Faith and Philosophy

Volume 33, Issue 4, September 2016

Jeff Speaks
Pages 465-473

Perfect Being Theology and Modal Truth

In “The Method of Perfect Being Theology,” I argued that the attempt to derive the divine attributes from the principle that God is the greatest possible being faces substantial challenges. Here I clarify and defend the argument of that paper in response to the objections of Brian Leftow in “Perfection and Possibility,” and consider the question of whether we might use perfect being reasoning to establish the possibility of certain hypotheses about God.