Notes
1 Introduction
1. The term (logischer Raum in German) “originates in Boltzmann’s general- ized thermodynamics, which treats the independent properties of a physical system as defining separate coordinates in a multidimensional system the points of which constitute the ‘ensemble of possible states’” (Hans-Johann Glock 1996: 220). 2. One might object here (as, indeed, an anonymous referee did during the book proposal submission stage) that recent speculative theories in physics, like Max Tegmark’s mathematical universe (or great ensemble theory), and, more generally, multiverse theories are examples of scientists dealing with logical space at the most fundamental level. However, this objection is misguided. The multiverse is not the same as a logical space; the multiverse is a hypoth- esis about the actual world, namely that it contains many spatio-temporally and causally disconnected universes. One can conceive of other worlds where there is no multiverse, but only one universe. This is obvious by the very fact that the multiverse is a hypothesis, which, for all we know, could be true or false. It must then be the case that there are open epistemic possibilities corresponding to whether the world is a multiverse or a universe. So the multiverse or the “great ensemble” is simply not enough to serve as a logical space. Also, there is virtually no discussion even in these highly speculative approaches in theoretical physics about the nature of modality, possible worlds, and so on. 3. Tractatus, 3.42: “A proposition can determine only one place in logical space: nevertheless the whole of logical space must already be given by it. (Otherwise negation, logical sum, logical product, etc., would introduce more and more new elements in co-ordination.)” 4. The original is “the mind and the world jointly make up the mind and the world”, and is a slogan for Putnam’s “Internal Realism”. See Putnam 1981: xi. 5. Although at the 2011 annual conference of the British Society for Philosophy of Religion, I learnt from Yujin Nagasawa that while I was working on this book, he was developing the very same view in a manuscript titled “Modal Panentheism”. I have read the paper and there are several ideas that I share with Yujin, and they are argued for in this book.
2 What Is Logical Space?
1. These examples were put forward to me as alleged counterexamples to logical totalitarianism by Ezgi Ulusoy Aranyosi and Ralf Bader. 2. This sentence was raised as a challenge to logical totalitarianism by Ilhan Inan.
181 182 Notes
3. The polarity of a state of affairs indicates whether the relations hold or not for the constituent objects. 4. Thus situation theory is also an alternative to the Fregean view that the semantic value (or reference) of a sentence is its truth-value. 5. To which the constraint of consistency is added, that is, that there is no world at which (P & ¬P) is true, thus the standard definition of “possible world” is that of a maximal consistent set of sentences (or propositions). 6. For details, see Zalta 1993.
3 “Life” in Logical Space
1. If unknowingly, for example because of split personality, you are writing a letter to yourself, then you are not a fictional character, so, again, the letter is self-undermining. 2. For the Russellian-Quinean the only truth about Pegasus is “Pegasus does not exist”, whereas Meinongians can assert sentences like “Pegasus is fictional”, “Pegasus is mythical”, and so on. This is one reason Meinongians fare better in accommodating the intuition that all these sentences are true or assertible. On the other hand, Meinongians would go further and also assert sentences like “Pegasus is a winged horse”, with respect to which, according to some philosophers, intuitions are indeterminate. 3. See Bernard Linsky and Ed Zalta 1991. 4. For a more elaborate treatment of this idea and, in my view, a devastating criticism of Routley’s claims to parsimony and novelty of his approach, see Lewis 1990b. 5. For the orthodox Russellian-Quinean view, see W.V.O. Quine 1948. For various Meinongian views, see Alexius Meinong (in Roderick Chisholm 1960), Routley 1980, Parsons 1980, and Zalta 1983. For Lewis’ view, see his 1986. 6. An exception is Takashi Yagisawa (2010), whose notion of existence at an index can be relative to a domain, to a time, to a place, and to a world. The relativity I propose here, as well as the argument for it, are different from Yagisawa’s. 7. As Jaakko Hintikka (1962) has pointed out, the argument is not really an inference in the classical sense, but a performance, that is we are supposed to perform its steps on ourselves in order to realize its force and soundness. 8. The fallacy is to deduce some proposition P from [(P implies Q) and P]. 9. Several people insisted, whenever I presented these ideas at various confer- ences, that if we are real, then we are not fictional, as a matter of analysis (for instance, Howard Robinson, Nick Effingham, and others). I disagree. In light of my arguments presented above, the notion of fictionality is also a rela- tive one. And so is that of reality. For instance, Sherlock Holmes is fictional relative to our world, but real relative to the world our fiction depicts him as being present in. There is also a related criticism or proposal, namely, that an object is fictional only if it is an actual nonconcrete object. My notion of Logical Space, of course, allows such a view, that is, such a view has a place in some logical region, but it is not a constraint on that space at all. Sherlock Holmes is a bona fide object in virtue of its so-sein. At a logical region that depicts Sherlock Holmes as a nonconcrete object (which means that it does not Notes 183
instantiate properties like being a detective, being smart, and so on), Holmes’ so-sein is perhaps the set of properties: {being nonconcrete, encoding the property of being a detective, encoding the property of being smart, and so on}. Although the first of these properties are, for Meinongians, paradigmatic extranuclear properties, and all of them except the first one are also higher-order, the notion of Logical Space and the doctrine of Logicalism proposed here makes it the case that they are all treated on a par, as nuclear, or so-sein making properties. 10. Meinong also posited such objects as inhabitants of his ontology. Objects of intentional states as well as certain uınderspecified, generic objects such as “the triangle”, are in this category. For Meinong these objects are determined by the properties that explicitly figure in their depiction. So the triangle is an incomplete object determined by triangularity, the isosceles triangle is determined by triangularity and being isosceles. 11. This is not to say that whenever two expressions have the same sense, the identity statement that they flank is trivial; a counterexample is the case of synonyms, because arguably an identity statement containing synonyms as its terms is not trivial, though it is a priori knowable. 12. One could object that, still, it is because of Carew’s knowledge and verbal dispositions dependent on it that substitution fails. However, it is not true that Carew would accept “Dr. Jekyll is trustworthy and friendly” and reject “Mr. Hyde is trustworthy and friendly”; he simply has no knowledge or any attitude towards the propositions regarding Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. 13. I adopt here what Thomas MacKay and Michael Nelson (2010) regard as the metaphysical conception of de re attitude. See their article for the syntactic and the semantic conception. 14. There is actually more to it, in this particular case, than the fact that the objects are named as they are, namely, the name “Superman” connotes some property like being a superior human, or something similar. To assert that it is only the way they are named that is relevant to attitude ascriptions involving some intentional objects appears to be liable to the criticism Frege – in the first paragraph of “On sense and reference” – adduced against the view that identity is to be understood as a relation between signs, which wouldn’t explain the informativeness of some identities. 15. I owe the phrase “gentrification of logical space” to Nicholas Silins.
