Category: Philosophy

  • Links on living well

    I’ve come across two different links today that speak to the broad question of doing this whole “living” thing well: A blog post by Lydia McGrew in which she reminds us that “An irresistible urge to follow every ephemeral fad is not the mark of a life well-lived.” A TED talk by Barry Schwartz in →

  • Happiness and joy

    I was thinking about the difference between happiness and joy, considered psychologically. The tricky thing with accounting for the difference is that any account of these two has to explain why happiness and joy seem related, but nonetheless why one can rejoice (ie. express joy) in the face of suffering (that is, experiencing sorrow, which →

  • “Knowing” versus “knowing about”

    We can all agree that there is more to knowing someone than merely knowing a collection of facts about them. The latter we might call knowing about them, whereas the former is simply knowing them. James Chastek has recently written a blog post in which he distinguishes two senses of experience: (i) experience as sensation, and (ii) experience →

  • Natural and moral goodness

    “Cats have four legs.” What an innocent statement. Who would’ve thought that unpacking it would lead us to a system of ethics? Natural goodness We start by noting that statements like this one don’t tell us some quantifiable fact about cats. Rather they tell us what features a cat has by virtue of which it →

  • Craig’s timeless moment sans creation

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    William Lange Craig’s model of how God relates to time can be stated succinctly: God is timeless sans creation, and temporal since creation.[1] The reason we word it like this is obvious: he can’t be timeless before creation, since before-ness is a temporal relation and creation includes time itself. Craig holds this view largely because he →

  • An historical overview of natural law theory from Budziszewski

    In the preface to the second edition of J. Budziszewski’s What We Can’t Not Know: A Guide he gives a brief account of the history of natural law theory (a meta- and normative ethical theory very much at home in, but not limited to, Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy). I liked it, so I’m quoting it at length: Speaking →

  • Whatever begins to exist has a cause

    Consider the following argument: If it’s possible for a thing to come into existence without a cause, this possibility is grounded in a property of the thing itself, or a property of nothingness. This possibility is not grounded in a property of the thing itself, nor in a property of nothingness. Therefore, it is not →

  • Divine simplicity and the bootstrapping objection

    Divine simplicity is the thesis that God has no parts, and that he is identical with his nature, his existence, and all his properties. Absolute creationism is the thesis that abstract objects exist and that God created each one of them [1]. Now, without divine simplicity, we can raise the bootstrapping objection against absolute creationism: →

  • Middle knowledge or Molinism?

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    [UPDATE: I’ve actually modified the related post since I wrote this one. I’m leaving this post here, though, because I still think it’s got an interesting thought in it] In my recent post on God’s providence I discussed a view which I called “middle knowledge”. To some this might have been confusing, for this position is →

  • Divine simplicity and constituent ontologies

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    I’ve recently begun reading about Aristotelean-Thomistic philosophy. In A-T metaphysics, the doctrine of divine simplicity has a central place. This is the doctrine that God has no parts, be they physical or metaphysical. From this it follows that he is identical to his nature, to his existence, and to each of the divine attributes. Now →