Rather than respond directly to comments on my previous post, I’m rewriting it, taking the issue “from the top” so to speak. The last four paragraphs are what I’d most like people to read and comment on, but the earlier parts are changed quite a bit too by adding a discussion of William Lane Craig. [...]
Category Archives: metaphysics
Plantinga’s ontological argument, take three
Posted by Chris Hallquist on December 16, 2011
19 comments
Why Alvin Plantinga’s ontological argument isn’t even halfway good
Posted by Chris Hallquist on December 12, 2011
24 comments
Someone asked me to write about Alvin Plantinga, so I’ve decided to write another explanation of who his ontological argument isn’t any good, due to not being satisfied with what I’ve previously written on this. Please tell me if the following is clear enough. If people understand it, it will appear more or less as [...]
In defense of free will and experimental philosophy
Posted by Chris Hallquist on November 16, 2011
4 comments
Jerry Coyne is unhappy with a Eddy Nahmias’ defense of free will, published on the NYT opinionator blog. Here’s Nahmias: Many philosophers, including me, understand free will as a set of capacities for imagining future courses of action, deliberating about one’s reasons for choosing them, planning one’s actions in light of this deliberation and controlling [...]
Review of Gary Gutting’s What Philosophers Know, part 1
Posted by Chris Hallquist on December 31, 2010
6 comments
In my post on leaving philosophy, I said that “I think philosophy gets even fewer real results than the meager results that philosophers have sometimes claimed,” linking to the Amazon page for What Philosophers Know, by Notre Dame professor Gary Gutting. As an explanation for my comment, I’m going to do a three-part blog review [...]
A quick and dirty rebuttal to Craig’s argument from the impossibility of an actual infinite
Posted by Chris Hallquist on December 10, 2010
9 comments
In his kalam argument for the existence of God, William Lane Craig tries in a number of different ways to prove that the universe began to exist. One involves arguing that it is impossible for there to be an infinite number of things, so there can’t be an infinite number of past events, so the [...]