4 Folded Logical Space
1. The notion of the definition of a situation would come to play a funda- mental theoretical role in a very influential school of thought in sociology and anthropology – Symbolic Interactionism – with applications in various subfields of these disciplines. George Herbert Mead, a key theorist of symbolic interactionism, who was a colleague of Thomas at the University of Chicago, expressed a thesis similar to the Thomas Theorem: “If a thing is not recog- nized as true, then it does not function as true in the community” (Mead 1936: 29). 2. The case that Merton made popular, namely, the self-fulfilling prophecy, implies or requires, therefore, strictly speaking, more than what the Thomas 184 Notes
Theorem does. It requires not only that what is defined as real be real in its consequences, but also that it become real per se, or real in its causes. Another such example of something becoming real per se as a result of people defining it as real is the entity we call “nation”. Benedict Anderson’s seminal book on nationalism (1983) makes this clear when Anderson asserts that although the nation is an imagined community, it does not mean that it is fabricated (1983: 6); by being imagined by a sufficiently high number of otherwise spatially disconnected people who never get a chance in their lives to interact face-to-face, the nation comes to be realized, or comes into existence. 3. If I am permitted to mention a small autobiographical detail, I grew up under Ceauşescu’s dictatorial regime in Romania, and I had first-hand expe- rience of what Havel calls “living within a lie”, as my mother was working in the so-called planning office of a large textile factory. Contrary to what the name suggests, the planning office was not planning anything, but creating and forwarding false figures regarding production, sales, profit, and so on to a central “planning office”, which in turn was collecting and forwarding these to the top echelons of the party-state and its media institutions. It is not as if the center did not know that they were forwarded fabricated data; on the contrary, the local planning offices were supposed to do this as required by the central headquarters. It is absurd, indeed, but this is part of how that system kept itself running until the bloody popular revolt broke out in December 1989. It is worth noting though that Romania’s case was especially extreme among all other Eastern European regimes, especially in the 1980s. 4. Of course, nowadays, more and more philosophers think that all mental states are intentional states, or supervene on such states – a thesis called “represen- tationalism”, or sometimes “intentionalism”. I wish to remain neutral on this issue, as it is not relevant for any topic that I discuss in this book. 5. For various problems regarding how to understand the thesis, see, for example Kim 2000, Loewer 2001, Papineau 2001. Arguably, the thesis originates in Davidson 1970 6. This is my own formulation, which, on the face of it, is weaker than, for example Kim’s (2000: 38) when he raises it as a question: “Given that every physical event that has a cause has a physical cause, how is a mental cause also possible?” To put it this way is close to saying that any other cause than the physical one is impossible, which I think is very implausible, as nothing excludes the case of overdetermination, when we have two sufficient causes of the same event – one mental and one physical. I take the exclusion thesis as an inductive, or plausibility argument according to which it is more plausible to think that there is only one cause (physical in this case) rather than two sufficient causes. 7. It is not universally agreed that behavior is so reducible, witness a once popular answer to the exclusion problem, the so-called explanandum doubling strategy, which distinguishes intentionally caused behavior from the physical motion, even though they spatio-temporally coincide. The most well-known philoso- pher proposing this was Georg Henrik von Wright 1971. I also offer a similar, explanandum-doubling account of mental causation in Aranyosi 2008. 8. Crane links this approach to mental causation to the denial of the causal closure of the physical, or the denial of explanatory completeness of physics, Notes 185
and he is happy to deny those. In that case, we would have an interactionist property dualism according to which the mental and the neural events are partial causes, which together are sufficient to bring about behavior. It would be a case of so-called downward causation. I don’t think this approach requires such a denial. My preferred way to interpret it is to say that, first, in order to remain neutral on dualism versus physicalism, we should talk about mental versus physical predicates as applying or failing to apply in the relevant situ- ations, and, second, the basic point would be to say that the observed causal sufficiency of events falling under physical predicates is always in the context of the same events falling under mental predicates. 9. LePore and Loewer do not present this observation as an argument for taking causes of behavior qua mental as being more important than qua neural (as I do here), or as an argument against the completeness of physics, as Crane does (see next footnote). 10. Again, Crane uses this as an argument against the completeness of physics; I myself think that they are compatible. 11. The same type of argument can be used in the context of newer, non- Lewisian counterfactual accounts, like interventionism; Panu Raatikainen (2010) offers a discussion of the argument in this context. 12. Hence, for properties that do not have physical effects the only available views are non-naturalism (that is belief in the reality of such properties) or naturalistically motivated irrealism (rejection of such properties). 13. And for that matter what ordinary people, journalists, as well as philoso- phically uninstructed scientists get most excited about. 14. I say “typically” because some objects in Logical Space are by definition or on purpose vague, namely, those that are supposed to be depicted by vague mental representations. 15. For a summary of these objections, see Adams and Aizawa 2010. 16. Another, somewhat imprecise objection that could be raised is that my account cannot be considered naturalistic because it is not “scientific”, what- ever that is supposed to mean. I don’t think this objection has any bite, given that, as a matter of fact, there are actual branches of science that explicitly deal with what I called “transistent” entities; for instance, parts of psychi- atry deal with the various types of hallucination, which after being divided according to the main sense modality involved are usually distinguished by their contents, for example animals, weird noises, and so on. Psychiatry does have an interest in studying these contents in that they are valuable diag- nostic tools for various conditions, such as schizophrenia. 17. For example, the sentences containing modal operators like “necessarily” and “possibly” are intensional but have nothing to do with intentionality, and sentences reporting perceptual states, like “John sees the rabbit”, involve intentionality but are not intentional. See below for explanation. 18. If we don’t specify that these are all epistemic, there are indeed some potential problems with the inference, for instance, the lack of entailment if the operator is epistemic in premise 1 and metaphysical in the conclu- sion. Another issue is that if identity is necessary, then ◊a=b implies a=b, under a strong enough modal logic (that is with a symmetric accessibility relation). Thanks to Mark Steen and Bill Wringe, respectively, for pointing these out. 186 Notes
5 Logical Spillover
1. Unlike for Smart (1959: 142), who adopts the phrase from Feigl, but changes its meaning so as to apply to sensations, raw feels, or qualia, which are supposed to dangle, that is to be ontologically distinct from but lawfully connected to what the complete scientific picture of the world would encompass. 2. Cf. David Chalmers (1996), where he uses, throughout his book, the formula “the explanatory irrelevance of conscious experience” to express the same thought. 3. In fairness to Feigl, we should mention that he comes very close to the identity theory as mediated by topic-neutral analysis, as he actually uses a two-step identification process, one between raw feels and referents of concepts that are inferentially related to logically behavioral concepts, and one from the latter to referents of neurophysiological concepts. At the very beginning of section E of chapter 5 (p. 78) he writes: “Taking into considera- tion everything we have said so far about the scientific and the philosophical aspects of the mind-body problem, the following view suggests itself: The raw feels of direct experience as we ‘have’ them, are empirically identifiable with the referents of certain specifiable concepts of molar behavior theory, and these in turn ... are empirically identifiable with the referents of some neuro- physiological concepts.” 4. Indeed, as Colin McGinn (2001: 286) points out, one finds two essentially different theories in one and the same article by Smart under the name “iden- tity theory”: what has nowadays been called “a posteriori” versus “a priori physicalism” (cf. Stoljar 2000, 2001). 5. Saul Kripke’s argument against the early, empirical, and contingent identity thesis (1972), the argument from the conceivability of zombies (Kirk 1974a, 1974b, and later revived and developed by Chalmers 1996), the argument from subjectivity (Nagel 1974 – though we should add that Nagel himself did not take his argument to actually prove the falsity of physicalism), the argu- ment from the explanatory gap (Levine 1983 – as in Nagel’s case, we should note that Levine did not think his argument was incompatible with the truth of physicalism), the knowledge argument (Jackson 1982). 6. Among its supporters we find Chalmers (1995, 1996), Tim Crane (2001), Galen Strawson (1997), Leopold Stubenberg (1998), and Aranyosi (2008). 7. Alien properties are defined as those that are instantiated in some possible worlds, but not in the actual world. 8. The principle is inspired by work on impossible worlds. An instance of explo- sion is the ex falsum sequitur quodlibet in standard logic, according to which one can derive any proposition from any contradiction. It implies that, in a world where one contradiction is true, everything is true. I borrow the term “explosion” from Daniel Nolan (1997) who calls a world where every proposi- tion is true an “explosion world”. Nolan argues against the principle of explo- sion, Lewis (1988) offers an argument for it. 9. One might ask at this point: what explains the identity itself? David Papineau (2002: 114) argues that identity, in general, is in no need of explanation; it does not make good sense to ask, once we know an identity to hold, why that identity holds. In our context, however, we need not rely on such a principle. What explains our mind–brain identity is precisely the fact that that identity itself explains our thesis of necessary correlation between mental and physical Notes 187
