Common-sense philosophers typically maintain that common-sense propositions have a certain kind of epistemic privilege that allows them to evade the threats of skepticism or radical revisionism. But why do they have this special privilege? In response to this question, the ¿Common-Sense Tradition¿ contains many different strands of arguments. In this paper, I will develop a strategy that combines two of these strands of arguments. First, the ¿Dynamic Argument¿ (or the ¿starting-point argument¿), inspired by Thomas Reid and Charles S. Peirce (but which will be strengthened with the help of Gilbert Harman¿s epistemology of belief revision). Second, G.E. Moore¿s ¿greater certainty argument¿ (interpreted along the lines of Soames¿ and Pollock¿s construal). This combined strategy, I will argue, is the strong core of Common-Sense Philosophy, and relies on extremely modest and widely held assumptions.

Reserña del libro: Mark C. MURPHY, Divine Holiness and Divine Action, New York: Oxford University Press («Oxford Studies in Analytic Theology»), 2021, XI+272 pp., 15 x 23, ISBN 9780198864783.

G. W. Leibniz fue un lector frecuente de la obra filosófica de Suárez, lectura que dejó una huella profunda en su metafísica. En concreto, el uso que Leibniz hace de los principios se puede ver como una aplicación práctica del tratamiento que hace Suárez de los principios en las Disputaciones metafísicas.

The problem of the Trinity is often framed as a paradox between some propositions central to the doctrine of the Trinity that seem to be logically in tension with each other. However, a problem of Paradox presupposes that we have a sufficient understanding of the meanings of the propositions (otherwise we wouldn¿t even have any appearance of conflict between these meanings). My claim in this paper is that the main problem of the Trinity is more radical than a problem of Paradox: it¿s rather a problem of Meaninglessness, in the sense that the difficult challenge is to grasp a meaning for the central propositions of the doctrine (not to render logically compatible some meanings clearly grasped). I show how we can respond to the problem of Meaninglessness and how, once we have solved it, there is no need to try and dissolve the appearance of contradiction which constitutes the problem of Paradox. As far as the problem of Paradox goes, the solution adopted here is therefore a form of Mysterianism.

¿Principio¿ es una de las nociones fundamentales de la filosofía leibniziana, con la que alude a diferentes tesis imprescindibles para comprender la realidad. No obstante, la importancia de este concepto, pocas veces se encuentra completamente definido: para suplir esta carencia, la lectura de la Monadología es una buena ayuda, ya que permite descubrir el uso que Leibniz hace de los principios y los matices que adopta la noción de ¿principio¿ a través de su uso. En el texto de la Monadología se indican cuatro principios fundamentales: el principio interno de cambio, el principio de contradicción, el principio de razón suficiente y el principio de lo mejor. El análisis de cada uno de ellos mostrará que comparten tres propiedades: son primitivos, a priori y envuelven una multiplicidad en una unidad. Esta caracterización de los principios abre la puerta a ulteriores investigaciones.

In this paper, I reformulate Sterba's argument from evil and consider the various ways theists might respond to it. There are two basic families of responses. On the one hand, theists can deny that God, as a perfect being, needs to act in accordance with Sterba's moral evil prevention requirements (MEPRs). We can call these responses exceptionalist responses. On the other hand, the theist can deny that God's acting in accordance with the MEPRs would imply an absence of significant and especially horrendous evil consequences of immoral actions in the world. We can call these responses compatibilist responses. I argue that the availability of both sorts of responses shows that Sterba's argument should not be taken as a logical argument from evil. A good God is logically possible. However, this does not show that Sterba's argument fails as an evidential argument from evil. In the second section, I argue that if we work within the framework of what Jonathan Kvanvig calls Creator Theology (CT), the force of Sterba's argument as an evidential argument is greatly weakened.

Contemporary philosophers of religion usually depict God as a responsible moral agent with virtues and obligations. This picture seems to be incompatible with the metaphysically perfect being of classical theism. In this paper I will defend the claim, based on a reading of Thomas Aquinas's thought, that there is no such incompatibility. I will present Aquinas's arguments that show that we can attribute to God not only moral goodness in general, but also some moral virtues in a strict sense, such as justice and mercy. I will show why for Aquinas we can say that God has moral duties toward Himself and toward creatures. I will explain how for Aquinas God's moral duties are not absolute, but conditionally necessitated. Finally, I will show how on Aquinas's view there is no contradiction in saying that every act of God is, simultaneously, an act of justice and a supererogatory act of mercy.

