development of logic, scientific theory, and philosophy generally. Occasionally, complete appreciation of Peirce's efforts has been hampered because his work is often unique and, at times, highly idiosyncratic. Yet, we hope to show in this paper that for one aspect of his work in logic Peirce did not abandon the ordinary without purpose. (...) Only relatively recently have philosophers of science become interested in the logic of discovery - that is, in the logic of the selection of hypotheses to be tested rather than simply in the ways of testing hypotheses which have already been selected. (shrink)

Modern empirical macroeconomic models, known as structural autoregressions (SVARs) are dynamic models that typically claim to represent a causal order among contemporaneously valued variables and to merely represent non-structural (reduced-form) co-occurence between lagged variables and contemporaneous variables. The strategy is held to meet the minimal requirements for identifying the residual errors in particular equations in the model with independent, though otherwise not directly observable, exogenous causes (“shocks”) that ultimately account for change in the model. In nonstationary models, such shocks accumulate (...) so that variables have discernible trends. Econometricians have conceived of variables that trend in sympathy with each other (so-called “cointegrated variables”) as sharing one or more of these unobserved trends as a common cause. It is possible for estimates of the values of both the otherwise unobservable individual shocks and the otherwise unobservable common trends to be backed-out of cointegrated systems of equations. The issue addressed in this paper is whether and in what circumstances these values can be regarded as observations of real entities rather than merely artifacts of the representation of variables in the model. The issue is related, on the one hand, to practical methodological problems in the use of SVARs for policy analysis—e.g., does it make sense to estimate of shocks or trends in one model and then use them as measures of variables in a conceptually distinct model? The issue is also related to debates in the philosophical analysis of causation—particularly, whether we are entitled, as assumed by the developers of Bayes-net approaches, to rely on the causal Markov condition (a generalization of Reichenbach’s common-cause condition) or whether cointegration generates a practical example of Nancy Cartwright’s “byproducts” objection to the causal Markov condition. (shrink)

This paper addresses the role of specification tests in the selection of a statistically admissible model used to evaluate economic hypotheses. The issue is formulated in the context of recent philosophical accounts on the nature of models and related to some results in the literature on specification search. In contrast to enumerative induction and a priori theory, powerful search methodologies are often adequate substitutes for experimental methods. They underwrite and support, rather than distort, statistical hypothesis tests. Their success is grounded (...) in a systematic effort to mold appropriate models to, and test them against, constraints of the data. (shrink)

Although the relevance and importance of his work has been recognized only belatedly, Charles Sanders Peirce was, throughout his life, a careful student and significant contributor to the development of logic, scientific theory, and philosophy generally. Occasionally, complete appreciation of Peirce's efforts has been hampered because his work is often unique and, at times, highly idiosyncratic. Yet, we hope to show in this paper that for one aspect of his work in logic Peirce did not abandon the ordinary without purpose. (...) Only relatively recently have philosophers of science become interested in the logic of discovery - that is, in the logic of the selection of hypotheses to be tested rather than simply in the ways of testing hypotheses which have already been selected. (shrink)

(2013). Beyond mechanical markets – asset price swings, risk and the role of the state. Journal of Economic Methodology: Vol. 20, Methodology, Systemic Risk, and the Economics Profession, pp. 69-75. doi: 10.1080/1350178X.2013.774856.