properties. It is not infrequent in science that our commitment to the exist- ence of some x is explained by the fact that x explains, in the best available way, some y. For example, the commitment to the existence of the gene is explained by the fact that the gene explains, in the best available way, our observations about heritability of traits. 10. We get similar results in a Bayesian framework. Let’s denote by H the hypothesis that there is a huge number of physical duplicates of @ that differ in phenom- enal property distributions, with E the proposition that @ is in NNP, and with ¬H the proposition that almost all physical duplicates of @ are in NNP. Bayes Rule says: P(H|E) = p(H)p(E|H)/ [p(H)p(E|H) + p(¬H)p(E|¬H)]. Let us assign some very high probability to H, say, .99999. By the indifference principle we get a vey low probability for p(E|H), and a very high one, i.e. 1- p(E|H), for p(E|¬H). The numerical values for our parameters are as follows:H: there are infinitely many conceivable phenomenal distributions over φ-duplicates of @ p(H) =.99999 ¬H: almost all φ-duplicates of @ are in NNP p(¬H) = .00001 E: @ is in NNP p(E|H) = .0000001 p(E|¬H)] = .9999999 Effecting the replacement in Bayes Rule, we get:P(H|E) = .99999*.0000001/ [.99999*.0000001 + .00001*.9999999] = 9.9999*10–8/(9.9999*10–8 + 9.999999*10–6) = .009 This means that one should update p(H) from .99999 to .009. If the number of non-NNP physical duplicates of @ approaches infinity, then the posterior probability of H is approximately zero. 11. For instance, in standard probability theory, because any atom of a count- able infinite state space has measure zero, any subset of the union of such atoms has the same probability as the union (since they have the same cardi- nality), assuming uniform probability distribution over the infinite number of states. Also, any finite union of atoms has the same probability as an infinite subset of the state space. To take an example for each, if we are to choose a number randomly from the set of natural numbers, the event “the number is a multiple of 2” and “the number is a multiple of 100” have the same probability, and the same is true of events “the number is between 1 and 1 million” and “the number is a multiple of 3”. Some philosophers find these facts counterintuitive (for example Storrs McCall and Armstrong 1989; and Vallentyne 2000). Things are different with nonstandard probability theory, as I exemplify later, in footnote 16. 12. We should note, though, that all these authors except Vallentyne and Herzberg have arguments that discourage a too optimistic attitude toward nonstandard analysis as a more intuitive basis for probability theory. 13. An atom of a probability space is a set of strictly positive measure such that any measurable subset of it has either that measure or measure zero. A prob- ability space with an atom of probability 1 is called “trivial”. A probability space (Ω, A, P), where Ω is the sample space, A is an algebra on Ω, and P is the probability function, is trivial iff we only have Ø and Ω as events in it, that is, A = {Ø, Ω}, it consists of exactly two sets – the sample space (everything) and the empty set (nothing). 188 Notes
14. The argument works for a continuous probability space just as well. Assume that the sample space is the real unit interval and our variable, the phenom- enal space, is a continuous random variable. This means that instead of probabilities as such we will have a probability density function, whose integral over an interval of possible values will assign a (a nonzero) prob- ability for the actual world being within that interval. If any non-NNP world is conceivable, then by PSYCHO-EXPLOSION, continuously many of them are conceivable. Given the thesis of nomological dangling applied now to phenomenal continua, the indifference principle applies across all values of the phenomenal variable across physical duplicates of @. Hence, the probability of @ being within some interval (a, b], such that 0 ≤ a < b ≤ 1, corresponding to NNP, is given by the continuous uniform distribution, and will have to be the same as that of @ being in any interval of equal length (measure), that is length a – b. If that is the case, then either as a – b approaches zero the probability of @ being in NNP approaches a value that is statistically equivalent to zero (in measure-theoretic terms: the property of being non-NNP holds almost everywhere), or otherwise it is strictly greater than zero, in which case (a, b] = Ω almost everywhere, which means that the only events in the sample space are NNP and the null set (so the non-NNP scenarios do not exist as epistemic possibilities at all). 15. The reader might want to consult Jerome Keisler’s (2000) introduction to nonstandard analysis for the properties of algebraic operation having hyper- real numbers as their terms. I note here only that an infinitesimal (or infinitely small) number is a ε, such that –a < ε < a, for all positive real numbers a. The only real number that is infinitesimal is zero. The line of hyperreal numbers is then constructed by positing infinitesimals that are not zero and adding them to the real line. A positive nonstandard infinite number, H, is then 1/ε. Standard algebraic operations and relations can be applied in this setting so that we get: negatives, reciprocals, sums, products, quotients, roots. To give a few examples, 1/H, ε/H, and ε/1 are infinitesimals; H/1, H/ε, and 1/ε are infinite (provided that ε ≠ 0); H/K, ε/δ, Hε, and H + K are indeterminate forms, their value depending on what H, K, ε, and δ are. For instance, if ε is 1/H, then Hε = H/H =1; if ε is 1/H2, then Hε = H/H2 =δ (an infinitesimal). See Keisler (2000, ch. 1). 16. The number of n-permutations of a set of x elements without repetitions is x!/(x–n)!, which is equivalent to the number of injective functions from x to n. Adding x to this number we get the number of n-permutations of a set with x elements with repetitions. 17. An anonymous referee objects that in order to assert that I observe that my own phenomenal states match my physical states as prescribed by NNP presupposes perceptual realism, which in turn depends upon acceptance that the world exemplifies NNP. Also, he/she objects that “I have zero evidence about my brain states and this is true of almost everyone (I know a few people who have been in MRI experiments etc. but they are very few and far between)”. Regarding the second objection, what is important is not whether I really have such evidence, but that, in principle, I can have such evidence. For instance, I can take images via computer tomography of my brain while having a certain kind of experience, and establish correlations. Regarding the first objection, to insist on having to solve some metaphysical problems in Notes 189
the philosophy of perception in order to be justified in asserting that some phenomenal-neural or phenomenal–behavioral correlations hold would, in general, and from the point of view of the empirical method, would be to set the bar too high, and even to change the subject in a sense. It would mean to set the bar too high because if it were right, then asserting any law, including purely physical ones, would be problematic just because it hasn’t been settled whether perception involves the world or some intermediary “veil” between us and the world, or just sense data. It would mean to change the subject because one can take any view about the metaphysics of percep- tion and accommodate assertions about nomic connections by employing the terminology of that view. For instance, one can be a phenomenalist (the view that reality is constituted by sense data) and formulate laws in terms of phenomenal states that present themselves as physical (as being about phys- ical, chemical, behavioral, etc. facts) and phenomenal states that present themselves as phenomenal (experiences, qualia). One can be a so-called representative realist (the view that experience is constituted by sense data, which in turn represent – by correlation or isomorphism – a physical reality that lies beyond the “veil of perception”) and formulate laws in terms of correlations between sets or structures of phenomenal property instantia- tions and the physical structures represented by sense data with a physical content. In the paper I have used a realist terminology as that seems the simplest and most intuitive, but nothing hinges on this choice as far as the main argument is concerned. 18. An objection put forward by two anonymous referees for the BJPS. 19. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for the BJPS who has made all the objections that will occur under this heading. 20. An imaginary device meant to detect conscious experience in others, invented by Chalmers, and presented, jokingly, in guise of a hair-dryer by him during the second “Toward a Science of Consciousness” conference, Tucson, Arizona, April 1996. 21. For instance, if it is possible/conceivable that the above-mentioned fine-structure constant, α, has a different value than actually, that value would actually be instantiated with some nonzero probability, which means that it is not a constant after all. It is worth noting that, in fact, John K Webb et al. (1999, 2001) have found evidence compatible with a slight time-variation of α with lower value in the past. 22. An objection raised by David Chalmers in correspondence. 23. Sometimes the indifference principle is used as a way to argue for the existence of the physical systems that support the non-actualized possibili- ties. The argument for the existence of the Multiverse is such an example. Here the variable is whether the universe contains life with conscious observers. The multiverse theorist argues as follows. Given (a) the fine-tuning of our universe (that is the extreme sensitivity of our variable to the physical magnitudes and constants of the initial conditions), and (b) the fact that we do live in such a universe, we would be either completely unsurprised, had our universe been just brutely there, or extremely surprised, had the magnitudes and constants of this universe been probabilistically “selected”, given that the universe containing conscious observers is one case in a very large number of possible lifeless universes. But given (a) we should 190 Notes
not be completely unsurprised, and given (b) we should not be extremely surprised either. The only way to find a moderate level of our surprise is, therefore, to assume the existence of a multitude of universes, most of them characterized by all the non-actual values of the magnitudes and constants of the initial conditions, and one of them being our universe. Given all these universes, it is no surprise that one of them contains life, but it is still somewhat surprising as the frequency of life-containing universes within the multiverse is extremely low. The interested reader might consult John Leslie 1989.However, the multiverse case is very different from the case that supports our argument. In the first applica- tion of the indifference principle, that is when applied to the actual world considered among the set of all physical duplicate worlds, condition (b) is not satisfied, as ex hypothesi we do not, given the notion of a nomological dangler, observe the phenomenal property instantiations of the actual world. In the second application of the indifference principle, that is when applied to own case phenomenal property instantiations considered among all such instantiations in the actual world, while (b) is satisfied, as I do observe my own phenomenal property instantiations, condition (a) is not satisfied, as there is no reason to think that there is any dependence of phenomenal property instantiations in the actual world on any own case physical particularities.
