Theoretical Philosophy » Non-personal necessary being » 12/15/2018 6:13 am |
Hello everyone.
I was considering responses that atheists give to cosmological argument. If we set aside the "brute fact" one, a possible answer is that there's a necessary being, but it isn't God. Good enough: but if that's the case, they should be able to give some plausible account of its necessity, right?
So here I am. I actually know, or at least I'm acquinted with threes authors who did give such an account:
- Kant, which is basically agnostic about "true" modality outside mind;
- Spinoza, which I really need to read entirely one day;
- Leslie. Well, he's still some sort of theist with his infinities of "goddish" minds.
It would be rather strange to just say "matter is neccessary" without making its necessity as clear as possible.
Does any of you find one of these plausible? Or is there better account? Some reading advice would be great.
Theoretical Philosophy » Perfect Theism imply life after death » 11/22/2018 8:57 am |
If this general solution to the problem of evil is correct, it seems to me that plausibly, some beings will live after their corporeal death.
Basically, the POE assumes that God can't actualize a world where there's gratuitous evil, where we define gratuituous evil as an evil which isn't necessary to some greater good.
Let's put aside the epistemic possibility that, in fact, it's impossible to have no possible world where there isn't any gratuitous evil. It still seems wrong to say that a benevolent being can't authorize some gratuitous evil.
If some being do some action that imply an evil, but without making this action for the sake of the said evil, and that it make sure that this evil is further compensate, would it imply that this being is evil? It doesn't seems so. Yet, this evil would be gratuitous: it's occurence wasn't necessary for a greater good: it could have happened for a lesser good, or a neutral thing.
Given this account, we must say then that every evil that a sentient being underwent must be compensante, in this life or thereafter.
Surely, some have suffered a lot without counterbalancing good; for example, if a baby is throw in a trash and die, it seems necessary for God to resurrect him if we assume that God is good.
Some could say that I presume univocal predication beetween God's goodness and his creatures' goodness, but if His isn't at least characterize by the two criteria I gave, it would seems misleading to say that He's Good in any sense.
Or maybe my account of goodness is too weak?
Theoretical Philosophy » How Do I Refute This Utilitarian Argument? » 11/22/2018 7:03 am |
Brian wrote:
2) It's fairly clear that the good isn't pleasure in any standard way. I can always ask, "Is this pleasure I am receiving good?" Me asking that question demonstrates that, at least at a conceptual/linguistic level, we differentiate between pleasure and goodness.
I don't think that's a good objection. You could always tell that to any account of morality.
Brian wrote:
6) There are certain painless acts that we find inherently shameful. For example, having sex with dead bodies. Insofar as you are satisfying a desire, and no one else finds about it, you are increasing pleasure. But would you really claim that necrophilia is an ethical action?
Even if I agree completly with you on that, I know by experience that people are prone to bite the bullet in that type of case. And the more the time passes, the more stranger things won't be consider immoral anymore.
For example, I was talking with some friend of mine on the issue of tradional mariage: I was telling him that given what ontological presupositions are for mariage today, something like desire + common agreement only, that we were bind to accept homosexual incestuous mariage. And he told me he was okay with that.
There's also Peter Singer, I think, that defended the morality some bestial relations and necrophilia.
Theoretical Philosophy » Two common atheist arguments I can't answer » 11/19/2018 9:31 am |
Pretty much what Daniel already said. I would also ask "Where's the evidence for your proposition: "I need evidence from physics to prove that God exists"?"
They would probably argue that it's irrational to say the opposite, but rationality is a normative matter, and normativity can't come from science. Just old self-defeating,bad empiricism. Nothing new under the sun.
Anyway, from my experience, those typicals r/atheism's type don't care about what you can say, for they have too much heavy-loaded anti-metaphysical background.
Theoretical Philosophy » A Question About Free Will » 10/30/2018 4:39 pm |
I don't know if someone already developped this point in a analytic way, but I think that we can make something like this:
1. We have two types of phenomenological experiences: active and passive. The passives are such way that we feel determined, the others are the ones where we feel that we really act by choosing beetwen different options.
2. Everything which is purely subject-related can't be an illusion. In other words, everything we believe about us as subject is true.
3. Experience qua experience, is knowledge of us as subject.
4. Therefore, our experience of our self as really choosing between different options, which is libertarian free-will, is true.
Theoretical Philosophy » Why did the modern metaphysical picture of reality prevail? » 10/20/2018 2:38 am |
DanielCC wrote:
Because of the early modern confusion of the a priori, an epistemic notion, with the necessary, a logical/metaphysical notion. This is what lead to Hume's Fork (as he assumed the only prospective form of non narrowly logical necessity was causal necessity) ergo the absurdity of Logical Positivism and towards the idealism of Kant and his followers.
Are you thinking about "Water is H2O" type of a posteriori necessities? If that's what you were thinking about, I'm not sure to understand why it was the problem.
Wouldn't it be simply empiricism the major problem? The fact that we don't have substantive a priori knowledge, when that idea is a substantive a priori knowledge.
(I'm most probably just showing my ignorance here.)
Chit-Chat » Elements in the Philosophy of Religion » 8/29/2018 4:54 pm |
DanielCC wrote:
Calhoun wrote:
Always interesting to read the blog posts.And also there is a new paper by Matthew James Collier on Modal realism and Classical theism, says their combination is either incompatible or lead to Modal collapse , among other things..
Ultimately I think any form of modal realism faces modal collapse because every being, or at least every worldbound being, is essentially the way it is. The indexical takes of existence and actual are just semantic ways of sugaring the pill.
Interestingly Almeida comes close to admitting this in his chapter on the cosmological argument and modal realism: 'Of course it is also true that the actual world and everything in it necessarily exists, since the actual world is one region of a necessarily existing pluriverse' (p79)
Something which seems very strange to me is to reconcile omnipotence and modal collapse: if God couldn't have done otherwise, in what sense can we say he's omnipotent?
Theoretical Philosophy » Imagination as a perfect guide to possibility » 8/29/2018 4:22 pm |
Hello everyone.
I was thinking about modal knowledge after reading a bunch of things about Husserl and his eidetic reduction,
It seems to me that "if we can imagine X, then X is possible" is clearly true. I fail to see how to form qualia in our mind could make us see an impossible word, even by mixing any of them.
So I tried to think about some counter-example, and I could found only one; a Penrose triangle:
But I'm not so sure, even if he's one of the so-called "impossible objects". Maybe some non-euclidean space could accodomate it?
What then is wrong: 1) the infaillibility of imagination as modal guide or 2) the impossibility of this figure?
I would bet on 2, but I'm curious about your views.
Practical Philosophy » The naturalist narrative » 7/24/2018 7:39 am |
Isn't this idea of teleological bias ultimately a petitio principii? Obviously, for every theists, every events comes from a personal source in the end.
I was also thinking about materialist accounts of mental life. Is there some clear account where even non-materialists, in general, agree that some parts of it is now explainable in a purely material way? (And where non-materialists were thinking that it wasn't possible.)
Practical Philosophy » The naturalist narrative » 7/24/2018 6:49 am |
Hello everyone.
You all certainly heard about the naturalist meta-narrative of history:
Our ancestors were a bunch of superstitious people who put supernatural being and substance beyond every natural phenomen. But with the progress of science/philosophy/whatever fields, we now know that it's false.
So, by extending this idea, we can be sure that everything that can't be explained in natural ways now, will be in some future.
What about that?
Is there some truth in that, or is it more like a distorted view of history?
It would be interesting to know everyone's opinion, and if you have some book on that subject, either from a naturalist or non-naturalist point of view.