Miguel wrote:

Why would steps 1 and 2 be necessary? Samuel Clarke gives the argument that the first cause is intelligent since it is also responsible for the existence of intelligent beings, and by PPC the effects of the first cause cannot have a perfection (such as intelligence) in a greater way than the first cause, so the first cause is intelligent. All that is needed is PPC and for intelligence to be a positive perfection .

Well, God isn't a simple agent, with a finite will and intellect right? He's the Infinite, the Absolute. We want to show that the First Principle is not merely a god, but clearly God.

Miguel wrote:

From 1 we can make an argument for will and freedom, however, in the sense that the first cause cannot be determined to create anything external to itself. Feser gives some interesting arguments for that, and, if I remember, Plotinus also gives some curious arguments for will and freedom in the One.

What do you precisely mean by will?
I think that from 1, we could only show that the First Principle can do things, but not necessarily that is an agent with intellect.
There's still the possibility that there is an impersonal being who cause everything by contingent mean, like stochastic process... or could he? I think that Joshua Rassmussen argued that an impersonal being like that would be contingent, because you would have to fix an arbitrary value, so a contingent one, to what he can do: like he would have a 13% chance to make our world, but that 13% would be a unexplained value, so we would need something external to explain it.

Hello everyone!

I wanted to know what's the link beetween the two notions mentionned in the title: by classical distinctions, I mean necessary/contingent, a priori/a posteriori and analytic/synthetic.

The general scholastic view on knowledge is that, if i I understood it well, we abstract notion like universals, causation, deduction, etc. from mental images that we form after experience.
Now, is it possible to fit this with the distinctions above?

Can a thomist, for example, clearly say that the conceptualization process make us gain something like synthetic a priori knowledge

Marty wrote:

But that is not a casual relationship, it's a logical one. That's why we need to look at the solutions to the problem of affection in Kant's transcendental Idealism. Which have been, by now, tackled by many scholars, particularly Henry Allison. This question has been answered time and time again. See: Kant's Transcendental Idealism By Henry Allison. Jacobi's horns are a non-issue for the dual-aspect view. So I'm not seeing an internal inconsistency with Kant's system yet. 

I also don't understand your first objection. The first objection doesn't apply because we cannot apply criterion to things that exceed epistemic justifications.
 

Well, then that's exactly what I said, the PSR is a logical relationship, bigger than merely causal one. When you said that the noumenon realm is the reason of the phenomen, you are using the PSR.

And that's why I think the transcendental idealism of Kant fail: we clearly have grasp of a universal notion beyond any experience. We know that PSR apply on anything.

For what I've saw of him, Jeffery Jay Lowder is good. Still, he's not a professional philosopher if I remember well.

Hello everyone!

I'm a novice on the fifth way, but here's a worry of mine:

If someone is a platonist, doesn't the teleological argument became the cosmological argument for him?
Let me explain; if you need to explain why there is regularity in nature, he could simply say that this regularity is grounded in the platonic realm by certains laws. And it seems that at this point, the only thing that we could ask, is "Why this regularity rather than another?" But then we're talking about contingency, not the "telos" anymore.

Maybe it's a question that was too many answered, or maybe it's ill-formulated and it doesn't have any sense. Anyway, answers would be great! :-)