6 Logical Pantheism
1. Actually, Plantinga argues that one does not have to assume the Hartshorne/ Malcolm premise, ◻(g ◻g), but that it can be deduced from some more general and, according to Plantinga, more plausible principles. One is the prin- ciple that the notion of a maximally great being implies maximal excellence (maximal goodness, potency, knowledge, and so on) in all possible worlds. The second one is the principle that if something has a property in a world, then that thing exists in that world. These two principles would imply that the maximally great being exists in all worlds as maximally excellent, whereas Plantinga thinks that the Hartshorne/Malcolm version, based on the premise that necessary existence is a perfection-making property for the notion of a maximally great being, is compatible with the maximally great being existing in all worlds, but not being maximally excellent in all of them. I think Plantinga is wrong on this issue. It is implicit in Hartshorne/Malcolm and in Anselm’s Proslogion that the transworld identity conditions of God involve maximal excellence; since God is by definition the being greater than which nothing can be conceived, whatever does not conform to this condition in any possible world cannot be identical to God. Second, Plantinga’s principle that whenever something has a property in a world, that thing has to exist in that world seems to be false, at least for modal properties. I don’t actually have a sister, but it is possible that I have one. The property of possibly being my sister is actual (since it is actually true that I could have had a sister), but my possible sister, if she exists in any way, does not actually exist. More generally, we can construct examples of properties that some contingent being has in all possible worlds (cf. Takashi Yagisawa 2005. For arguments by analogy from Notes 191
the temporal case see David Kaplan 1973: 503–5 and Nathan Salmon 1981: 36–40), which means that there are worlds in which the being does not exist but has these properties. For instance any α-transform (Plantinga 1978b) of a property of any contingent being, that is, that property indexed to the actual world, would come out as a counterexample to Plantinga’s principle. Plantinga could reply by pointing out that his principle applies to non-world-indexed properties, but a property like possibly being a sister is (i) non-world-indexed, and (ii) necessary, given Plantinga’s commitment to S5. Yet there are beings that are contingently sisters. He could then reply that God is not contingent to begin with, but that would render the whole project of trying to formulate the modal ontological argument without assuming ◻(g ◻g) at the outset meaningless, as now it looks like the non-contingency of God needs to be assumed anyway. 2. For surveys of these arguments, see Drange 1998 (for multi-attribute incoher- ence), Grim 2007, and Everitt 2010 (for one-attribute incoherence), Martin and Monnier 2003 (for all categories). 3. See, for instance, Chalmers 2002. 4. For instance, my argument does not rely on either Anselm’s or Plantinga’s analytic premise that “God is maximally great” means “God exists in all possible worlds and is maximally great in all”. 5. Lewis’s point is made in the context on a modal realist interpretation of the ontological argument, but his point carries over, more generally, to any inter- pretation of the nature of logical space. 6. Here are a couple of examples of such dubious practices that sometimes even become hilarious. They are both related to the doctrine of the resurrection of our bodies, present in Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. First, Trenton Merricks, after expounding and expressing doubts about the coherence or empirical adequacy of some astonishing views about how God would reassemble our bodies’ molecules after we die in order to resurrect those bodies, puts forward an “argument”, basically, to the effect that being ignorant about the mecha- nism by which our bodies are supposed to be resurrected is good enough to believe in such resurrection: ‘Moreover, suppose we concede, just for the sake of argument, that something or other must account for, or ground, every instance of identity over time, including every instance that would result from a coming resurrection. Then believers in the resurrection can block the above objection by denying that objection’s second assumption. That is, they can simply conclude that there will be something in virtue of which each resurrection body will be iden- tical with a body had in this life, something that will ground or account for that identity. Crucially, they can conclude this even given their inability to discover that ground, an inability evidenced by the failure of proposed accounts such as reassembly. After all, no one should presume to know exactly how God pulls off any miracle, including the resurrection of the body’. (Merricks 2009: 480) Peter van Inwagen (1978: 121) puts forward an even more astonishing idea in order to defend the dubious dogma of bodily resurrection: ‘It is of course true that men apparently cease to exist: those who are cremated, for example. But it contradicts nothing in the creeds to suppose that this is 192 Notes
not what really happens, and that God preserves our corpses contrary to all appearance. ( ... ) Perhaps at the moment of each man’s death, God removes his corpse and replaces it with a simulacrum which is what is burned or rots. Or perhaps God is not quite so wholesale as this: perhaps he removes for “safekeeping” only the “core person” – the brain and the central nervous system (sic!) – or even some special part of it. These are details.’ 7. Related to this, I will later discuss the modal problem of evil, where the theist is forced to be committed to the logical impossibility of very evil logical regions, like, for instance, a world of eternal suffering of many blameless sentient creatures. Again, I have not encountered any inde- pendent reason offered by theists against the obvious modal intuition that such a region is not logically impossible. I will say more on this in Chapter 8. 8. An anonymous referee during the initial, proposal submission stage of this manuscript, rather superficially and uncharitably asserted that there is nothing original about Logical Pantheism because it has already been argued at least since Cicero that “that the ontological argument goes to the ‘All’”. The problem is that Cicero’s “All” is essentially different from mine, both in its nature and in how we arrive at it in thought; see below. 9. For instance, stars are ascribed intellect and will by Cicero because of their orderly motion and because they are “higher-level” entities, hence must have the intellect or mind of the lower ones (like humans and animals) only to much higher extent. He also speculates that since our minds work better when we inhabit a region where air is rarified than when we inhabit a foggy area, stars must have very sharp minds as air is very rarefied around them. 10. This would be so even for Lewis’s modal realism. Lewis could argue that something actually exists because of the plenitude of the space of possible worlds, but one could raise the question why his modal space exists at all, given that his modal space is a mereological sum of concrete possible worlds, so it is ultimately a concrete individual; then one can ask: why does that concrete individual exist at all rather than nothing existing? One cannot raise, however, such questions when modal space is thought of in terms of our Logical Space, because even the scenario in which possible worlds understood as concrete, or in any other way, don’t exist is itself a region of Logical Space. Logical Space transcends all partitions obtained by nega- tion, so the question why Logical Space itself exists does not arise, whereas the question why something actual exists rather than nothing existing is answered by reference to our principle of plenitude for Logical Space and the three principles of Logicalism; see below. 11. For surveys of the cosmological argument, as well as original contemporary discussion, see Rowe 1975, and Craig 1979, 1980. 12. More exactly, what Swinburne calls a “good C-inductive argument” – an argument whose premises increase the probability of the conclusion, that is, the conclusion becomes more probable if the premises are true than if they are not. Here the premises are empirical, stating some fact about the universe. 13. For example, Swinburne [1979] 2004, and Parfit 1998. Notes 193
7 Historical Precedents
1. See, among many others, Kenny 1979, Leslie 1979, John Hick 1989, and O’Connor 2012: ch. 6. 2. William Riordan (2008) interprets, following Anna Maria Prastaro 1980, Denys as subscribing to both the apophatic and cataphatic. It is true that he uses both these methods, but only to claim (in chapter 2 of the Mystical Theology) that they are steps toward the more illuminated theology (as opposed to “popular theology”) according to which both affirmation and negation are inadequate when trying to characterize God. 3. There are well-known problems with both the notion of a purely transcendent God, as in Neoplatonism, and with that of a purely immanent notion, as in Pantheism; hence the interest in describing God as both transcendent and immanent. 4. What Tillich means by “theological theism” is the endeavor to prove the existence of God; so we could say today that it is something close enough to analytic philosophy of religion.
