There are two kinds of facts: normative and non-normative. Facts about how things should be, what is or is not properly functioning, what is right or wrong, what is healthy or not, and what is good or bad are normative. Facts about how things are or how they could be or statistically tend to be…

Neo-Aristotelianism is indeed resurgent in contemporary philosophy. The renaissance has been underway for at least fifty years, beginning with a new focus on classical metaphysical themes by Roderick Chisholm, David M. Armstrong, Alvin Plantinga, and Robert M. Adams. In the 1960’s and 70’s, these anglophone philosophers began digging themselves out of the rubble of logical…

My overall aim in this brief response to Paul Gould’s lead essay is to draw the reader’s attention to an area of contemporary moral philosophy—Neo-Aristotelian metaethics—that is ripe for rediscovery in the wake of the ongoing resurgence of Neo-Aristotelianism in metaphysics and philosophy of science. Sketching A Metaphysical Picture Let me begin with a thumbnail…

I am grateful to Professor Gould for his invitation to respond to his introductory remarks for this symposium. Professor Gould is especially interested in a framework for philosophical thought and a particular comprehension of nature, that, as he says, held sway for millenia. He refers to this as the “Neo-Aristotelian picture,” according to which “the…

Our conception of nature and the natural shapes our way of perceiving, thinking, and living. Let me explain. On the dominant way of conceiving the world and our place in it today, gifted to us by the Enlightenment thinker David Hume among others, the universe is like a clock—a mechanism—and is wholly composed of bits…

I am sure I am not the only professional philosopher who, from an early age, decided to stay firmly away from the free-will problem. It has always struck me as being like one of those rather cruel animal traps, where the happy little rodent, perhaps attracted by some yummy smell, steps on the platform which…

“God saw that it was good.” As reported by Saint Augustine, the Manichees latched onto the peculiarity of this refrain in the opening chapter of Genesis to criticize the received Christian doctrine of creation. Read in a certain light, it seems to suggest that either God didn’t know what he was going to make before…

Michael Dodds’s proposal for understanding divine action is fundamentally analogical. It is based on an understanding of ex nihilo creation that also can only be expressed analogically. Because there are different orders or levels of reality, our language of creation in general and causation in particular must be able to stretch across such levels. Whether…

When we speak about action and agency, we inevitably avail ourselves of causal concepts—of agents moving in order to bring about changes in the world: Gianna gives the book to Sebastian, Dominic pours milk into his bowl, Thomas walks to school, and so on. Our concept of cause is deployed anytime we seek to explain…

Something Like an Introduction To begin, an anecdote: I was asked recently to referee a paper for a philosophy of religion journal. I ended up declining to review the paper because I knew who its author was, but I did read it. I’ll not name the author here, of course, but I will tell you:…

There is no single view about the authority of Scripture held amongst analytic theologians. There is no single view about how to use Scripture in theological argument among analytic theologians either. This should come as no surprise to those acquainted with analytic theology. It is, after all, a methodological approach to doing theology that is…

Like Theophilus of Luke’s gospel, many American, inerrantist evangelicals today are expectant “to know the certainty of the things [they] have been taught” (Luke 1:4). As I reflect upon the forum topic, three questions come to mind: 1) How did we get to the point we are now? 2) What options remain? 3) How does…