In this article, I respond to Stephen Law's evil god challenge (EGC) to traditional theism. I argue that while there are credible a priori grounds for believing that the first cause is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good, there are no credible a priori grounds for believing that the first cause is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-evil. Because of this, theists have a reason for explaining away the a posteriori evidence against theism. The hypothetical evilist, on the other hand, does not. Thus, while the problem of the good makes it absurd to believe in evilism, the problem of evil does not make it absurd to believe in theism.

Stephen Law has authored the evil-god challenge, i.e., the possibility of a completely evil god as a challenge for theistic philosophers; this challenge is grounded on the absence of a plausible proof of God's good moral character. This paper calibrates the accuracy of the evil-god challenge when faced with Barry Miller's strategy to elaborate on divine attributes.

Given certain free agent causal models inspired by Tomas de Aquino, it is interesting to look at the causal model presented by Aquinas himself, especially in a text from which the exposition of free action as the effect of the four Aristotelian causal senses.This is the question of the commanded acts (ST I- II, q.17); in whose first four articles -and in its parallel texts- it determines that the will is an agent cause; practical reason, ordering cause; and the imperium of both (reason and will) is related to the ruling act as the formal with the material.

There are three families of solutions to the traditional Amputation Paradox: Eliminativism, Contingent Identity Theories, and Theories of Coincident Entities. Theories of Coincident Entities challenge our common understanding of the relation between identity and parthood, since they accept that two things can be mereologically coincident without being identical. The contemporary discussion of the Amputation Paradox tends to mention only one theory of Coincident Entities, namely the Constitution View, which violates the mereological principle of Extensionality. But in fact, there is another theory, namely the Unique Part View, which violates another mereological principle (the Weak Supplementation Principle). In this paper, I argue that the contemporary focus on the Constitution View is unmotivated, at least when we are confronted with the Amputation Paradox, and that a balanced comparison of the two views (as solutions to this specific paradox) should favour the Unique Part View.

One version of the Problem of Divine Hiddenness is about people who are looking for God and are distressed about not finding him. Having in mind such distressed God-seekers, Blaise Pascal imagined Jesus telling them the following: "Take comfort; you would not seek me if you had not found me". This is what I call the Pascalian Conditional of Hiddenness (PCH). In the first part of this paper, I argue that the PCH leads to a new interpretation of Pascal¿s own response to the problem, significantly different from Hick¿s or Schellenberg's interpretations of Pascal. In short: for any person who is distressed about not finding God, and who (for this reason) seriously considers the Argument from Hiddenness, the PCH would show that their own distress constitutes evidence that God is in fact not hidden to them (because this desire for God has been instigated in them by God himself). In the second part of the paper, I set aside the exegetical question and try to develop this original strategy as a contemporary response to one version of the Problem of Divine Hiddenness, which I call the "first-person problem". I argue that the PCH strategy offers a plausibly actual story to respond to the first-person problem. As a result, even if we need to complement the PCH strategy with other more traditional strategies (in order to respond to other versions of the problem), the PCH strategy should plausibly be part of the complete true story about Divine Hiddenness.

Une approche fréquente de la question du libre arbitre dans la philosophie contemporaine est constituée des deux idées suivantes : (i) le libre arbitre tel que nous l¿expérimentons est une illusion, et (ii) si nous devons faire place à une forme de liberté humaine dans un cadre naturaliste, ce ne peut être qu¿une liberté compatible avec la nécessité. D¿un point de vue historique, Spinoza est le premier philosophe qui ait défendu cette double approche du problème. Dans les débats contemporains, elle est représentée par un certain nombre de philosophes analytiques « compatibilistes », qui considèrent que les données des sciences ¿ en particulier des neurosciences ¿ en faveur d¿une forme de déterminisme nous obligent à abandonner la conception « incompatibiliste » (ou « libertarienne ») du libre arbitre. L¿article présent a pour but de resituer les récentes données déterministes des neurosciences dans le contexte du débat analytique entre compatibilistes et incompatibilistes. Ceci permettra de montrer comment et pourquoi certains auteurs (y compris l¿auteur de cet article) estiment que ces donnés scientifiques n¿ont pas totalement et définitivement réfuté la possibilité d¿une conception libertarienne et la fiabilité de notre expérience commune.

When the meta-philosophies of Nominalism and Realism are compared, it is often said that Nominalism is motivated by a methodology of ontological economy, while Realism would be motivated by an appeal to Common Sense. In this paper, I argue that this association is misguided. After briefly comparing the meta-philosophy of Common Sense and the meta-philosophy of economy, I show that the core motivation in favour of Realism relies in fact in a principle of economy which violates the methodology of Common Sense. I conclude that Common Sense philosophers should endorse Nominalism (and more precisely Ostrich Nominalism).