8 Solutions
1. This also presents an answer to what van Inwagen calls “the local problem of evil”, that is, the problem of why God allows a particular evil to happen, like the Holocaust. Given that all possible evil exists in Logical Space, there will exist all possible distributions of evil as well. One of these distributions is the one that is the case in our world; there is nothing special about a set of worlds containing the Holocaust, and, as it happens, our world is one of them. Van Inwagen’s reply is basically the same, except he posits God as drawing an arbitrary line between those people who will suffer a particular evil and those who don’t. We don’t need the God of theism to draw such a line; the very nature of Logical Space will suffice to ground such an arbitrary division, and infinitely many such divisions, with our world falling, as a matter of primi- tive fact, on one side or the other of such a division. In other words, since ultimately even in van Inwagen’s argument what plays the crucial role is the arbitrariness of who is going to suffer, I see no reason to further posit the God of Theism as making this arbitrary choice. 2. Of course, the option remains for the theist to bite the bullet and claim that the tormented world has no place in logical space. But there is no independent argument for this claim beyond one’s commitment to the necessary exist- ence of God, so it is question-begging, as also pointed out by Almeida (2011). Furthermore, as Kraay (2011) notes, if one accepts that the worst of all possible worlds is absent from logical space, then one should also cleanse logical space of all possible worlds that are worse than the actual one, and this is perhaps even more implausible. 3. Levine (1994: 53, 194) insists that, anyway, for the pantheist God is not a being to begin with, by which he implies that a synonymy between “a being” and “a person”, but my point is not about God as a person, but about God as any arbitrary item in logical space, be it person, thing, property, state of affairs, or logical region. 194 Notes
4. Similar criticism will apply to Panentheism. There are several types of this doctrine, according to which everything (that is the universe or the world) is in God (rather than identical to God), but most of them are hybrids of Theism and Pantheism, hence their narrow focus on the actual world will make them vulnerable to the type of criticism I have expounded against the latter two. 5. The topic of power relations pervades the entire corpus of Foucault’s writings. For a selection of his writings, see Foucault and Rabinow 1984. 6. Some representatives of this type of discourse go as far as to claim that Muhammad was in fact a promoter of free speech and unrestricted inquiry. This might or might not be true, but in any case the fact that these left-liberal opinion makers and scholars make such claims is hard to square with the fact that the same left-liberals are happy to support criminalization of criticism of Islam. 7. Ludovic-Mohamed Zahed, “Why I want to open a gay-friendly mosque in Paris”, The Guardian, Monday 26 November 2012 12.13 GMT. 8. Reported in “From Korean pop music to skydiving to Earth – not-your-typical diplomatic meetings for UN Secretary-General”, UN News Centre, 24 October 2012,
9 Objections
1. The view that there are many deities, but ruled by a single supreme one. 2. Zoroastrianism is considered the oldest monotheism, which influenced all the Abrahamic religions, but its supreme being Ahura Mazda, although very similar to how God is conceived in later monotheisms, has a dualistic aspect, namely, that God is not omnipotent and has an evil uncreated rival, Angra Mainyu. 3. As pointed out by B.J.T. Dobbs (1991), Isaac Newton speculated that gravity, light, and electricity were active divine principles, mediating between the Notes 195
incorporeal God and the world of matter. Newton had heretical, namely Arian beliefs, according to which Jesus Christ is not identical to God, but the mediator or first cosmic agent, who arranged the world to function in a certain fashion. Since Newton also thought that one is allowed to worship God through worshipping Christ (but not the other way round, as that would for Newton be idolatry), we are driven to the idea that one could worship God through worshipping gravity, for instance. Thanks to Daniel Nolan who directed me to Dobbs’ work on Newton. 4. Although it is usually translated in English as “prayer”, namaz, whose correct translation would be “bowing”, is meant to be worship of divinity, not praying. 5. Indeed, the ultimate level of worship makes the Sufi even blind to anything in the sensible realm: “A certain Sufi said: ‘I made the pilgrimage and saw the Ka’ba, but not the Lord of the Ka’ba.’ ( ... ) Then he said, ‘I made the pilgrimage again, and I saw both the Ka’ba and the Lord of the Ka’ba.’ ( ... ) Then he said, ‘I made the pilgrimage a third time, and I saw the Lord of the Ka’ba, but not the Ka’ba.’” (Nicholson [1914] 1989: 58). 6. Such doubts and suspicions about the Sufis did in fact arise within the orthodoxy of Islam, sometimes followed by reprimand and even repression directed at them. The most famous case is the beheading of the Persian Sufi Mansur al-Hallaj, after 11 years of imprisonment, for what the orthodox inter- preted as heresy. Contrary to the requirements of esoterism, he was sharing his mystical experiences with the masses, sometimes falling into trance. On one such occasion he uttered “I am the Truth”, which the authorities inter- preted as a claim to being God himself. 7. For more information about this controversy in the Eastern Christian Church, see Runciman 1986 and Louth 2002. 8. Of course, in the case of entities for which the question of whether life is meaningful does not arise, because they do not possess such a capacity (for instance, nonhuman animals and humans with mental disabilities), the implication is not that their life is meaningless. Rather, since for them the question does not arise because they do not have the capacity to raise it, it is a category mistake to assign meaningfulness or otherwise to their lives. References
Adams, F. and K. Aizawa (2010): “Causal Theories of Mental Content”, in E. N. Zalta (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [online encyclopedia],
196 References 197
Craig, W. L. (1980): The Cosmological Argument from Plato to Leibniz, London: The Macmillan Press. Crane, T. (1998): “Intentionality”, in E. Craig (ed.) Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, London: Routledge. Crane, T. (2001): Elements of Mind: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crane, T. (2001): “The Significance of Emergence”, in C. Gillet and B. Loewer (eds), Physicalism and its Discontents, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 207–24. Davidson, D. (1970): “Mental Events”, in L. Foster and J. W. Swanson (eds) Experience and Theory, London: Duckworth. Dennett, D. (1991): Consciousness Explained, Boston: Little Brown and Company. Dobbs, B.J.T. (1991): The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton’s Thought, Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. Drange, T. M. (1998): “Incompatible-Properties Arguments: A Survey”, Philo 1(2): 49–60. Dretske, F. (1970): “Epistemic Operators”, The Journal of Philosophy 67: 1007–23. Dretske, F. (1981): Knowledge and the Flow of Information, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Dreyfus, H. and S. D. Kelly (2011): All Things Shining, New York: Free Press. Eckhart, M. (2007): Meister Eckhart’s Sermons, translated by C. Field, New York: Cosimo Inc. Elga, A. (2004): “Infinitesimal Chances and the Laws of Nature”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 82, 67–76. Evans, G. (1973): “The Causal Theory of Names”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 47: 187–208. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. ([1937] 1976): Witchcraft, Magic and Oracles among the Azande, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Everitt, N. (2010): “The Divine Attributes”, Philosophy Compass 5(1): 78–90. Fagin, R. and J. Y. Halpern (1988), “Belief, Awareness, and Limited Reasoning”, Artificial Intelligence 34: 39–76. Feigl, H. (1958/1967): “The ‘Mental’ and the ‘Physical’”, in H. Feigl, M. Scriven, and G. Maxwell (eds), 1958, Concepts, Theories and the Mind-Body Problem, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 2, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 370–497. Reprinted with a postscript in H. Feigl (1967): The “Mental” and the “Physical”, The Essay and a Postscript, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fodor, J. A. (1990): A Theory of Content and Other Essays, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Forbes, G. (1990): “The Indispensability of Sinn”, Philosophical Review 99 (4): 535–563. Foucault, M. and P. Rabinow (eds) (1984): The Foucault Reader, New York: Pantheon Books. Garthwaite, G. R. (2005): The Persians, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Gelinas, L. (2006): “The Stoic Argument Ex Gradibus Entium”, Phronesis 51(1): 49–73. Glock, H. J. (1996): A Wittgenstein Dictionary, Blackwell Publishing. Grim P. (2007): “Impossibility Arguments”, in M. Martin (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 199–214. 198 References
