Philosophers such as Derek Parfit, and Hume and Blain before him, who maintain that we are not continuing persons but successive series of states, do not apply their theories to real life and especially themselves. As Bradley asked of Blain, 'Mr Blain collects that the mind is a collection. Has he ever collected who collects Mr Blain?' (But then Bradley went on to argue something rather similar in Appearance and Reality .)
Parfit explicitly states we are not the same persons at all as we were in the past. So, if you were to borrow £50 pounds for a month from him today and he asked for its repayment a month later, you could ask, 'Why?' For, according to his own doctrine, you would not then be the person who borrowed it nor he the person who lent it.
Philosophy was once the search for wisdom. But now it is often the production of absurdities that the producers themselves clearly do not believe. Why, taxpayers might well ask, do we pay good salaries to such people?
Monday, February 16, 2009
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
My Latest Book
My latest book is The Necessity of God (Transaction Publishers, Rutgers (NJ USA), 2008; ISBN 978-1-4128-0832-3, 98 pp.). In it I show how previous versions of the Ontological Argument, from St Anselm to Charles Hartshorne and Keith Ward, are ambiguous between merely defining God into existence (by saying that he exists necessarily and so must exist) and proving that necessary being necessarily exists. For the active ingredient in these proofs is the idea of necessary being, and the proofs are valid only if 'God' means 'necessary being' and no more.
The latter result looks like a mere tautology: that if X is a necessary being then X necessarily exist. But it has a profound meaning: that the category or modality of necessary being is necessarily instantiated (i.e. something or other must exist, about which we so far know no more), just as that of merely possible being may or may be instantiated, and that of impossible being cannot be instantiated. This is the only valid form of the argument.
I then continue in a purely a priori manner to prove that it must be one and eternal, have all its properties necessarily, be transfinite, personal, the archetype of personal and moral existence and at least 2 in 1, the archetype of community: in short God as in classical theism. The final chapters prove, also in an a priori manner that God and the world are related as Creator and created, and that changes in the world and the unforeseeable decisions and actions of finite beings with some degree of self-determination do not mean that God is in any way temporal, limited or contingent. He necessarily knows when it happens all that does happen, and remains the same through all the changes of of detail in his activity in respect of the world.
The latter result looks like a mere tautology: that if X is a necessary being then X necessarily exist. But it has a profound meaning: that the category or modality of necessary being is necessarily instantiated (i.e. something or other must exist, about which we so far know no more), just as that of merely possible being may or may be instantiated, and that of impossible being cannot be instantiated. This is the only valid form of the argument.
I then continue in a purely a priori manner to prove that it must be one and eternal, have all its properties necessarily, be transfinite, personal, the archetype of personal and moral existence and at least 2 in 1, the archetype of community: in short God as in classical theism. The final chapters prove, also in an a priori manner that God and the world are related as Creator and created, and that changes in the world and the unforeseeable decisions and actions of finite beings with some degree of self-determination do not mean that God is in any way temporal, limited or contingent. He necessarily knows when it happens all that does happen, and remains the same through all the changes of of detail in his activity in respect of the world.
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