This article analyses Aquinas's conception of divine impeccability, and replies to some contemporary objections to this view. The first three sections show that for Aquinas the proposition that expresses God's impeccability is necessary de re, since God's moral goodness is grounded in His ontological goodness. The fourth section presents the connection between God's will and God's power and explains the sense of Aquinas's claim that God cannot sin because He cannot will to sin. The last three sections address the objections based on the apparent incompatibility between omnipotence and impeccability, and between impeccability, free will, and praiseworthiness.

John Henry Newman starts the second half of the Grammar of Assent by laying out a "paradox," and he announces that the purpose of the following chapters of the book is to resolve it. Surprisingly, recent scholarship has tended not to question the nature of this paradox. In this paper, I argue that we should understand Newman's paradox to be a kind of skeptical paradox that arises when we accept "Lockean rationalism." I then show how Newman deals with the paradox. One of the upshots of this reading is that "naturalism" plays a smaller role in Newman's anti-skepticism than previous commentators have suggested. Another is that we should understand Newman to be a kind of infallibilist.

Dariusz ¿ukasiewicz has investigated in depth the ¿Argument from Chance¿ which argues that the data revealing chance in the world are incompatible with Divine Providence. ¿ukasiewicz agrees that these data undermine the traditional model of Providence¿a fine-grained model in which every single detail is controlled by God¿but maintains that they are not incompatible with a coarse-grained model¿in which God leaves to chance many aspects of history (including some horrendous evils). Furthermore, ¿ukasiewicz provides independent reasons to prefer this coarse-grained model. Even though I agree that a maximally fine-grained model is undermined by the scientific data, I argue that this is no sufficient reason to adopt a model as coarse-grained as ¿ukasiewicz¿s. I propose a model of intermediate level of fine-grainedness which could avoid the drawbacks of both extremes, and seems to me to provide a more traditional approach to the problem of evil.

Reseña de: Raquel SÁNCHEZ-PADILLA, Ángela CALERO y José Enrique AGULLÓ (coords.), Discursos en torno a la discapacidad: Paradigmas, espacios e itinerarios, Valencia: Neopàtria, 2017, 175 pp., 15,5 x 21,5, ISBN 978-84-1683-373-3.

Reseña de: Modesto BERCIANO, Teología natural. Doctrina filosófica de Dios, Madrid: BAC, 2018, 464 pp., 15 x 22, ISBN 978-84-220-2025-7.

Reseña de: Lourdes FLAMARIQUE y Claudia CARBONELL (eds.), La larga sombra de lo religioso. Secularización y resignificaciones, Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2017, 380 pp., 15 x 23, ISBN 978-84-16938-80-3.

Descartes¿s Evil Demon argument has been the subject of many reconstructions in recent analytic debates. Some have proposed a reconstruction with a principle of Infallibility, others with a principle of Closure of Knowledge, others with more original principles. In this paper, I propose a new reconstruction, which relies on the combination of two principles, namely the Meta-Coherence principle (defended by Huemer) and the principle of Closure of Justification (best defended by Hawthorne). I argue that the argument construed in this way is the best interpretation of what is really at play in the Evil Demon intuition, and also that this argument is dialectically much stronger than previous reconstructions. If this is right, then the ¿Closure plus Meta-Coherence¿ argument is what anti-sceptics should really be attacking.

I argue that we can understand John Henry Newman as defending the Principle of Faith throughout the University Sermons. According to the Principle of Faith, belief in the Christian message is in itself a good act of the mind, and it has moral significance. I argue that Newman's developed account of faith and its relation to reason in Sermons 10 through 12 are designed to defend the Principle of Faith. Finally, I argue that we can understand Newman's defense of the Principle of Faith as a reaction against criticisms dating back to the English Deists.

Cet article tente d¿établir un diagnostic épistémologique du phénomène contemporain de développement des théories complotistes. Il part de la critique de deux approches du phénomène. L¿approche « hyper-critique » consiste à dire que le développement du complotisme manifeste un manque « d¿esprit critique », et prescrit donc comme thérapie d¿enseigner aux élèves à ne rien croire sans l¿avoir vérifié soi-même. Je réponds que cette stratégie « individualiste épistémique » est inefficace voire contre-productive, car une étude des discours conspirationnistes révèle que le conspirationnisme se nourrit précisément d¿une rhétorique individualiste. La seconde approche que je rejette consiste à nier l¿existence de tout phénomène problématique de « théories du complot ». Cette approche s¿appuie essentiellement sur la difficulté qu¿il y a à définir précisément ce qu¿est l¿état d¿esprit conspirationniste. Je réponds en définissant le conspirationnisme comme une exacerbation de l¿individualisme épistémique, c¿est-à-dire l¿incapacité à distinguer les sources testimoniales fiables des sources testimoniales non fiables.