Grünbaum, A. (2004): “The Poverty of Theistic Cosmology”, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 55(4): 561–614. Guleserian, T. (1983): “God and Possible Worlds: The Modal Problem of Evil”, Noûs 17(2): 221–38. Hartshorne, C. (1941): Man’s Vision of God. New York: Harper and Row. Havel, V. (1985): The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central- Eastern Europe, Hutchinson and Co. Ltd. Heidegger, M. ([1953] 2010): Being and Time, Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Herzberg, F. (2007): “Internal Laws of Probability, Generalized Likelihoods and Lewis’ Infinitesimal Chances – A Response to Adam Elga”, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 58(1), 25–43. Hick, J. (2001): “Who or What Is God?”, [website]
Leslie, J. (2000): “The Divine Mind”, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 47: 73–89. Leslie, J. (2001): Infinite Minds, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Leslie, J. (2007): Immortality Defended, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Levine, J. (1983): “Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap”, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 64: 354–61. Levine, M.P. (1994): Pantheism: A Non-Theistic Concept of Deity, London: Routledge. Lewis, D. K. (1966): “An Argument for the Identity Theory”, Journal of Philosophy, 63: 17–25. Lewis, D. K. (1970): “Anselm and Actuality”, Noûs 4(2): 175–88. Lewis, D. K. (1986): On the Plurality of Worlds, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Lewis, D. K. (1988): “Relevant Implication”, Theoria, 54: 161–74. Reprinted in Lewis, D. K. [1998]: Papers in Philosophical Logic, Cambridge Studies in Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 111–24. Lewis, D. K. (1990a): “What Experience Teaches”, in W. G. Lycan (ed.), Mind and Cognition: A Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, 499–519. Reprinted in Lewis, D.K. [1999]: Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology, Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 262–91. Lewis, D. K. (1990b): “Noneism or Allism?”, Mind 99(393): 23–31. Linsky, B. and E. Zalta (1991): “Is Lewis Meinongian?”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 69(4): 438–53. Loewer, B. (1987): “From Information to Intentionality”, Synthese 70: 287–317. Loewer, B. (1997): “A Guide to Naturalizing Semantics”, in C. Wright & Bob Hale (eds), A Companion to the Philosophy of Language, Blackwell: Oxford. Loewer, B. (2001): “From Physics to Physicalism”, in Carl Gillett and Barry Loewer (eds), Physicalism and Its Discontents, New York: Cambridge University Press, 37–56. Louth, A. (2002): Denys the Areopagite, London, UK: Continuum. Malcolm, N. (1960): “Anselm”s Ontological Arguments”, The Philosophical Review LXIX: 41–62. Mally, E. (1912): Gegenstandstheoretische Grundlagen der Logik und Logistik, (Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik 148), Leipzig: Barth. Martin, M. and R. Monnier (eds) (2003): The Impossibility of God, Amherst NY: Prometheus Books. McKay, Th. and M. Nelson (2010): “Propositional Attitude Reports”, in E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, [encyclopedia]
Merricks, T. (2009): “The Resurrection of the Body”, in Th. P. Flint and M. C. Rea (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 476–91. Merton, R. K. (1948): “The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy”, The Antioch Review 68 (1): 193–210. Merton, R. K. (1976): Sociological Ambivalence and Other Essays, New York: The Free Press. Millikan R. (1984): Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Moreno, A., U. Cortés and T. Sales (1999): “Modeling Rational Inquiry in Non-ideal Agents”, in J. A. Padget (ed.), Collaboration between Human and Artificial Societies. Coordination and Agent-Based Distributed Computing, (Lecture Notes in Computer Science series), Berlin / Heidelberg: Springer. Morris, T. (1987) “The Necessity of God’s Goodness”, in Morris, Anselmian Explorations: Essays in Philosophical Theology, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, pp. 42–69. Nagel, T. (1974): “What Is it Like to Be a Bat?”, Philosophical Review, 83: 435–50. Reprinted in T. Nagel (1979): Mortal Questions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 165–80. Nasr, S. H. (1993): The Need for a Sacred Science, Richmond UK: Curzon Press. Nicholson, R. A. ([1914] 1989): The Mystics of Islam, London, UK: Penguin Books. Nolan, D. (1997): “Impossible Worlds: A Modest Approach”, Notre Dame Journal for Formal Logic, 38: 535–72. O’Connor, T. (2012): Theism and Ultimate Explanation: the Necessary Shape of Contingency, London: Wiley-Blackwell. Oppy, G. (1997): “Pantheism, Quantification and Mereology”, Monist 80 (2): 320–36. Oppy, G. (2011): “Ontological Arguments”, in E. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2011/entries /ontological-arguments/. Papineau, D. (1993): Philosophical Naturalism, Oxford: Blackwell. Papineau, D. (2001): “The Rise of Physicalism”, in C. Gillett and B. Loewer (eds), Physicalism and its Discontents. New York: Cambridge University Press, 3–36. Papineau, D. (2002): Thinking about Consciousness, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Papineau, D. (2007): “Naturalism”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [online encyclopedia], http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2009/entries/naturalism/. Parfit, D. (1998): “Why Anything? Why This?”, London Review of Books, 20 (2): 24–7. Parsons, T. (1980): Nonexistent Objects, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Pelczar, M. (2008): “On an Argument for Functional Invariance”, Minds and Machines, 18: 373–7. Perry, J. (1986): “From Worlds to Situations”, Journal of Philosophical Logic 15: 83–107. Pettit, P. (2008): “Freedom and Probability: A Comment on Goodin and Jackson”, Philosophy and Public Affairs 36(2): 206–20. Place, U. T. (1956): “Is Consciousness a Brain Process?”, British Journal of Psychology, 47: 44–50. References 201
Plantinga, A. (1974): God, Freedom, and Evil, New York: Harper and Row. Plantinga, A. (1978a): The Nature of Necessity. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Plantinga, A. (1978b) “The Boethian Compromise”, American Philosophical Quarterly 15(2): 129–38. Prastaro, A. M. (1980): Introduzione a Massimo Il Confessore, Lecce. Pseudo-Dionysius, The Areopagite ([1920] 2004): The Mystical Theology and The Divine Names, trans. and intro. R. C. Rolt, Mineola NY: Dover Publications. Putnam, H. (1981): Reason, Truth, and History, Cambridge University Press. Quine, W.V.O. (1948): “On What there Is”, Review of Metaphysics 2: 21–38. Reprinted in his (1953) From a Logical Point of View, Harvard University Press. Raatikainen, P. (2010): “Causation, Exclusion, and the Special Sciences”, Erkenntnis 73(3): 349–63. Rescher, N. and Brandom, R. (1980): The Logic of Inconsistency: A Study in Non-Standard Possible-World Semantics and Ontology, Oxford, Basil Blackwell. Riordan, W. (2008): Divine Light: The Theology of Denys the Areopagyte, San Francisco: Ignatius Press. Routley, R. (1980): Exploring Meinong’s Jungle and Beyond, Interim edition, Departmental Monograph #3, Department of Philosophy, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. Rowe, W. (1975): The Cosmological Argument, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Runciman, S. (1986): The Great Church in Captivity: A Study of the Patriarchate of Constantinople from the Eve of the Turkish Conquest to the Greek War of Independence, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Russell, B. and F.C. Copleston (1964): “The Existence of God,” in J. Hick (ed) The Existence of God, New York: Macmillan & Co. Salmon, N. (1981): Reference and Essence, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Schuon, F. (1984): “Dimension of Omnipotence”, Studies in Comparative Religion 16(1 & 2), accessed at
