The Concept of Miracle

Edited by Daniel von Wachter (International Academy of Philosophy In The Principality of Liechtenstein)
About this topic
Summary We can distinguish two approaches to the concept of a miracle: First, one can try to define the concept according to the ordinary usage. Secondly, one can try to redefine the concept so that it is more in accordance with what oneself believes or in some other sense better. Texts that investigate the nature of miracles and how they fit into the causal structure of the world are not here but in ‘The possibility of miracles’.
Key works Larmer 1998 contains articles by various authors with various views. Swinburne 1989 contains articles with various positions.
Introductions An encyclopedia article: McGrew 2011; an introduction: Larmer 1988.
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8 found
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  1. Locke on the objective nature of miracles.Alexander-Henri Barrientos - 2023 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 61 (3):411-426.
    Locke's definition of miracles in “A Discourse of Miracles” is widely cited by scholars as evidence of his subjectivism on the matter. According to this interpretation, Locke held it to be sufficient that an event seems to be a violation of the laws of nature for it to count as a miracle. Nothing supernatural need actually occur. The principal aim of this article is to argue that Locke can and ought to be read as an objectivist about miracles. A subjectivist (...)
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  2. Locke’s Miracle Mistake.Robert Larmer - 2022 - Sophia 61 (4):727-736.
    In this paper, I argue that, despite Locke’s explicitly subjectivist definition of miracle, he in fact employs an objectivist understanding of the concept. This contrast between his official definition and his employment of an objectivist understanding of what it is for an event to be a miracle is a result of his confusing the epistemological issue of how to recognize a miracle with the ontological issue of what a miracle is.
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  3. Hyde within the Boundaries of Mere Jekyll: Evil in Kant & Stevenson.Virgil W. Brower - 2020 - Polish Journal of Aesthetics 56 (1/2020):63-84.
    This essay experiments with Kant’s writings on rational religion distilled through the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as canonical confrontations with primal problems of evil. It suggests boundaries between Stevenson’s characters and their occupations comparable to the those conflicted in the Kantian university, namely, law, medicine, theology, and philosophy (which makes a short anticipatory appearance in his earlier text on rational religion). With various faculties it investigates diffuse comprehensions—respectively, legal crime, biogenetic transmission, and original sin—of key ethical (...)
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  4. Mary and Fátima: A Modest C-Inductive Argument for Catholicism.Tyler Dalton Mcnabb & Joseph E. Blado - 2020 - Perichoresis 18 (5):55-65.
    C-Inductive arguments are arguments that increase the probability of a hypothesis. This can be contrasted with what is called a P-Inductive argument. A P-inductive argument is an argument that shows the overall probability of a hypothesis to be more probable than not. In this paper, we put forth a C-inductive argument for the truth of the Catholic hypothesis (CH). Roughly, we take CH to be the hypothesis that the core creedal beliefs found within the Catholic Tradition are true. Specifically, we (...)
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  5. Why all classical theists should believe in physical premotions, but it doesn’t really matter.James Dominic Rooney - 2020 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 88 (2):139-166.
    “Physical premotion” is a concept associated with Baroque Catholic theological debates concerning grace and freedom. In this paper, I present an argument that the entities identified in this debate, physical premotions, are necessary for any classical theist’s account of divine causality. A “classical theist” is a theist who holds both that God is simple, that is, without inhering properties, and that humans and God are both free in the incompatibilist sense. In fact, not only does the acceptance of physical premotions (...)
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  6. Ultima ratio deorum.Alex V. Halapsis - 2016 - Anthropological Measurements of Philosophical Research 10:100-106.
    Purpose of this article is to investigate the role that the "miraculous" – that is, everything that goes beyond “natural” – plays in the worldview of Western man. Methodology. I do not consider “miracles” as the facts of nature, but as the facts of culture, so in this article I am not talking about specific cases of violation of “laws of nature”, but about the place of “miraculous” in the view of the world of Western man and those transformations, that (...)
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  7. Miracles and the Perfection of Being: The Theological Roots of Scientific Concepts.Alex V. Halapsis - 2016 - Anthropological Measurements of Philosophical Research 9:70-77.
    Purpose of the article is to study the Western worldview as a framework of beliefs in probable supernatural encroachment into the objective reality. Methodology underpins the idea that every cultural-historical community envisions the reality principles according to the beliefs inherent to it which accounts for the formation of the unique “universes of meanings”. The space of history acquires the Non-Euclidean properties that determine the specific cultural attitudes as well as part and parcel mythology of the corresponding communities. Novelty consists in (...)
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  8. The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy.Cora Diamond - 2003 - Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 1 (2).
    I am concerned in this paper with a range of phenomena, which, in the first four sections of the paper, I shall suggest by some examples. In the last three sections, I try to connect the topic thus indicated with the thought of Stanley Cavell. First example: a poem of Ted Hughes’s, from the mid-50s, called “Six Young Men.” […] What Hughes gives us is a case of what I want to call the difficulty of reality. That is a phrase (...)
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