Ultimate Considerations

In this post I will take O'Connors ideas concerning necessary existence and run with it.  At the end of my previous post I briefly mentioned that we should regard necessary existence itself as concrete, and not as a mere property or part of a necessary being. This is also where I want to start.  We have established by now that ultimate explanations require the fundamentality of existence in a necessary nature. Everything else leads to an abrupt stopping point where further questions could be asked. If instantiated concepts in general require an external explanations (they're not self-explanatory) , it's hard to see how we could rationally affirm that this isn't the case in some cases. The only thing different is the kind of concept instantiated.  What does follow however from existence being fundamental? First of all, within the necessary being, every additional property it has is entailed by existence. The entailment makes only one kind of necessary being possible. ...

Additionally to my other projects I plan on giving chapter by chapter notes for the books I'm reading. It helps me in understanding the arguments of the author and it gives the opportunity spreading novel arguments of books that haven't been read as widely. And it's a great list for future references. I won't make arguments, I will write out the key points of each chapter.  On the list: William Vallicella- A Paradigm Theory of Existence Gaven Kerr- Aquinas Way to God & Aquinas and the Metaphysics of Creation David Braine- The Reality of Time and the Existence of God Martin Heidegger- Sein und Zeit Immanuel Kant- Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason, Critique of Judgment Bernard Lonergan- Insight; A Study in Human Understanding David Oderberg- The Metaphysics of Good and Evil Alasdair MacIntyre- Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry I won't guarantee the order nor that this will certainly be the only or even primary ones I'm focusing on. But ...

In this post I will turn my tides to William Lane Craigs' review of Timothy O'Connors book "Theism and Ultimate Explanation: The Necessary Shape of Contingency". In my last post I explained and defended O'Connors arguments about the nature of a necessary being. In this post I'll defend him against the objections of Craig. His review can be found here: https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/scholarly-writings/the-existence-of-god/timothy-oconnor-on-contingency-a-review-essay Of course I won't answer the whole essay, I'm currently not interested in arguing about the ontological status of possible worlds or abstract objects. Hence I'll begin my quotations from more in the middle of the text, the passages that concern the exact paragraph of O'Connor, which I treated, as well as additional thoughts of Craig on necessary beings. "In O’Connor’s view the essential properties of a necessary being must form a tight unity: They must be so bound...

In his book " Theism and Ultimate Explanation: The Necessary Shape of Contingency " Timothy O'Connor provided some original insights on the constitution of an absolutely necessary being. Even though he himself didn't drew the implications out, what resulted was a highly interesting analysis of what accounts for the necessity of said existence, as well as a new argument for divine simplicity (DS), which didn't rely on specific metaphysics but came from an analysis of necessary existence itself. I will quote the key passage at length and then will take on the criticisms made by William Lane Craig in the review of that work. I will take Craig to be representative of most analytic philosophers here and show how simple misunderstandings and the lack of openness to the topic of existence resulted in egregious mistakes and misrepresentations. What we will be left with is a new way to look at the topic and progress in the debate surrounding necessary beings, so that the l...

This post is the first in my larger project of showing that nowadays philosophers do not understand the concept of necessary existence. It's more akin to a contingent entity that just happens to have necessary existence due to a unique feature it possesses, be it the first in time or the fundamental ontological level. But being unique in some sense is insufficient. Unless we can see how its uniqueness follows from its nature, we can't rationally affirm the necessity of the one arbitrarily limited thing just on the basis that it exists and the others do not. Note that the initial singularity as the starting point for modality won't help here. The reason why is that the worlds are derivative and thus have existence de dicto . This can also be leveled at the starting point though, for the simple reason that the necessity, as mentioned above, can't be ascribed just because it's the first and the fact that it actually exists. It's important to distinguish between an ...