Tillich, P. (1967): My Search for Absolutes, New York: Simon and Schuster. Tooley, M. (1981): “Plantinga’s Defence of the Ontological Argument”, Mind, 90 (359): 422–427. Turner, D. (2009): “Dionysius and Some Late Medieval Mystical Theologians of Northern Europe”, in S. Coakley and C. M. Stang (eds) Re-thinking Dionysius The Areopagite, London: Wiley-Blackwell. Vallentyne, P. (2000): “Standard Decision Theory Corrected”, Synthese 122: 261–90. Van Inwagen, P. (1978): “The Possibility of Resurrection”, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 9(2): 114–21. Van Inwagen, P. (2006): The Problem of Evil, New York: Oxford University Press. Vogel, J. (1999): “The New Relevant Alternatives Theory”, Philosophical Perspectives 13: 155–80. von Wachter D. (2011): “Review of Mark Johnston, Saving God: Religion after Idolatry”, Dialectica 65(2): 286–92. von Wright, G. H. (1971): Explanation and Understanding, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Webb, J. K., Flambaum, V. V., Churchill, C. W., Drinkwater, M. J. and Barrow, J. D. (1999): “Search for Time Variation of the Fine Structure Constant”, Physical Review Letters, 82, 884–7. Webb, J. K., M.T. Murphy, V. V. Flambaum, V. A. Dzuba, J.D. Barrow, C. W. Churchill, J. X. Prochaska, and A. M. Wolfe (2001): “Further Evidence for Cosmological Evolution of the Fine Structure Constant”, Physical Review Letters, 87, 091301. Williams, D. C. (1962): “Dispensing with Existence”, Journal of Philosophy 59: 748–63. Williamson, T. (2007): “How Probable is an Infinite Sequence of Heads?”, Analysis, 67: 173–80. Wittgenstein, L. ([1922] 2010): Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Barnes & Noble Publishing. Yablo, S. (2000): “Textbook Kripkeanism and the Open Texture of Concepts”, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 81(1): 98–122. Yagisawa, T. (2005): “A New Argument Against the Existence Requirement”, Analysis 65: 39–42. Yagisawa, T. (2010): Worlds and Individuals, Possible and Otherwise, New York: Oxford University Press. Zalta, E. N. (1983): Abstract Objects: An Introduction to Axiomatic Metaphysics, Dordrecht: D. Reidel. Zalta, E. N. (1993): “Twenty-five Basic Theorems in Situation and World Theory”, Journal of Philosophical Logic 22: 385–428. Index
a priori reasoning, 4, 81 Anselm of Canterbury, 4, 101, 114, abduction, 90 115, 117–19, 144, 145, 177, 190, Abraham, 130, 166, 167 191, 199 Abrahamic tradition, 166, 194 anthropology, 48, 50, 183 Absolute Everything/Plenitude, 9, 13, anti-Communism, 51 38, 66, 117, 121, 124, 134, 137, apophatic method, 131, 193 149, 165 Arabs, 166 action, 55, 56, 141, 147, 158, 161, Aranyosi, I., 4, 55, 57, 184, 186, 196 173, 178 argument actual world, 2–5, 11, 15, 27, 41, conceivability, ix, 4, 73, 79, 85, 92, 48–50, 52, 54, 55, 73, 77–88, 96, 104 90, 91, 93, 94, 96, 97, 110–12, cosmological, 122–4, 126, 192, 196, 114, 119, 120, 125, 128–30, 139, 197, 201 141–3, 145, 147, 149, 151, 155, design, 101, 122, 124, 125 160, 171, 172, 179–81, 186, 188, fine tuning, 124 190, 191, 194 knowledge, see knowledge actualization, 93, 120, 121, 125, 145 argument Adams, F., 185, 196 modal ontological, see modal African Americans, 157 ontological argument afterlife, 172, 173 ontological, 4, 97, 101–9, 111–15, Agnosticism, 130, 150, 171 117, 119, 126, 136, 138, 144, 191, Ahura Mazda, 166, 167, 194 192, 198–201 Aizawa, K., 185, 196 argumentum ex gradibus entium, Al-Hallaj, M., 195 119, 197 alcohol consumption, 194 Arianism, 195 Alexander, S., 168, 196 Armstrong, D. M., 75, 187, 196, 199 All-Possibility, 135 Aryan superiority theory, 160 Allah, 138, 195 asymmetric dependence theory, 62–4 Almeida, M., 145, 193, 196 Atheism, 109–11, 120, 123, 129, analysis, 12, 13, 27, 36, 39, 42, 52, 54, 130, 197 58–60, 76, 97, 147, 182, 186–8 Atma, 135 nonstandard, see nonstandard atonement, 142 analysis attitude ascription, 38, 69, 183 analytic functionalism, see attitude report, 10, 32, 35, 36, 199 functionalism de re/de dicto, 35 analyticity, 75 Axiom 5, 102 anaphora, 13 Axiom A, 38, 115, 116, 121 Anderson, B., 184, 196 Axiom B, 102 angels (spirits, jinn, devas, Azande people, 50, 197 daemons, etc.), 111, 112 Angra Mainyu, 194 Bader, R., 181 animists, 168 Balzac, H. de, 15, 30, 31 anomic distribution, 83 Ban Ki-moon, 162
203 204 Index baptism, 166 coexistence, 25, 35, 52, 53, 66, 115, Barlaam of Seminara, 170 116, 160, 172, 194 behavior, 48, 49, 54–7, 60, 65, 68, 72, cognitive system, 62, 63, 91, 92 74, 78, 84, 87, 155, 158, 160–2, Communist propaganda, 51 184–6, 189 Communist regimes, 51 religious, 5 compatibilism, 42, 43 being conceivability arguments, see omnibenevolent, 5, 109, 115, 128, argument 140, 144, 149, 167, 170 conceivability-possibility omnipotent, 5, 104, 106, 109, 115, principle (C-P), 104–6 144, 170, 194 conceptual scheme, 29 omniscient, 5, 106, 109, 115, 127, concreteness, 3, 40 140, 144, 167, 170 contingency, 9, 10, 88, 200 versus so-being, 24, 25 coreferential terms, 4, 31–3, 35, 36, belief 68, 71 fine-grained, 58, 59, 66 Cortés, U., 12, 199 benevolent dictator, 147 counterfactual conditional, 13, 54 Beyond-Being, 135, 136 Craig, W. L., 192, 196, 197 Big World hypothesis, 88, 89 Crane, T., 52, 56, 57, 68, 184–6, 197 Bjerring, J. C., 12 creation ex nihilo, 149 Bolshevik Revolution, 51, 196 Boltzmann, L., 181 Dasein, 174 Bostrom, N., 84, 88, 89, 196 Davidson, D., 184, 197 Brahman, 138 Dawkins, R., 47 Brandom, R., 12, 200 definition of a situation, 48–51, 156, Brouwer axiom, see Axiom B 157, 183 brute necessity, 81, 86, 93 Demigod Explosion, 110 Buddhism, 133, 177 demigods, 111, 112, 130, 139 demonstratives, 13 C-inductive argument, 192 Dennett, D., 47, 93, 94, 197 cardinality, 84, 187 dervish, 169 Castell, P., 95, 196 Descartes, R., 22–4 cataphatic method, 131, 165, 193 dhikr, 169 Causal Closure of the Physical, 55, dialetheism, 42 61, 184 disjunction problem, see causal exclusion, 55, 61, 184 naturalized semantics causation distribution counterfactual account of, 54, 185 anomic, see anomic distribution downward, 185 nomic, see nomic distribution interventionist account of, 185 divine attributes, 103, 108, 115, 116, mental, 54, 55–57, 61, 74, 184, 198 120, 127, 129, 154, 197 transistent, 52–4, 57, 59–62, 73 divinity, 111, 117, 120, 135, 137, 138, Chalmers, D., 76, 80, 81, 87, 90–2, 140, 150, 151, 153, 169, 171, 195 104–110, 186, 191, 196 Dobbs, B. J. T., 194, 195, 197 Christianity, 160, 161, 166, 170, 191 Doyle, A. C., 39 Chrysippus, 119 Drange, T. M., 191, 197 Church, F. F., 137, 196 Dretske, F., 21, 62, 63, 197 Cicero, 119, 120, 192 Dreyfus, H., 173, 175, 193 Cleanthes, 119 Dutch Reformed Church, 148 Index 205
Eastern Christian Church, 195 fine tuning of the universe, 124, Eastern Europe, 51, 184, 194, 197 125, 189 Effingham, N., 182 Fodor, J. A., 63, 64, 197 Elga, A., 82, 197, 198 folk stories, 148 empty set, 187 Foucault, M., 158, 194, 197 epistemic externalism, 21, 23 freakish observers, 89 epistemic humility, 136, 161 free speech, 194 epistemic possibility, free will, 12, 43, 141, 142 see possibility free will defence, 141 esoterism, 195 functionalism eternity, 103, 154, 173 analytic, 76 Euclidean topology, 88 fundamentalists, 194 Evans, G., 38, 164, 167, 197 Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 50, 197 Gangnam Style, 162 Everitt, N., 191, 197 Garthwaite, G. R., 167, 197 evil gay men, 159 actual, 5, 141 Gelinas, L., 119, 197 amount, 141–3 gender equality, 156 local problem of, 193 gender segregation, 159 modal problem of, x, 5, 140, geometry, 10, 13 143–50, 192, 197 Glock, H.-J., 181, 197 quality of, 143 God evolution by natural selection, 66 Anselmian, 143 ex falsum sequitur quodlibet, 186 existence of, 101–22 exaltation, 130, 131, 169 immanent, 128, 132, 133, 135, existence 136, 193 absolute, 26, 27, 118, 132 pantheistic notion of, 150–3 relative, 20, 132, 134 transcendent, 131–6, 138, 139, existence requirement, 52, 53 171, 193 Existential Relativity, 17, 20, 25, 27, God above God (Tillich), 136, 137 28, 41, 134 godless world, 104, 106–8, 111, 112, Existentialism, 137 117, 123, 178 Expanded free will defence, 141 The greatest conceivable being explanandum doubling (GCB), 114–16, 118, 119, 125, strategy, 184 150, 152, 167, 177 explanatory irrelevance of Grim P., 191, 197 experience, 87, 90 Grünbaum, A., 123 extended simples, 43 Guleserian, T., 5, 143, 144, 197 facts, 2, 58, 73, 78, 81, 87, 92, 96, Haneke, M., 175 123, 124, 147, 155, 162, 178, Harris, S., 47 179, 187, 189 Hartshorne, C., 101, 102, 105, Fagin, R., 12, 197 190, 197 fear, 54, 58, 156, 164 Havel, V., 51, 184, 197 Feigl, H., 74, 75, 77, 78, 80, 82, 84, 87, Heaven, 141, 168, 173 90, 110, 186, 197 Heidegger, M., 174, 198 fiction, 13, 15, 16, 18, 20–31, 38, 52, Hell, 103, 173 53, 67, 182 henotheism, 165 fine-structure constant, 87, 189 Herzberg, F., 82, 187, 198 206 Index
