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articles
1. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 4
David Lewis Should a Materialist Believe in Qualia?
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2. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 4
Robert Merrihew Adams Qualia
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3. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 4
Peter van Inwagen Dualism and Materialism: Athens and Jerusalem?
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The thesis that dualism is a Greek import into Christianity and that the Christian hope of eternal life does not presuppose dualism has recently begun to win adherents. This paper is a defense of this thesis. One philosophical argument for dualism (that dualism best explains the phenomenon of sensuous experience) is briefly discussed and is rejected. The body of the paper addresses the relevant creedal and biblical data. The paper closes with a discussion of the question whether the doctrine of the Resurrection of the Dead, on which the Christian hope of eternal life is founded, presupposes dualism.
4. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 4
Lynne Rudder Baker Need a Christian Be a Mind/Body Dualist?
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Although prominent Christian theologians and philosophers have assumed the truth of mind/body dualism, I want to raise the question of whether the Christian ought to be a mind/body dualist. First, I sketch a picture of mind, and of human persons, that is not a form of mind/body dualism. Then, I argue that the nondualistic picture is compatible with a major traditional Christian doctrine, the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead. Finally, I suggest that if a Christian need not be a mind/body dualist, then she should not be a mind/body dualist.
5. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 4
Eleonore Stump Non-Cartesian Substance Dualism and Materialism Without Reductionism
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The major Western monotheisms, and Christianity in particular, are often supposed to be committed to a substance dualism of a Cartesian sort. Aquinas, however, has an account of the soul which is non-Cartesian in character. He takes the soul to be something essentially immaterial or configurational but nonetheless realized in material components. In this paper, I argue that Aquinas’s account is coherent and philosophically interesting; in my view, it suggests not only that Cartesian dualism isn’t essential to Christianity but also that the battle lines between dualism and materialism are misdrawn.
6. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 4
William Hasker Concerning the Unity of Consciousness
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Ever since Descartes there have been philosophers who have claimed that the unity of conscious experience argues strongly against the possibility that the mind or self is a material thing. My contention is that the recent neglect of this argument is a mistake, and that it places a serious and perhaps insuperable obstacle in the way of materialist theories of the mind.
7. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 4
Keith E. Yandell A Defense of Dualism
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I argue here (in Part II) for mind-body dualism --- a dualism of substances, not merely of properties. I also investigate (in Part Ill) dualism’s relevance to the question of whether one can survive the death of one’s body. Naturally the argument occurs in a philosophical context, and (in Part I) I begin by making that context explicit.
8. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 4
Charles Taliaferro Animals, Brains, and Spirits
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This paper contains an overview of the significance of dualism for theism and a modal argument for dualism. It concludes with remarks on the relevance of the modal case on behalf of dualism for an intramural materialist quarrel between animalists and brain-identity theorists.
9. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 4
Hugh J. McCann Divine Sovereignty and the Freedom of the Will
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Libertarian treatments of free will face the objection that an uncaused human decision would lack full explanation, and hence violate the principle of sufficient reason. It is argued that this difficulty can be overcome if God, as creator, wills that I decide as I do, since my decision could then be explained in terms of his will, which must be for the best. It is further argued that this view does not make God the author of evil in any damaging sense. Neither does it impugn my freedom. God’s creative activity does not put in place any secondary causes that determine my decision; and his will does not stand as an independent determining condition either, since it is fully expressed in my decision alone.
notes and news
10. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 4
Notes and News
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index
11. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 4
Index to Volume 12, 1995
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articles
12. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 3
Sandra L. Menssen, Thomas D. Sullivan Must God Create?
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In this paper we evaluate two sets of theistic arguments against the traditional position that Cod created with absolute freedom. The first set features several variations of Leibniz’s basic proof that Cod must create the best possible world. The arguments in the second set base the claim that Cod must create on the Platonic or Dionysian principle that goodness is essentially self-diffusive. We argue that neither the Leibnizian nor the Dionysian arguments are successful.
13. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 3
John Peterson God As Truth
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The view of Aristotle and Brentano that ‘true’ applies straightforwardly to statements (judgments, beliefs, propositions) and derivatively to other things makes for awkward and unintuitive definitions in the cases of derived truth. This is corrected by construing ‘true’ as applying analogically to statements and other things. Under this view, six senses of ‘true’ are distinguished. Following the logic of analogy, these senses are partly the same and partly different. These six senses also exhibit an analogy of proportionality. This yields three groups, paired as follows: moral truth is to sentenial truth as productive truth is to ontological truth as cultural truth is to lawful truth.But behind every analogical prediction is a derivative predication. This implies that there is a primary referent of ‘true’ behind moral, productive and cultural truth on the one hand and sentential, ontological and lawful truth on the other. In the case of the former three, it is evidently the human mind. In the case of the latter three, a reasonable hypothesis, shared by Aquinas, is that it is God’s mind.
14. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 3
Robert Greg Cavin Is There Sufficient Historical Evidence to Establish the Resurrection of Jesus?
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A number of Christian philosophers, most recently Gary R. Habermas and William Lane Craig, have claimed that there is sufficient historical evidence to establish the resurrection of Jesus conceived as the transformation of Jesus’ corpse into a living supernatural body that possesses such extraordinary dispositional properties as the inability to ever die again. I argue that, given this conception of resurrection, our only source of potential evidence, the New Testament Easter traditions, cannot provide adequate information to enable us to establish the historicity of the resurrection---even on the assumption that these traditions are completely historically reliable.
15. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 3
David O'Connor Hasker on Gratuitous Natural Evil
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In a recent contribution to this journal William Hasker rejects the idea, long a staple in philosophical debates over God and evil, that the existence of gratuitous evil is inconsistent with the existence of God. Among his arguments are three to show that God and gratuitous natural evil are not mutually inconsistent. I will show that none of those arguments succeeds. Then, very briefly, and as a byproduct of showing this, I will sketch out how a potentially vexing form of the problem of God and natural evil is facilitated by Hasker’s distinction between types of gratuitous natural evil.
16. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 3
Timothy P. Jackson Is God Just?
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I defend in this essay the seemingly uncontroversial thesis that God is just. By highlighting the kenotic nature of God’s essential goodness, I rebut arguments by Marilyn Adams, Thomas Morris, and William Alston to the effect that God is too sublime to be bound by obligations to creatures. A straightforward acknowledgement that the God who is Love has freely chosen to be (not merely seem) just, is required by fidelity to Scripture as well as by religious experience. Thus is Christianity’s incarnational faith unHellenized ... again.
17. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 3
Huston Smith The Religious Significance of Postmodernism: A Rejoinder
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Accepting Lyotard’s “incredulity toward metanarratives” as its definition of postmodernism, and Derrida’s “openness to the other” as deconstruction’s contribution to it this essay distinguishes three species of postmodernism: minimal (we have no believable metanarratives), mainline (they are unavailable in principle), and polemical (“good riddance!”). It then argues that the religious impulse challenges all three of these contentions. Contra polemical postmodernism, metanarratives/worldviews are needed. Contra mainline postmodernism, reliable ones are possible. And contra minimal postmodernism, they already exist - in the world’s great, enduring religious traditions.
18. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 3
William Hasker Chrzan on Necessary Gratuitous Evil
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Keith Chrzan claims to have found a flaw in the central argument of my essay, “The Necessity of Gratuitous Evil.” I point out that Chrzan misstates my views on several key points, and argue that his comments fail to create any difficulty for my argument.
book reviews
19. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 3
Christopher Hughes Reasoned Faith: Essays in Philosophical Theology in Honor of Norman Kretzmann
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20. Faith and Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 3
Thomas D. Senor On the Nature and Existence of God
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