Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Here is an explanation, from Thomas Aquinas, of why patriotism is a virtue: "A man becomes a debtor to others in divers ways in accord with the divers types of their excellence and the diverse benefits that he receives from them. In both these regards, God occupies the highest place ... in second place, the principles of our being and governance are our parents and our country, by whom and in which we are born and governed. And so, after God, a man is especially indebted to his parents and to his country. Hence, just as religion involves venerating God, so at the second level piety involves venerating one's parents and country. Now, the veneration of ... one's country includes the veneration of one's fellow citizens and of all the friends of one's country." You're taking 'divers' leaps here, Tom, even if we grant you certain premises.... BTW, is "divers" just an alternate spelling of "diverse"? I've generally read ...

The ontological argument for the existence of God was long thought to have been discredited. Theists as well as atheists thought so in, say, 1958. But not only has the argument made a comeback, it has a new name that indicates a new focus: Perfect Being Theology. The name indicates that the ontological argument isn't 'only' used to show that God exists, but to prop up some very controversial ideas about His nature and the character of our worship of him.https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/the-greatest-possible-being/ I'm not an admirer of the ontological argument, and am pretty sure I'll always have something better to do than to set aside time for books such as the one pictured here. I'll be more explicit about my reactions to the ontological argument than I usually am, though. My take is that the word "perfect" has no fixed meaning, and that if through some pragmatic arbitration we could fix one it would not have anything akin to the content that...

I didn't post anything especially Easter-ish last weekend. This post is in penance. Modalism, in the history of Christian theology, is the doctrine (or if you will the heresy) that the three persons of the divine trinity are distinct modes of a single revelation, not distinct persons within the Godhead. So if a theologian tries to compare the three persons of the trinity to the three states of water: ice, liquid water, and vapor, he is likely to be accused of modalism.  Modalism is is also sometimes called monergism ("the work of One"). This is generally taught together with and in contrast to partialism, the view that each of the persons of God is one-third of God. Thus, if one uses and takes too seriously St Patrick's analogy of the trinity, the three-leaf clover, one is subject to the accusation of partialism.  The two are generally taught together -- at least in the Sunday school lessons of my receding memories -- because modalism denies the ge...

I never post on Tuesday. This week, though, I think I'll make an exception. As was widely expected, Governor Martin O'Malley has come in third in a three-candidate field in the Iowa caucus, part of the Democratic Party's primary campaign for its Presidential nomination. Worse, he received in essence no support and suspended his campaign before the votes had been counted. I spare O'Malley a moment of thought today because of a brief remark he made during the "town hall" meeting that the three candidates for that nomination held, in as non-debate-like a format as could be arranged, one week before the caucus. If I heard him right, O'Malley said that the difficulties faced by a progressive political agenda in the United States today are "the hidden God's way of letting us know the job is important." I hope I heard that correctly because it is a fascinating expression. One doesn't hear a politician use the phrase "the hidden God...

I'm about 24 years late to the party, but I've recently learned that Ernan McMullin, of the University of Notre Dame, wrote a fascinating take-down of an essay by Alvin Plantinga. This must have been big news in the world of Christian theologians/apologetics in 1991. Plantinga was easily the better known of the two: he was once (in 1980, or eleven years before McMullin took him on) described by TIME as "America's leading orthodox Protestant philosopher of God."  The exchange may have seemed to some like a hopeless mismatch, a case of "Alvin v. the chipmunk."  The essay of his that drew McMullin's ire was titled "When faith and reason clash: Evolution and the Bible."  Plantinga writes that "[In]  all the areas of academic endeavor, we Christians must think about the matter at hand from a Christian perspective; we need Theistic Science." Theistic science will come to conclusions that a science devoted to methodological natur...