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The boundless riches of God
Get PDFThis paper explores the concept of infinity in mathematics and its relation to theological considerations. It begins by seeking to answer the question of whether mathematical enquiry into the character of infinity may cast some light on the infinite character of God. Drawing on the work of Euclid, Cantor, and Gödel in particular, it considers concepts of potential and actual infinity and how mathematical discoveries have implications for (i) the relation of the finite and infinite (which has theological implications for the incarnation); (ii) the relation of theory and reality; (iii) the future scope of discovery and invention; and (iv) further reflection on the givenness of revelation
Review essay: To Hell and back with David Bentley Hart
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David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), pp. 222, ISBN 978-0300246223. £20.0
Who Has My Thoughts?
Get PDFThe too many minds problem can be adapted to attack nearly every account of personal identity. The problem can be phrased loosely as a question: why do certain things count as people and others not? For example, if this human organism is a person, why isn\u27t this brain also a person? It seems to be thinking; but I (the organism) insist that I am the person, and the brain is just a part of me. The problem also arises as an objection to "perdurantist" theories that maintain that persons persist by having temporal stages as proper parts; the perdurantist maintains that every person is made up of a number of different "temporal parts" at different times, the maximal combination of which is a person. However, there doesn\u27t seem to be any strong reason to deny personhood to every person stage, and they seem even more likely to be persons than brains—they can look at themselves in the mirror, scratch themselves, pick their noses, and perform all sorts of other actions typically associated with persons that brains just cannot. While each version of the problem attacks a different view, they all rely on the same fundamental intuitions and can be presented by essentially the same argument. In this paper I will canvass a few of the ways in which the argument has and can be applied and show how they can all be easily resisted by blocking a central premise
Hooking Up in the \u27Black Mirror\u27: Breaking, Reflecting and Refracting the Actual in Virtual Dating Worlds
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Preface
No full textWe are pleased to present VOL 11, NO 2, Post-Uprising Excavations. This issue of Syria Studies includes three articles: “UN Mediation in the Syrian Crisis: From Kofi Annan Through Lakhdar Brahimi To Staffan De Mistura” by I William Zartman; “Palestinians in the Syrian Uprising: The Situation on the Ground” by Ashraf Mousa; and “No Temple in Palmyra! Opposing the Reconstruction of the Temple of Bel” by Andreas Schmidt-Colinet.
 
The Contemporary Relevance of Jesus\u27s Messages to the Churches in Asia: A Study of Revelation 2
Get PDFThe Value of Knowledge
Get PDFWhy care about knowledge?
One of the questions that is very rarely asked in epistemology concerns what is perhaps the most central issue for this area of philosophy. It is this: Why we should care about whether or not we have knowledge? Put another way: Is knowledge valuable and, if so, why? The importance of this question resides in the fact that it could well be that it is only if the primary focus of epistemological theorising—i.e., knowledge— is valuable that the epistemological enterprise is itself a worthwhile undertaking. The goal of this paper is to examine this issue in more detail. We will discover, perhaps surprisingly, that the value of knowledge is far from obvious
Saving Armchair Metaphysics from A Posteriori Problems
Get PDFIn this paper I will claim that conceptual analysis can plausibly be held to play an essential role in “serious metaphysics” in spite of skeptical arguments concerning our epistemic access to A‐ intensions. Before arguing for this claim, I will present Frank Jackson’s conception of “serious metaphysics” and show why Jackson thinks that doing conceptual analysis is a necessary part of doing “serious metaphysics”. Furthermore, I will canvass Jackson’s distinction between A‐ intensions and C intensions, show the role this distinction plays in Jackson’s account of conceptual ‐ analysis and explain why the thesis that we have a priori access to A intensions is crucial to ‐ Jackson’s program. Once this has been covered, I will present an argument against our a priori access to A intensions and then show that this argument is too strong by providing two thought ‐ experiments. Next, I will suggest another argument against our a priori access to A intensions from ‐ the a posteriori nature of our theories. However, I will show that this argument need not pose a problem for Jackson provided that Jackson’s A intensions consist of the right kind of description. In ‐ this way, because Jackson can evade the skeptical arguments, Jackson can still claim that we have a priori access to A intensions and, therefore, that conceptual analysis can still be considered a ‐ necessary condition of “serious metaphysics”
A Metacognitive Approach to Memory Markers
Get PDFGiven both the phenomenological and cognitive similarities between episodic memory and imagination, it’s difficult to say how we can reliably distinguish them at their moment of retrieval. Several memory markers have thus been proposed, which are characteristics that would reliably indicate to the subject that her mental state is an instance of memory. While the question of what exactly constitutes these memory markers is still an issue to be settled, there is also the more general question of whether they can be reliable at all. In the present paper, I have identified two theses about the latter issue (the reliability and unreliability theses) and have argued that the main cause of disagreement between them lies on their different assumptions on how beliefs about our own mental states are formed, i.e. what are the underlying metacognitive mechanisms responsible for self-attribution of mental states. These different views on metacognition were then further investigated with regards to their use of metarepresentations and their general agreement with recent cognitive psychology research. These analyses corroborate the reliability of certain kinds of memory markers in distinguishing between memory and imagination