“…the statement that gold is malleable is true if and only if gold is malleable. The ‘content’ of a statement–what it states to be the case–gives us everything we need to specify what it takes for the statement to be true. In practice this means the ‘that’ clause–the content specifying clause–that tells us what statement we are referring too can also be used to make explicit what it takes for the statement to be true. Nothing more is required for the truth of the statement, and nothing less will suffice. In particular, and looking forward to the main alternative to this account of truth, there are no epistemic requirements for…
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Planned Parthood
My house has parts–walls, foundations, windows, etc–and there are things that are inside my house–children, saucepans, guitars, etc. Being inside my house does not entail being part of my house. But there are boundary cases: Are my curtains or appliances part of the house or merely contained within the house? If they are inside my house and not part of the house itself, then I can take them when I leave the house. If, on the other hand, they are part of the house, then I should not remove them when I leave. Recently, in response to a question I posed about abortion, someone wrote this: When the fetus is…
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Tri-unity
Christian theism is, at least in part, a set of statements or propositions believers take to be true. The study of the coherence of Christian theism is the consideration of the coherence of that set of statements. It is not a study of whether or not those statements are true but whether or not if they are true there is any explicit or implicit contradiction within or implied by that set of propositions. A contradiction is a relationship between propositions such that if it is the case that p, then it cannot also be the case that ~p. It is commonly suggested that among the set of propositions Christian theists…
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Notes: Does God Have a Nature?
When we say that God is good or that he is all-powerful we are predicating something of a subject as we are when we say “Socrates is wise.” On a realist view, the predicate is a property that is instantiated by the particular. “Wise” is a property of Socrates and, as such, and given realism, the property of is what is referred to by the term “wise.” To say that God is wise, or good is to say that God has the property of wisdom or goodness. If there are such things, as realists suggest, then they must exist in order to be referred to. In common parlance, such things…
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Plastic Theseus
The famed puzzle about the Theseus’ ship getting its parts replaced involves an assumption: the ship is made of wood and so are the replacement parts. But what if the parts used to replace the old parts are not wood, but plastic? Perhaps, over time, each wooden part of the ship is replaced with a plastic part. We can even follow the story where it usually goes: the old parts are reassembled in some warehouse somewhere. There lies in the warehouse an old ship with all the old wooden parts while at sea a plastic ship goes about its business bearing the famous name. The question is: does this alter…
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Descartes-Minus
The following is a summary of chapter 8 of Metaphysics by Micheal Loux. The question of the chapter is: How does a material object (or concrete particular), if there is such a thing, persist through time? There are two views: Endurantism and Perdurantism Endurantists claim that for a concrete particular to persist through time is for it to exist wholly and completely at different times. The account assumes a presentist account of time where what exists is real if and only if it exists at the present time. An entity overtime persists as numerically identical thing at one time as any other time. According to endurantists, concrete particulars do not have…
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On Vagueness
Here is an old puzzle: Imagine a heap of sand. Now imagine taking one grain of sand off the top. It’s still a heap, right? Now keep going. At each removal of a grain the heap remains a heap until you get to one grain. One grain isn’t a heap so something changed. It’s just not clear when it changed. That’s vague. Here’s another puzzle I wrote about the other day (I got it from Peter van Inwagen’s book, Material Beings). Imagine yourself as a freshly fertilized egg. Call it A. The single cell then becomes two cells, A and B. Now imagine that B fails to make it and…
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Augustine’s Evil-Evil Distinction
If you tell a lie, you commit an immoral act. But what if you just believe something that turns out to be false? Is that evil? Augustine thought so. He didn’t think an intententional lie was the same as an unintentional false belief but both are evil. How so? Surely a mistaken belief isn’t evil, is it? Augustine distinguished between moral evil and metaphysical evil. Augustine thought that to believe some false proposition may not be a sin if it is believed unintentionally, but it is nonetheless a metaphysical evil, a lack, or a corruption, of the good. Lying, on the other hand, is a moral evil since it is…
