Explanation, Entailment, and Leibnizian Cosmological Arguments

Metaphysica 10 (1):97-108 (2009)
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Abstract

I argue that there are Leibnizian-style cosmological arguments for the existence of God which start from very mild premises which affirm the mere possibility of a principle of sufficient reason. The utilization of such premises gives a great deal of plausibility to such types of argumentation. I spend the majority of the paper defending three major objections to such mild premises viz., a reductio argument from Peter van Inwagen and William Rowe, which proffers and defends the idea that a necessary proposition cannot explain a contingent one. I, then, turn to an amelioration of the Rowe/van Inwagen argument which attempts to appeal to an entailment relation between explanans and explanandum that is fettered out in terms of relevance logic. Subsequent to dispelling with that worry, I tackle objections to the utilization of weak principles of sufficient reason that depend essentially upon agglomerative accounts of explanation.

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Christopher Gregory Weaver
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

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References found in this work

The logic of scientific discovery.Karl Raimund Popper - 1934 - New York: Routledge. Edited by Hutchinson Publishing Group.
The Significance of Free Will.Robert Kane - 1996 - New York, US: Oxford University Press USA.
Saving truth from paradox.Hartry H. Field - 2008 - New York: Oxford University Press.

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