Necessary
Concreta
Are there any necessarily existing concrete things? And if so, what might they be like? Some
philosophers might consider these questions to be questions for philosophers of
religion on the grounds that a necessarily existing concrete thing sounds
somewhat like the self-existent Being of natural theology. Be it as it may,
naturalists and non-naturalists alike may view these questions as purely
metaphysical—an inquiry into the nature of the most fundamental aspects of the
concrete world. Investigating this topic can expand our understanding of the
nature of explanation and of the causal structure of the concrete world.
Why
might one think there is one or more concrete thinks that exist necessarily?
From States of
Affairs to a Necessary Being, Philosophical
Studies, forthcoming.
I point out some unforeseen
connections between certain modest causal principles—e.g., that arrangements of
concrete things, or their intrinsic duplicates, normally can be causally explained—to the existence of a necessarily
existing concrete thing.
A New Argument for a Necessary
Being (previously called, “A Modest Cosmological Argument”), Yale-Uconn Graduate Conference, March,
2009, work-in-progress.
I’ve recently come upon what
just might be the most modest
argument for a concrete, necessary thing developed so far. Sounds bold, I
realize that. But the causal principle I use appears to be more modest
(logically weaker than) than other principles I’ve seen in arguments for a
necessary being from ancient times to the present. The argument is built from a
premise that is logically weaker than this one: beginnings normally can have
causal explanations. The argument may be viewed as a kind of rejoinder to
Oppy’s recent criticism of cosmological arguments for necessary beings. I
believe it just might be powerful to persuade some philosophers to accept the
existence of one or more Necessary Beings, but I certainly do not think it
ought to persuade every philosopher.
Kalam Calamity, Society
of Christian Philosophers Conference (Pacific Division), February, 2004.
Here my roommate at the time
(Luke van Horn) and I basically tear the kalam argument to pieces. :) Or to be
more modest, we synthesized the major objections to the kalam argument that at
the time had not (in our view) been adequately addressed (or addressed at all)
in the literature by proponents of the argument. My present assessment of the
argument remains skeptical: see my entry
at Prosblogion.
Of course, the Kalam
cosmological argument isn’t really an argument for a concrete necessary being.
I include it here, however, because the Kalam argument aims to argue for an
eternal thing that has causal powers and that isn’t identical to the universe
as a whole, and someone might wonder whether the best explanation for why a thing
is eternal is that its non-existence is impossible. In other words, it’s an
open question whether the kalam argument would give us reason to believe in a
necessary concrete thing, if it were
successful.
Hume
and the Kalam Cosmological Argument with Garrett Deweese, in In
Defense of Natural Theology: A Post-Humean Reassessment, ed. Douglas
Groothuis and James Sennett.
After a year of
graduate classes in philosophy (with no undergraduate philosophy degree), I
wrote a chapter with my professor defending
the Kalam argument against Hume-style criticisms. My section was on the
analysis of various causal principles. But I should say that our defense
ultimately relies on an argument from contingency. And if the best way to
defend the Kalam argument is to give a different
cosmological argument, then the Kalam argument isn’t really doing any of the
work.
William Rowe’s Objection to PSR,
idea-in-progress.
When I read Rowe’s, The
Cosmological Argument (1975), as a freshman in college (not for class, but for
fun!), I became convinced that an unrestricted principle of sufficient reason
is false. Later, I came across Pruss’ book length defense of PSR. His book weakened my conviction that PSR is
false. One important point in his book was to motivate a distinction between a
sufficient explanation and logically entailing one (this may weaken the force
of van Inwagen’s objection). Still, Rowe’s circularity argument continued to
hold sway. But recently I’ve had a change of thinking on this matter. I now think
I see a flaw in Rowe’s objection. I’m also much more sympathetic to the idea
that a moderately strongly version of PSR might even be correct.
What
might a necessarily existing concrete thing be like?
From a Necessary Being to God, International Journal of Philosophy of
Religion (forthcoming).
Here I draw out some new
connections from a concrete necessary thing to a maximal being—a being that has various attributes to maximal
degrees. The connections are proposed tentatively. I see this paper as
providing an outline for further investigation.