Category: Philosophy

  • Omni-instrumentality 1: Cooperation

    ,

    Divine providence is about God’s direction of all history in accordance with his plans, without thereby frustrating human freedom or undermining nature. Long-time readers will know that I was once a Molinist, but I have not said much on the topic since changing my views. I would describe the view I now hold as the →

  • Form vs structure, and what it means for virtual existence

    , ,

    A common but mistaken tendency when trying to understand hylomorphism is to equate form and structure and matter with the elements in that structure.1 This tendency is unsurprising, since modern science has taught us how to think about reality in terms of its physical and biological structure, but it is still a mistake. When Aristotle introduces →

  • God, matter, and necessary existence

    ,

    Reader Ante asks the following question in the comments of my response to his previous question: The issue I have is with regards to God’s necessary existence. Since God’s essence and existence are identical, He exists necessarily. But the same thing could be said of matter as well, as it seems to me. Why could →

  • Potentiality and inertia

    A key thing to appreciate about potentials is that they are indifferent to what is actually the case. It’s because of this that they are able to play the role they do in accounting for the reality of change, together with actualities. I have the potential to sit down even when I am standing up, →

  • Divine simplicity and freedom

    , ,

    In the conversation on divine simplicity over at the Theopolis Institute, Mullins’ most recent response draws attention to the three premises that are “only affirmed by proponents of divine simplicity”: All of God’s actions are identical to each other such that there is only one divine act. God’s act to give grace is identical to God’s one →

  • Eternity’s relation to time

    ,

    A few months ago, reader Ante asked this question on my What I Believe page: I am very much struggling how to combine a presentist account of time (like the A-theory for example) and the view that God is outside of time, in a Thomistic sense. I would be very thankful for your help, since it seems to →

  • Paul’s eschatological ethics

    ,

    There was a distinct moment when it dawned on me that I had missed something important in Paul’s thinking on the Christian motivations for doing good works. During a Bible study we were busy discussing the following passage: Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled →

  • The measures of activities

    When discussing self-perfective immanent activities we gave the following analysis of activities, with which we were able to delineate three kinds: … an activity is the measured exercise of powers for the sake of some end, where the end for which the activity is done determines the appropriate measure. A thing’s powers are what determine what it can and →

  • Aristotle’s function argument

    In the course of discussing the egoist worry, we saw that Aristotle’s own proposal for what happiness is is presented as the conclusion of his so-called “function argument.” This name is a bit misleading, however, since Aristotle didn’t think about function in the way we tend to these days, and he doesn’t so much give an argument as gesture in →

  • Aristotle and the egoist worry (part 2)

    In the first part we introduced the egoist worry about Aristotle’s ethics: does his claim that happiness is the ultimate goal of human life imply that everything we do is done for selfish reasons? We also traced Aristotle’s discussion from the beginning of his Nicomachean Ethics up to just before he puts forward his own proposal for what happiness →