ISSUES ON THE (IM)POSSIBLE VII

Philosophical Studies, 2010

God is traditionally taken to be a perfect being, and the creator and sustainer of all that is. So, if theism is true, what sort of world should we expect? To answer this question, we need an account of the array of possible worlds from which God is said to choose. It seems that either there is (a) exactly one best possible world; or (b) more than one unsurpassable world; or (c) an infinite hierarchy of increasingly better worlds. Influential arguments for atheism have been advanced on each hierarchy, and these jointly comprise a daunting trilemma for theism. In this paper, I argue that if theism is true, we should expect the actual world to be a multiverse comprised of all and only those universes which are worthy of creation and sustenance. I further argue that this multiverse is the unique best of all possible worlds. Finally, I explain how his unconventional view bears on the trilemma for theism.

2008

A fundamental error has dominated philosophy and science since ancient times, the assumption of the existence of the "unicorn-world"-that is, the existence of one unique world. It is one of the oldest and most dominant paradigms in human thinking that has generated many pseudo-problems in philosophy and science. We can identify this thinking paradigm, the unicorn-world, in the majority of myths, theological doctrines, philosophical approaches and scientific theories.

2013

"It is a venerable slogan due to David Hume, and inherited by the empiricist tradition, that the impossible cannot be believed, or even conceived. In Positivismus und Realismus, Moritz Schlick claimed that, while the merely practically impossible is still conceivable, the logically impossible, such as an explicit inconsistency, is simply unthinkable. An opposite philosophical tradition, however, maintains that inconsistencies and logical impossibilities are thinkable, and sometimes believable, too. In the Science of Logic, Hegel already complained against “one of the fundamental prejudices of logic as hitherto understood”, namely that “the contradictory cannot be imagined or thought” (Hegel 1931: 430). Our representational capabilities are not limited to the possible, for we appear to be able to imagine and describe also impossibilities — perhaps without being aware that they are impossible. Such impossibilities and inconsistencies are what this entry is about..."

The Philosophical Quarterly, 2010

Accounts of propositions as sets of possible worlds have been criticized for conflating distinct impossible propositions. In response to this problem, some have proposed to introduce impossible worlds to represent distinct impossibilities, endorsing the thesis that impossible worlds must be of the same kind; this has been called the parity thesis. I show that this thesis faces problems, and propose a hybrid account which rejects it: possible worlds are taken as concrete Lewisian worlds, and impossibilities are represented as set-theoretic constructions out of them. This hybrid account (1) distinguishes many intuitively distinct impossible propositions; (2) identifies impossible propositions with extensional constructions; (3) avoids resorting to primitive modality, at least so far as Lewisian modal realism does.

Religious Studies, 2020

This is a draft, please cite final version Relying on inference to the best explanation (IBE) requires one to hold the intuition that the world is ‘intelligible’, i.e. such that states of affairs at least generally have explanations for their obtaining. I argue that metaphysical naturalists are rationally required to withhold this intuition, unless they cease to be naturalists. This is because all plausible naturalistic etiologies of the intuition entail that the intuition and the state of affairs which it represents are not causally connected in an epistemically appropriate way. Given that one ought to rely on IBE, naturalists are forced to pick the latter and change their world-view.Traditional theists, in contrast, do not face this predicament. This, I argue, is strong grounds for preferring traditional theism to naturalism.

