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"...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 the truth of my statement. It is not required that any person or any social group, however defined, know that gold is malleable or be justified or rational in believing it. It is not required that science be destined, in that far-off divine events towards which inquiry moves, to arrive at the conclusion that gold is malleable. It is no...

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 still within the mother it is part of her body. Terminating is therefore her choice. After it is born it is no longer part of her body and therefore not her choice... Surely women can be trusted to make decisions about their bodies on their own, just as men are (do you see anyone trying to make smoking illegal?). The US government has no right, in any situation, to force a w...

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 hold there are cases of contradictions. If so, then that set of propositions is inconsistent and at least some of them are not true. One way to solve the problem is to say that though there is a set of propositions that are true, there is no adequate way to express any of them in natural languages because human beings are not sufficiently well equipped to grasp any of t...

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 are called universals. They are eternally existent abstract objects. Properties should be distinguished from kinds and relations. Kinds are categories that entities belong to, whereas properties are things that are had by entities. Relations are exemplified by multiple entities in relation to one another such as being taller than or far from. The problem of coherence facing any account of God’s properties is this: If p...

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 one's judgement about persistence? Would we think of the old wooden parts having a better claim to being the ship of Theseus or are we prepared to allow grandeur to attach to a plastic ship? If you want to make the story more clashing, just imagine the plastic ship being bright yellow, you know, lego yellow. If you are partial to the plastic ship, consider the following: What if ...

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 temporal parts. The only things that count as parts are those within space. Perdurantists claim that it is not possible for numerically identical concrete particulars to exist at different times. Rather Perdurantists claim that a concrete particular is an aggregate of different parts each existing at its own time. Perdur...

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 A goes on to divide making A and C and so on. After grieving the loss of B it is reasonable to assume that A is you. But what if rather than A surviving, B survives instead? It would be equally reasonable to think that B was you. But now suppose that both A and B survive but that they become detached and go on to be identical twins. It appears that you would be both A and B. But that is absurd. Why is it weird? Sur...

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 carried out intentionally. Augustine's view of falsehood and lying derived from his theological vision. For Augustine, God is supremely truthful: He  is  truth and, consequently, internally harmonious. Therefore, for creation to function properly, it must function in harmony with its creator. False beliefs are contrary to the thoughts of God, to his design for th...

Many arguments for physicalism, the view that all that exists is describable in terms of physics, assume that, at some point, there will be enough convincing empirical evidence to show that folk psychology, the view that mental stuff or souls exist, is false.  Let's be clear: this would be a monumental feat and, so far, no one has come close. And, absent any empirical evidence, folk psychology carries on. So, what kind of evidence would do it? You can't exactly show anyone that there is no mental/soulish stuff in the world. It's no good pointing at a brain and saying, "see! There's no soul there!" What you would need is some way to show that one can manipulate physical stuff in such a way that mental stuff becomes highly implausible.  Many philosophers thought that such evidence was available when it was noted that personality and mental function is dramatically altered by physical changes. But this doesn't go far enough. It really doesn't th...

Compatbilists about free will hold that, although everything is determined by God, human beings are free because they are able to operate, uncoerced, according to their desires. Greg Boyd argues that such a view inhibits the possibility of loving relationships particularly when it comes to human relationships with God. He describes the following scenario in order to make his point: Suppose I were able to invent a computer chip that could interact with a human brain in a deterministic fashion, causing the person who carries the chip to do exactly what the chip dictates without the person knowing this. Suppose further that I programmed this chip to produce the perfect wife and inserted it in my wife's brain while she was sleeping. The next morning she would wake up as my idea of the perfect wife. She would feel, behave and speak in a perfectly loving fashion. Owing to the sophistication of this chip, she would believe that she was voluntarily choosing to love me in this fashio...

Consider this weird thought experiment I was reading about in 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 A goes on to divide making A and C and so on. After grieving the loss of B it is reasonable to assume that A is you. But what if rather than A surviving, B survives instead? It would be equally reasonable to think that B was you. But now suppose that both A and B survive but that they become detached and go on to be identical twins. It appears that you would be both A and B. But that is absurd. Why is it weird? Surely whichever one survives is you and so what's the problem? Well, consider Leibniz law. Leibniz law states that for any objects X and Y, if X is identical to Y then X has all the properties that Y has and Y has all the properties that X has. Furthermore, the law implies that X is always going to have to have t...

If you think reality is exhaustively physical, then you will probably be either a pessimist or an optimist about naturalistic scientific discovery. You will either conclude that it is highly likely that "folk psychology," the belief that there are irreducibly mental, non-physical entities of some sort, will be shown to be false, or you will think that though it is possible that folk psychology will be proven false, it is unlikely. The latter position entails the belief that one should continue the naturalistic research program with a physicalist assumption even though you probably won't be able to prove it. If you're are an optimist, a bouncy physicalist, you will think it is only a matter of time. You will believe that we are on the brink of discovering some physical explanation for pesky mental properties, qualia and other ontological nuisances. So, if you are a physicalist, which type are you? To find out, consider the following argument: (1) Either nat...

2015 was the year of unusual predication. What kind of thing  I am mattered more than ever. Consider the following: "I am black" "I am a woman" "I am French" It was not obvious what it was that made  a person any of these things. In ordinary speech we assume that some fact about the world makes a property ascription such as the above statements true about the entity we are referring to. However, the claims made by many people in 2015 were apparently fact-free claims. A man claimed to be a woman, Englishmen claimed to be Frenchmen and a white woman claimed to be a black woman. Let's think about gender for a minute. But before I do I want to say that those who struggle with this issue should know that I don't think struggling with one's gender is a grounds for me to hate you. I recently read this and it challenged me about how the Christian faith should be grounds for compassion for those who, as a result of our sin, struggle with sexu...

This is an excellent little book. Metaphysics can be opaque and this book takes the veil off some of the mystery without degrading the discipline. If you are married to a philosopher and think that talking about tables and chairs the way your spouse does is insane and irrelevant, then this book is for you. If you are a freshman who just got yourself an introduction to metaphysics but wished it was more introductory then this book is for you. If you are a highly decorated metaphysician but have forgotten how to explain what you do to the uninitiated this book will help. Stephen Mumford's skill lies in navigating a path with many wormholes pointing them out without disappearing down one of them. His resistance to temptation is laudable and we are grateful.

In his recent book, Deeper Exegesis, Peter Leithart suggests that texts are analogous to events. The analogy holds, he says, because events, like texts,  change over time. What one text meant in one context is different to what it means when read at a different time. Events are similar, according to Leithart, they are not static, but subject to change over time as new properties are added to them. Although interpretation of text changes over time, I think it is a mistake to suggest texts are like events because they change over time. Events are ontologically slippery, but the view espoused by Leithart may actually negate some pretty basic views Leithart would hold as a Christian, particularly the nature of a human being. Just what is an event? Events happen, take place, occur or fail to do so. The popular view is that an event is a entity made up of particulars, a time and a set of properties (Kim, 1980). In contrast, David Weberman, from whom Leithart gets his view, sugg...