Category: Philosophy

  • Aristotle and the egoist worry (part 1)

    Aristotle famously held that happiness is the ultimate goal of human life, or — to use language more in keeping with Aristotle — that happiness is the chief good and last end of human life: Let us resume our inquiry and state… what is the highest of all goods achievable by action. Verbally there is very general agreement; for both →

  • Natural law vs the moral argument

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    Up until recently, I had thought that natural law theory was compatible with moral arguments formulated as follows: If God does not exist, then objective moral values and duties do not exist. Objective moral values and duties do exist. Therefore, God exists. Moral arguments of this kind have been made popular by defenders such as →

  • Self-perfective immanent activity

    At the beginning of his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle distinguishes two ways an activity can be related to the end for which that activity is done: either the activity is distinct from its end, or they are the same. We call those activities that are distinct from their ends transient and those that are the same immanent. Now, because an →

  • Dialogue on God’s interaction with the universe

    Bob: How can an immaterial God interact with a material universe? Alice: The question itself needs to be questioned before we can answer it. Bob: How so? It seems like a fairly straightforward question. Alice: Well, consider the word “interact.” God does not interact with anything. To interact requires action going in both directions, and →

  • McTaggart and meta-time

    There is what I take to be an error common among my fellow Thomists regarding change and certain theories of time. Put tersely, this error says that the B-theory of time is committed to the Parmenidian denial of change. I had decided to write something about it, but after doing a bit of research, it →

  • We don’t do God

    In a dialogue with the late Christopher Hitchens, John Haldane outlines why he thinks religion is crucial as a foundational political principle in societies made up of diverse cultures, religions, etc. Very roughly his position is (1) that the governing of such a society must be built around certain core notions like the respect for →

  • The real distinction

    Whenever we have two concepts, A and B, we can ask to what extent the things they pick out in reality are distinct. If they pick out distinct realities, then we say that there is a real distinction between them. If they pick out the same reality, however, then we say that there is a →

  • Essentially ordered series

    The notion of a series, or chain or regress, comes up a number of times in philosophical discussions. In this post, we’re going formalize the notion in general, and then develop this into a formalization of essentially ordered series in particular. Intuitively, a series is when we start with some member and from there we trace through →

  • The threefold whole

    In his Metaphysics Δ Aristotle says there are two senses of the term “whole”: Whole means that from which none of the things of which it is said to consist by nature are missing; and that which contains the things contained in such a way that they form one thing. The first sense corresponds to our usage →

  • Because God said so

    In a recent discussion with some friends, the question of why murder was wrong came up (actually, it was why Aquinas would say murder was wrong, but the discussion equally applies to the more general discussion to be had here). The answer “because God said so” quickly came up and, being a natural law theorist →