I like me some Schiller. Have you read his Mission of Moses. Interesting essay. Try Goethe for another poet.

I know Ovid mentioned some form of henotheism/monotheism in his Metamorphose with a demiurge creating the world but I'm not sure if he took it seriously are not. I also read somewhere Horace in his later years went towards some form of philosophical monotheism but again I'm not sure how accurate this is of him. You're right about Cicero, and Seneca, but with Aurelius I think it's more polytheistic, and I can't tell with Virgil.

The entire article as I know jack about modal logic or the axioms needed to understand the argument.

I saw these a while ago, but I didn't understand it. Still don't.

DanielCC wrote:

AKG wrote:

DanielCC wrote:

iwpoe wrote:

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Obviously not, since OS doesn't not address this issue but assumes God's sovereignty in the matter and then seeks to explain why we are in the position of needing divine aid. You already have to assume a lot of Christian aparati for this to make sense: especially the gap between ourselves and God requiring God's intercession.

Is not that last claim partially what is at issue?

iwpoe wrote:

That is not an explanation but a restatement of the issue, as is...

Re the first, only if one takes ignorance rather than error as equitable with evil. I’ll grant that might be a tenable position to take on the Privation account of Evil however.

Re the second, no it's not. Your argument claims the world ought not to be the way it is, whilst I object ought to be that way because it serves a purpose.


Here the tacit acknowledgement is that error is part and parcel of the nature of contingency, ergo the question becomes 'Why are there any contingent beings in the first place?'. I am surprised it should be placed in the mouth of a classical thinker though since they have a well-worn answer - contingent entities exist because the Great Chain of Being requires no gaps.

This is off-topic but are you a Platonist, and do you believe in reincarnation?
 

To the first question, 'No' although as a more Neo-Platonically influenced Scholastic Classical Theist there is naturally a lot of a cross over (would you call Augustine a Platonist?). I suppose that in terms of 'religious' identity I have more kinship to Plotinus than many orthodox Christian thinkers.

With regards to reincarnation I do not know. Would you apply that term to living other lives in other kinds of world? (One might say this continued finite lives are a form of Purgatory but that has excessively negative connotations). I don't think the objections Feser and Oderberg give to that notion, even on a Hylemorphic account, hold water thou

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