To return to my complaints Davies’ overview and criticism of various theistic accounts of evil e.g. the tapestry theory or soul-making, would be considered a disgrace to a lowbrow philosophical atheist like Martin or Maitzen. That a theist should come out with them in the muddled strawman way that he does is highly depressing.

I am also impressed how that noble son of the Ox manages to completely ignore applicatione of the Principle of Double Effect to the cases he discusses. If he is applying human moral standards to God (to show why that should not be done of course least Plantinga creep into our houses and eat our children) then quite categorically he is not applying Thomistic ones.

With due deference to Anscombe fans I really think Wittgenstein ruined Thomist and associated scholastic philosophy in the U.K. Almost all of them bear his taint and Davies is no exception.

Last edited by DanielCC (8/09/2018 7:28 am)

Daniel, Is the Richard Cross you're referring to this?:

(I'm not allowed to include the amazon link as a new member, so instead the title:Duns Scotus (Great Medieval Thinkers))

I don't know anything about Scotus so is this a good place to start?  I'm surprised to see it $40 new....

A thought on Vos' Scotus. The book is excellent (I read the central section on the Subtle Doctor's philosophy some years ago and am just beginning it again) and Vos really tries hard to give the reader a sense of the time and local in which his subject worked.

The one little quibble I have is that though Vos is right to stress Scotus innovation with regards to synchronic contingency ('logical potency') he sometimes talks as if prior scholastics including Thomas were modal fatalists, that they held the actual world was the only possible world. This is quite clearly false - earlier scholastics still understood what synchronic contingency entailed even if they were stuck with an Aristotelian paradigm that tried to parse modality into diachronic statements (this is one reason why though Thomas is happy to admit matter might be necessary in the Aristotelian sense of existing from eternity he still stresses its difference from the necessity of the divine substance). Although the emanationist view held by the Neo-Platonists and some Arabian philosophers points towards modal collapse most scholastic philosophers had a strong sense of creation's contingency dating back to Augustine's discussion of different worlds God could create.