Simply Unsuccessful: The Neo-Platonic Proof of God’s Existence

Edward Feser defends the ‘Neo-Platonic proof’ for the existence of the God of classical theism. After articulating the argument and a number of preliminaries, I first argue that premise three of Feser’s argument – the causal principle that every composite object requires a sustaining efficient cause to combine its parts – is both unjustified and dialectically ill-situated. I then argue that the Neo-Platonic proof fails to deliver the mindedness of the absolutely simple being and instead militates against its mindedness. Finally, I uncover two tensions between Trinitarianism and the Neo-Platonic proof and one tension between the Neo-Platonic proof (and, more generally, classical theism) and the incarnation.

The problem of mind-body interaction and the causal principle of Descartes’s Third Meditation

The article analyses recent English publications in Cartesian studies that deal with two problems: (1) the problem of the intrinsic coherence of Descartes’s doctrine of the real distinction and interaction between mind and body and (2) the problem of the consistency of this doctrine with the causal principle formulated in the Third Meditation. The principle at issue is alternatively interpreted by different Cartesian scholars either as the Hierarchy Principle, that the cause should be at least as perfect as its effects, or the Containment Principle, that the cause should contain all there is in its effects. The author argues that Descartes’s claim (in his argument against the scholastic doctrine of substantial forms) that it is inconceivable how things of different natures can interact does not conflict with the acknowledgement of interaction between things of different natures in the case of soul and body. The case is made that Cartesian mind-body interaction can agree with both the Hierarchy Principle and the Containment Principle, because the Principle is about total and efficient cause, whereas in the interaction, mental and brain states are only partial (and plausibly, in the case of brains states, occasional) causes. In particular, in the case of the causality in the brain-to-mind direction, the mind is conditioned by brain states to form the corresponding specific ideas on the basis of its innate general ideas of movements, forms, colours, etc. Eventually, for Descartes, the most natural way to deal with worries about the possibility of mind-brain interaction is to rely on God’s omnipotence, which certainly enables Him to arrange for such interaction.

Beyond Causal Explanation: Einstein’s Principle Not Reichenbach’s

Our account provides a local, realist and fully non-causal principle explanation for EPR correlations, contextuality, no-signalling, and the Tsirelson bound. Indeed, the account herein is fully consistent with the causal structure of Minkowski spacetime. We argue that retrocausal accounts of quantum mechanics are problematic precisely because they do not fully transcend the assumption that causal or constructive explanation must always be fundamental. Unlike retrocausal accounts, our principle explanation is a complete rejection of Reichenbach’s Principle. Furthermore, we will argue that the basis for our principle account of quantum mechanics is the physical principle sought by quantum information theorists for their reconstructions of quantum mechanics. Finally, we explain why our account is both fully realist and psi-epistemic.

Public Reason and Embodied Community- Intercultural Philosophical Perspective: An African Approach

Every human person is a cultural being. Each culture has incomplete knowledge of reality, and the sharing of viewpoints makes for mutual enrichment, hence the need for intercultural perspectives. Even in a human being, body and spirit, emotion and reason reciprocally influence on each other. Life is dialogical. Action gives flesh to theory, and the abstract reason is exemplified in real things, which is what embodiment of reason is all about. Principles govern all things and public reason, as a causal principle, regulates the affairs of embodied homogeneous communities. African embodiment of reason is self-evident in names and allegories wherein rational thoughts and ideas are personified the way sentient robots embody or personify Artificial Intelligence (AI). In this treatise, we shall use allegory, nomenclature, traditional songs, apophthegms, etc., to show how Africans wisely incarnate ideas in things. As it is analogous to modern-day AI, we shall not only highlight the African approach to public reason and embodied community but also tangentially discuss the effect of AI on the global community, of which Africa is a subunit. In conclusion, we shall caution against the empowering of robots with logical reasoning, and the disempowering and denaturalizing of humans. Keywords: Reason, Embodiment, Philosophy, Principle and Community.

Introduction

The introduction investigates the literature on Kant’s awakening by Hume. It begins by considering the view, which goes back to Vaihinger and Kemp Smith, that Hume woke Kant by challenging the causal principle defended in the Second Analogy, the principle that every event has a cause. It then takes up the attempts of Kuehn and then of Gawlick and Kreimendahl, in the 1980s, to reconcile Kant’s declaration of his debt to Hume with a later assertion that it was the Antinomy that woke him. Finally, it addresses the rich literature on the topic that has developed in the present century, and in particular the views of Hatfield, Watkins, Forster, and De Pierris and Friedman.

Interpreting Hume on the Causal Principle

Chapter 4 supports by means of collateral evidence the claim that Hume woke Kant by attacking the principle of sufficient reason. First, it considers Treatise 1.3.3, though without supposing that Kant knew this text, in order to show that there, where Kemp Smith and others thought Hume was attacking the principle that every event has a cause, he was actually attacking the principle of sufficient reason. Second, it explains Hume’s lack of explicitness in the Enquiry about the fact that he was attacking the principle of sufficient reason; he avoided explicitness on this score, I argue, in order to veil his antitheological intentions. Third, it examines Sulzer’s commentary on Enquiry Section 4, which Kant surely knew well, to show that Sulzer read Section 4 as attacking the principle of sufficient reason. The fact that Kant’s contemporaries such as Sulzer and Tetens read Hume in this way makes it plausible to suppose that Kant did too.

Hume’s Attack on the Rationalist Principle of Sufficient Reason in the Enquiry

Chapter 3 investigates more precisely where in the Enquiry Kant finds Hume showing that we cannot know causal connections via pure concepts, and thus that we cannot know the principle of sufficient reason. Hume’s rejection of the principle of sufficient reason comes to a head at 4.13, and Hume returns to it at 12.29 note (d). 12.29 note (d) is directed not, as Hume pretends, against Lucretius’s principle Ex nihilo, nihil fit, but against the causal principle that Descartes, Locke, and Clarke had used to prove the existence of God. This is confirmed by reading 12.29 note (d) against the background of Bayle’s “Spinoza.” Descartes’s Ex nihilo, nihil fit is equivalent, for our purposes, to the principle of sufficient reason found in Wolff, Baumgarten, and the early Kant. The chapter addresses Michael Della Rocca’s argument that Hume failed in his attack on the principle of sufficient reason.

Deny the Kalam’s Causal Principle, Embrace Absurdity

One objection against the kalam is that while the standard arguments for its causal premise (everything that begins to exist has a cause) apply to things in the universe, they do not apply to the universe itself. Thus, universes could come into existence uncaused from nothing. This objection, however, creates a situation where an absurd universe is as likely to come into existence uncaused as a normal universe is. This then generates serious skepticism about the reliability of our cognitive faculties, the truth of our sensory inputs, and our past knowledge, thus creating a reductio ad absurdum against the objection.

A First Cause

Causal finitismimplies that every causal sequence has at its root at least one uncaused cause. Together with a defensible (and defended) Causal Principle, this implies that there is a necessarily existing first cause. The argument is similar to the Kalām cosmological argument. The most prevalent theory as to what a necessarily existing first cause would be like is theism, and the rest of the chapter is spent discussing the coherence between causal finitism and theism, especially of a classical sort. For there is prima facie reason for the theist to be worried. It seems that God is moved by infinitely many reasons, knows infinitely many things, and seemingly can make use of this knowledge to produce effects in the world. Resolutions to the difficulties are offered, at times drawing upon classical theism’s doctrine of divine simplicity.