The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 1989

2008

Part I. The “epistemologically different worlds” perspective and its background Chapter 1. The Cartesian framework for the mind-body problem .. 25 1.1. The Cartesian “I” .......................................................................... 26 1.2. Clear, distinct and complete perceptions ...................................... 28 1.3. The two substances and the bi-directional relationship between “epistemology” and “ontology” .................................................. 32 1.3.1. The epistemological argument ........................................... 32 1.3.2. Complete things/knowledge ............................................... 35 1.3.3. The relationship between ontology and epistemology ...... 36 1.4. One world and the relationships between all primitives (the union between mind and body, the “I” and the “world”, etc.) ............... 39 Chapter 2. Kant’s anti-metaphysics, empirical knowledge and objective reality ................................................................................. 48 2.1. Transcendental deduction ............................................................. 55 2.2. The role of original synthetic unity of apperception for internal and external objects ...................................................................... 66 2.3. The schematism ............................................................................ 69 2.4. Apperception and existence .......................................................... 85 2.5. Apperception and the noumenal self ............................................ 94 2.6. Against Kant’s perspective ........................................................... 98 Chapter 3. The epistemological different worlds perspective ........... 101 3.1. Epistemologically different worlds .............................................. 101 3.2. The role of the conditions of observation in the defining of physical and mental phenomena .................................................. 113 3.2.1. The influence of Kant on Bohr’s approach ........................ 114 Chapter 4. Applications to some notions from philosophy of mind .. 159 4.1. Levels and reduction vs. emergence ............................................. 160 4.2. Qualia, Kant and the “I” ............................................................... 181 4.3. Mental causation and supervenience ............................................ 190 Chapter 5. Applications to some notions from cognitive science ...... 200 5.1. Computationalism ........................................................................ 200 5.2. Connectionism .............................................................................. 211 5.3. The dynamical system approach .................................................. 223 5.4. Robotics ........................................................................................ 232 5.5. Dichotomies concerning the notion of mental representation and processing .............................................................................. 243 5.6. The EDWs perspective and some key elements in cognitive science .......................................................................................... 249 5.7. The relation between key elements and some philosophical distinctions ................................................................................... 264 5.8. Cognitive neuroscience ................................................................ 267 5.9. The status of any living entity ...................................................... 277 Chapter 6. Applications to some notions from philosophy of science and science ............................................................................ 281 6.1. A glance at logical positivism ...................................................... 285 6.2. Carnap’s linguistic frameworks .................................................... 289 6.3. Carnap vs. Gödel or syntactic vs. semantic .................................. 292 6.4. Carnap vs. Quine or rational reconstruction vs. naturalized epistemology ................................................................................ 295 6.5. Quine’s ontological relativity ....................................................... 296 6.6. Goodman’s relativity .................................................................... 298 6.7. Putnam and the rejection of the “thing-in-itself” .......................... 299 6.8. Friedman’s relative constitutive a priori principles....................... 301 6.9. Some notions from quantum mechanics ....................................... 305 6.10. The status of the external non-living epistemologically different entities ....................................................................................... 343

Religions, 2021

This article aims to provide a metaphysical elucidation of the notion of Theism and a coherent theological synthesis of two extensions of this notion: Classical Theism and Neo-Classical Theism. A model of this notion and its extensions is formulated within the ontological pluralism framework of Kris McDaniel and Jason Turner, and the (modified) modal realism framework of David Lewis, which enables it to be explicated clearly and consistently, and two often raised objections against the elements of this notion can be successfully answered.

Dialetheism and its Applications, ed. A Reiger and G Young, Springer (Trends in logic), 2020

David Lewis famously dismisses genuine impossible worlds on the basis that a contradiction bound within the scope of his modifier ‘at w’ amounts to a contradiction tout court – an unacceptable consequence. Motivated by the rising demand for impossible worlds in philosophical theorising, this paper examines whether anything coherent can be said about an extension of Lewis’ theory of genuine, concrete possible worlds into genuine, concrete impossible worlds. Lewis’ reasoning reveals two ways to carve out conceptual space for the genuinely impossible. The first is to abandon Lewis’ classical translation schema for negation, on the basis that it begs the question against incomplete and inconsistent worlds. I argue that, whilst this option incurs some loss in the semantics, it preserves the core spirit of Lewis’ metaphysics. The alternative is to bite the bullet, abandon classical logic and embrace true contradictions. The key challenge with this strategy is that the resulting theory seems committed to a particularly strong kind of dialetheism — one that even dialetheists would be reluctant to accept. I motivate such a dialethic account of genuine impossibilia using Lewis’ own methodology and defend it against triviality objections. I close with a few comments on why impossible worlds should not be reduced to set theoretic constructs out of possible worlds.

2018

Before delving into Craig’s all-important argument for his particular Christian brand of theism, it is pertinent to consider that his case for bare theism has failed for numerous reasons, even if the unsuccessful arguments were individually considered to be mostly sound and good. It is not obvious that the arguments assemble themselves into a bricolage that proclaims the existence of some god or gods, or some other phenomenon, or even of the existence of some supernatural realm. Furthermore, it is important to note that they do not necessitate theism. Missing from Craig’s case is an argument that either makes clear that theism is the only god-model that could obtain or that eliminates all alternatives as impossible, or at least relatively improbable. In fact, many of these alternative god-conceptions are here examined and judged as being more plausible than the very limited theistic conception. In effect, I argue here for a-theism. I even argue that theism is very improbable. Crucia...