Fundamentals of Philosophy - an introduction

A very basic introduction meant for Chinese lay people, who only have a background in the official historic-materialist worldview. A version in Chinese is available as 基础哲学 ― 概论, philpapers rec DUR-

Two Dozen Compossibles

We present a simple model to show the compossibility of middle knowledge, grounded truth, libertarian free will, predestination, evil, hell, a sin-free heaven, God being perfectly just, free, praiseworthy, and necessarily omnibenevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent, this world being both replete with injustice and the best of all possible worlds, heinous suffering, no-one unjustly suffering, God’s grace for the godly, the prospering of the godless, original sin, human responsibility, transworld depravity, irresistible grace, and Arminian human choice. The model is not intended to be realistic, but its possibility argues for the possibility that a realistic model containing such compossibles could exist – and even be actual

The multiverse doesn't affect the Anthropic argument

Often, the possibility of a multiverse is given as a defeater for the anthropic argument: if there are many, possibly even an infinite number of worlds, then the probability of having a life-permitting world is no longer low. This article shows that the possibility of a multiverse doesn’t defeat the anthropic argument

Transcendent mediocrity is the neutral position

In the light of the principle of mediocrity, naturalism is in fact transcendent exceptionalism - as opposed to transcendent mediocrity. As such, it has the burden of proof - and the "inverse criterion" defeats many of such alleged proofs

The World's Haecceity is the Dual of My Thrownness

We live in a contingent world, a world that could have been different. A common way to deal with this contingency is by positing the existence of all possibilities. This, however, doesn’t get rid of the contingency – it merely moves it from the third-person view to the first-person view

Tightening the Statistical Resurrection Argument

McGrew & McGrew make a solid statistical case for the historicity of the resurrection. This article fills two lacunae in the argument given there, and repairs a conceptual error (making the first lacuna irrelevant in the process)

The asymmetry in Tobia's modal arguments

In Tobia (2016), Kevin P. Tobia tests for bias using two ontological arguments claimed to be symmetrical and of equal strength. We show they are neither

Knowing in the Teeth of the Diallelus - How rightly not to be sceptical

What can we know if we take sceptical worries such as the Münchhausen trilemma seriously? Quite a lot, actually - if the world is a certain way, namely if transcendent mediocrity is the case

Freedom in a physical world – a partial taxonomy

If I take a free decision, how does this express itself physically? If God acts in this world, how does he do so? The answers to those two questions may be different or the same. Here we sketch a typology of possible answers, including Transcendent Compatibility. It turns out that in an open universe, freedom is the timewise mirror image of causality

A valid conjunction principle for fallible knowledge

The multi premise closure principle states that the logical conjunction of known facts yields again a known fact. For absolute knowledge this principle holds. We show that for fallible knowledge, assuming knowing requires a minimum level of statistical certainty (whatever else it requires), and that there is a sufficient number of known facts above a given level of uncertainty, it does not hold, for simple statistical reasons. We present a modified version, the dependent conjunctive closure principle, that does hold