God and Necessity
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Product details:
- Publisher OUP Oxford
- Date of Publication 6 September 2012
- ISBN 9780199263356
- Binding Hardback
- No. of pages588 pages
- Size 243x167x37 mm
- Weight 1004 g
- Language English 0
Categories
Short description:
Brian Leftow offers a theist theory of necessity and possibility, and a new sort of argument for God's existence. He argues that necessities of logic and mathematics are determined by God's nature, but that it is events in God's mind - His imagination and choice - that account for necessary truths about concrete creatures.
MoreLong description:
Brian Leftow offers a theory of the possible and the necessary in which God plays the chief role, and a new sort of argument for God's existence. It has become usual to say that a proposition is possible just in case it is true in some 'possible world' (roughly, some complete history a universe might have) and necessary just if it is true in all. Thus much discussion of possibility and necessity since the 1960s has focussed on the nature and existence (or not) of possible worlds. God and Necessity holds that there are no such things, nor any sort of abstract entity. It assigns the metaphysical 'work' such items usually do to God and events in God's mind, and reduces 'broadly logical' modalities to causal modalities, replacing possible worlds in the semantics of modal logic with God and His mental events. Leftow argues that theists are committed to theist modal theories, and that the merits of a theist modal theory provide an argument for God's existence. Historically, almost all theist modal theories base all necessary truth on God's nature. Leftow disagrees: he argues that necessary truths about possible creatures and kinds of creatures are due ultimately to God's unconstrained imagination and choice. On his theory, it is in no sense part of the nature of God that normal zebras have stripes (if that is a necessary truth). Stripy zebras are simply things God thought up, and they have the nature they do simply because that is how God thought of them. Thus Leftow's essay in metaphysics takes a half-step toward Descartes' view of modal truth, and presents a compelling theist theory of necessity and possibility.
This book should be read carefully and thoroughly. It contains an enormous number of challenging ideas and arguments, far more than I can mention in a short review. Defenders of deity theory and theistic defenders of an independent space of possibility will certainly have to engage the counterarguments presented in this book.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
Modal Basics
Some Solutions
Theist Solutions
The Ontology of Possibility
Modal Truthmakers
Modality and the Divine Nature
Deity as Essential
Against Deity Theories
The Role of Deity
The Biggest Bang
Divine Concepts
Concepts, Syntax, and Actualism
Modality: Basic Notions
The Genesis of Secular Modality
Modal Reality
Essences
Non-Secular Modalities
Theism and Modal Semantics
Freedom, Preference, and Cost
Explaining Modal Status
Explaining the Necessary
Against Theistic Platonism
Worlds and the Existence of God
Bibliography
Index
