The argument from divine hiddenness (ADH) requires accepting that nonresistant nonbelief has existed or does exist. Yet some reasons for accepting nonresistant nonbelief are also reasons for accepting theistic-supporting and naturalism-falsifying evidentially compelling religious experiences (ECREs). Additionally, any reasons for rejecting ECREs can be used to reject nonresistant nonbelief, thus creating parity (at the very least) of epistemic warrant between the two claims. Consequently, accepting nonresistant nonbelief should lead to accepting ECREs. Accepting nonresistant nonbelief therefore indirectly threatens naturalism, atheism and (...) even the ADH itself. To any reason that can be given for rejecting ECREs there corresponds a parallel reason for rejecting nonresistant nonbelief. So it is irrational to accept the ADH while refusing to accept ECREs. Yet the existence of ECREs contradicts the ADH’s conclusion. So the ADH is self-defeating. (shrink)

This article examines Richard Lynch’s metaphysics and finds that he ultimately resolves his account of being in terms of essens—that which denotes the essential structure that a being (ens) has apart from existence. For Lynch, unlike many of his Jesuit contemporaries, existence is accidental to being. Yet, even if essens is distinct from existence, it is not altogether lacking being, but is accorded a certain kind of “essential being,” which is identified with the possible. Lynch thus seems to re-appropriate an (...) essentialist metaphysics that has antecedents in Avicenna and Henry of Ghent’s notion of esse essentiae. More proximate to Lynch is the Jesuit thinker Francesco Albertini, who takes Henry’s metaphysics and conveys it to Baroque Scholasticism. Lynch continues down that metaphysical path which, as we shall see, generated fierce controversy among late seventeenth-century Scholastics regarding the nature of creaturely possibility. (shrink)

There are two competing models for how to understand Aquinas’s hylomorphic theory of material substances: the Simple Model, according to which material substances are composed of prime matter and substantial form, and the Expanded Model, according to which material substances are composed of prime matter, substantial form, and all of their accidental forms. In this paper, I first explain the main differences between these two models and show how they situate Aquinas’s theory of material substances in two different places within (...) the contemporary debate on concrete particulars, highlighting several advantages that Aquinas’s approach has over other varieties of substratum and bundle theory along the way. I then offer some reasons to think that the Expanded Model, as a theory of concrete particulars, is preferable. I argue that the Expanded Model avoids two major concerns for the Simple Model: the problem of extrinsicality, and the problem of too-many-possessors. (shrink)