Hick, J., x, 4, 138, 139, 154, 155, 161, Jackson, F. C., 186, 198, 200 162, 171, 193, 198 Jeremiah, 138 The Highest (Johnston), 129 Jesus Christ, 155, 170, 195 Hinduism, 135, 165 Jesus Prayer, 170 Hintikka, J., 12, 182, 198 Jihad, 159 Hitchens, C., 47 Job, 138 Hitler, A., 160 Johnston, M., 129, 138, 160–2, Hobbes, T., 157 198, 201 Holocaust, 193 Judaism, 166, 191 homosexuality, 159 judgment, 94, 108, 160, 173, 175 Hopkins, J., 134, 198 justice, 151 Hume’s dictum, 80, 86 justification, 5, 21, 78, 160 hyperreal line, 82 hyperreal numbers, 188 Kane, R., 102, 198 Kaplan, D., 191, 198 identity Keisler, J. H., 84, 188, 198 knowledge of, 4, 67–72 Kelly, S., 173, 175, 197 mental-physical, ix, 3, 4, 77–86 Kenny, A., 130, 171, 193, 198 necessity of, 81 Kim, J., 184,198 Identity Thesis, 3, 73, 74–7, 80, 81, Kirk, R., 186,198 109, 186 Knowledge argument, 92, 93, 186 imagined community (Anderson), Kraay, K. J., 193, 198 184, 196 Kripke, S. A., 33, 73, 105, 106, 164–7, immutability, 103, 154 186, 198 impersonae, 138 Krishna, 138 impossibility, 9, 27, 86, 103, 192, 197, 199 Lebensraum, 160 Inan, I., 181 left-liberal discourse, 159, 194 incompatibilism, 42, 43 Leftow, B., 178, 198 incomplete object, 31, 32, 35–8, Lenin, V. I., 51 69–71, 183 LePore, E., 56, 185, 198 independence principle (Mally), Leslie, J., 125, 152, 153, 178–80, 190, 113, 114 193, 198 indexical theory of actuality, 27121 Levine, M. P., 120, 121, 150–3, 186, indexicals, 13 193, 198 indifference principle, 81, 82, 84, 85, Lewis, D. K., 11, 13, 19, 20, 22, 26, 27, 88–90, 93–7, 187–90 53, 56, 75, 76, 93, 94, 114, 121, induction, 89, 90 127, 146, 182, 185, 186, 191, 192, infidels, 159, 161 198, 199 intelligent observers, 125 Linsky, B., 182, 199 intensionality, ix, 4, 31–3, 67–9, 71 Loewer, B., 56, 58, 62, 63, 65, 184, intentional states, 13, 31, 54, 185, 197, 198, 199, 200 55, 57, 59, 60, 63, 65–8, Logical Egalitarianism, 17, 25, 27, 183, 184 38, 39 intentionality, ix, 3, 31, 54–67, 74, Logical Pantheism, ix, 4, 5, 25, 185, 197, 199 101–30, 140, 150, 151, 153, 162, Ionesco, E., 15 164–71, 178, 180, 190, 192 Islam, 134, 154–60, 165, 166, 169, logical space (general), 1–5, 9–43 191, 194, 195, 200 canonical, 12, 13, 15, 42, 73, 80, 97, Islamophobic discourse, 156, 157 116, 118, 129, 130, 151, 172 Index 207
Logical Space, 9–43 Monnier, R., 191, 199 folded, 3, 5, 47–73, 183 monotheism, 110, 150, 165, 194 nested, ix, 42, 43, 129, 134 morality, x, 5, 143, 149, 171 logical spillover, ix, 4, 73–97, 109, Moreno, A., 12, 199 111, 186 Morris, T., 146, 200 Logical Thomas Theorem, ix, 47, 52 Muhammad, 154, 156, 194 Logical Totalitarianism, 5, 10–13, 15, multiverse, 88, 124–6, 181, 189, 190 38, 39, 117–21, 127, 130, 132, Muslims, 154–7, 162, 166, 167 133, 136, 154, 181 mystical experience, 170, 195 Logicalism, ix, 17, 28, 132, 183, 192 mysticism, 137, 168, 170 Louth, A., 195, 199 love, 129, 142, 147, 148, 159, 168, Nagasawa, Y., 181 169, 175 Nagel, T., 186, 200 namaz, 169, 171, 195 Maher, B., 47 Nasr, S. H., 134–6, 200 Malcolm, N., 101, 102, 190, 199 nation, 23, 184 Mally, E., 10, 24, 113, 114, 199 nationalism, 184 market crash, 48 natural disasters, 142 marriage vow, 148 natural evil, 142 Martin, M., 191, 199 naturalism, 59, 60, 61, 80, 81, 200 Maya, 135 epistemological/methodological, 59 McCall, S., 187, 199 ontological, 59, 61, 62 McGinn, B., 133, 199 naturalistic dualism, 77, 78, 85, 94 McGinn, C., 186, 199 naturalized semantics, ix, 57–67 McKay, T., 68, 199 asymmetric dependence Mead, G. H., 183, 199 theory of, 62–4 meaning of life, x, 171–6 crude causal theory of, 58 Meinong, A., 10, 17, 19–21, 24, 40, disjunction problem for, 59, 64 71, 112, 182, 183, 199, 201 information-based theory of, 62–3 Meinongian systems, 10 new crude causal theory (New CCT) Meister Eckhart, x, 4, 132–4, 199 of, 59, 60, 62, 63, 65–7 mereological nihilism, 43 problem of error for, 58, 62, 64 Merricks, T., 191, 199 teleological theory of, 62, 65–7 Merton, R. K., 48, 157, 183, 199 nature metaphysical nihilism, 27, 41 worship of, 168 Millikan R., 66, 199 Nazi ideology, 160 mind-dependence, 2, 29, 67 necessity mind-independence, 67 brute, 81, 86 miracle, 111, 112, 139, 142, 191 epistemic, 80, 86, 93 modal depth, 107–9, 117 logical, 81, 180 modal depth objection, ix, 104–9, 117 neighborhood pressure, 159 modal illusion, 105 Nelson, M, 68, 183, 199 modal intuition, 110–12, 119, 136, Neoplatonism, 193 138, 150, 177, 178, 192 Newton, I., 194, 195, 197 modal knowledge, 150 Nicholas of Cusa, x, 132–4 modal ontological argument, ix, Nicholson, R. A., 169, 195, 200 101–9, 112–15, 191, 198 Nirvana, 138 modal parochialism, 152 noble lie, 155, 159, 162, 163 modally demanding goods, 147, 148 Nolan, D., 186, 195, 200 moderate Islam, 158 nomic distribution, 83, 84 208 Index nomological danglers, 75, 77, 82, 83, a priori, 186, 201 86, 87, 89, 90, 188, 190 epistemic arguments against, non-ideal cognizers, 12 76–8, 92 nonstandard analysis, 83, 84 Place, U. T., 74, 200 nonstandard infinities, 84 Plantinga, A., 102, 103 noumena, 138 Plato, 155, 197 Null World, 124 plenitude, see Logical Totalitarianism pluralistic hypothesis, see religious observational evidence, 74 pluralism Ockham’s razor, 76, 80, 86 polarity (situation theory), 14, 182 O’Connor, T., 193, 200 polytheism, 112 omnibenevolence, 103, 144, 145, pop-religion, 162 147–9, 152, 154 pop cultural products, 194 omnicorn, 107 Pope Pius IX, 5, 151 omnipotence, 103, 152–4, 165, 201 possibilia (possible objects), 20 omnipresence, 103 possibility omniscience, 103, 150, 152–4, 157 conceptual, 96, 105 The One (Neoplatonism), 120, epistemic, 28, 29, 137, 181, 188 131, 133 metaphysical, 105 Ontic Deflationism, 17, 26, 28, possible-worlds semantics, 2, 13, 200 41, 114 Prastaro, A. M., 193, 200 ontological argument, see argument, prayer, x, 167–71 ontological agnostic, 130, 171 modal, 101–9, 112–15, 117, formal, 169 191, 198 probability space, 82 Oppy, G., 112, 113, 127, 128, 200 probability theory, 84, 86, 187 nonstandard, 187 Palamism, 170 Pseudo-Dionysius The Pantheism, x, 117, 120, 127, 128, 140, Areopagite (Denys), x, 130–2, 150–4, 170, 193, 194, 198 192, 199, 200 Logical, see Logical Pantheism PSY, 162 Papineau, D., 59, 61, 66, 184, psychiatry, 185 186, 200 psycho-physical laws, 75, 77, 78–86, parallelism (Feigl), 74 89, 90, 96 Parfit, D., 192, 200 psychology, 48, 162, 200 Parmenides, vii psychopath, 49, 50 Parsons, T., 10, 24, 40, 182, 200 psychotherapy, 174 Pelczar, M., 92, 200 Putnam, H., 3, 22, 29, 41, 181, 200 People of the Book, 166, 167 Perennialist Philosophy, x, 4, 134–6, qualia, 74, 75, 79–81, 90–2, 186, 189, 141, 190, 191, 200, 201 198, 201 Persia, 166, 195, 197 Qualia inversion, 79–81, 91, 92 persuasion, 156 Quine, W. V. O., 20, 21, 26, Pettit, P., 147, 200 182, 200 phenomenal consciousness, 3, 4, Qur’an, 49, 155, 156, 159, 162 105, 110 phenomenal information, 93 Raatikainen, P., 185, 200 physicalism/materialism Rabinow, P., 194, 197 a posteriori, 186, 201 Ramadan, T., 159 Index 209
Raphals, L., 177 Smart, J. J. C., 74–5, 186, 201 raw feel, 75, 77, 78, 186 Smart, N., 121, 201 The Real (Hick), 138, 139, 154, 155 So-Sein, 24, 113, 114, 182, 183 reasoning solipsism, 43 a priori, see a priori reasoning Spinoza, B., 23, 152, 174 abductive, see abduction St. Gregory of Palamas, 170 redemption, 172 standing quantifier, ix, 28, 36, 38, reference of “God”, 164–7 40, 41, 53, 66, 69–71, 115 relations state of affairs, 1, 3, 4, 14, existence of, 52 23–5, 27, 48, 52, 62, 121, external, 53 140, 145, 147, 173, 177, standing of, 53 182, 193 religion Steen, M., 185 esoteric aspect of, 134, 135, 169 Stoics, 119 exoteric aspect of, 135, 169 Stoljar, D., 186, 201 religious conflict, x, 4, 5, 140 Strawson, G., 186, 201 religious fanaticism, 5 Strawson, P. F., 53, 201 religious pluralism, x, 154–63 Stubenberg, L., 186, 201 religious tolerance, x, 154–63 suffering, 49, 141, 144, 145, 148, representationalism, 184 180, 192 Rescher, N., 12, 200 Sufism, 169 Riordan, W., 193, 200 suicide, 173, 175 Robinson, H., 182 Süleyman the Magnificent, 194 Roman Catholic Church, 148 surjection, 83 Romania, 184 Swift, J., 23 Routley, R., 19, 20, 182, 201 Swinburne, R., 122–4, 192, 201 Rowe, W., 192, 201 Symbolic Interactionism, 183 Runciman, S., 195, 201 Russians, 160 Tao, 138 Theism Salmon, N., 191, 201 theological, 136 salvation, 172 theodicy, 5, 149 Sassanid Empire, 166 theology Satan, 104 philosophical, 130, 199 Schelling point, 79 Third Reich, 160 Schuon, F., 134, 135, 201 Thomas, D., 48, 49, 183, 201 Sein, 24 Thomas, W. I., 48, 49, 183, 201 self-fulfilling prophecy, 48, 157, 183 Thomas Theorem, 4, 47–9, 51, 52, 65, semantics 156, 157, 183 modal, 2 Logical, see Logical Thomas naturalized, see naturalized Theorem semantics Tillich, P., x, 4, 136–8, 161, 162, 193, situation, see situation semantics 196, 201 sexual intercourse, 68 Tooley, M., 103, 104, 107–9, 201 sexuality,194 topic-neutral vocabulary, 76, 77, 186 Sharia, 159 topology, 10, 13, 88 Sikhism, 165 totemists, 168 situation semantics, 13–15 transistence, ix, 4, 5, 47, 52, 71–3, Skyrms, B., 82, 201 140, 155–7, 160 210 Index transistent causation, Wittgenstein, L., 1, 2, 9, 169, 170, see causation 197, 202 Turkey, 159, 194 world Turner, D., 132, 201 actual, see actual world Twitter, 163 godless, see godless world possible, see possible-worlds Ulusoy Aranyosi, E., 181 semantics unactualized states, 96 tormented, 144, 145, 147, 149, universe 150, 193 fine tuning of the, see universe world-ensemble, see multiverse flat, 88 worship, x, 167–71 life-permitting, 125, 144 meditative, 170 Wringe, B., 185 Vallentyne, P., 82, 187, 201 Van Inwagen, P., 141, 142, Yablo, S., 104, 105, 202 191, 193, 201 Yagisawa, T., 182, 190, 202 via negativa, 165 Yahweh, 119, 138 violence, 140, 142, 154–61 Youtube, 163 Vogel, J., 21, 22, 201 von Wachter D., 161, 201 Zahed L.-M., 159, 160, 194 von Wright, G. H., 184, 201 Zalta, E., 10, 14, 182, 196, 199, 200, 201, 202 Webb, J. K., 189, 201 Zeno, 119 Williams, D. C., 27, 202 Zoroaster, 167 Williamson, T., 82, 202 Zoroastrianism, 165–7, 194 witchcraft, 50, 197 Zyporin, B., 177