The Nature of God explores a perennial problem in the philosophy of religion.

The capacity to represent things to ourselves as possible plays a crucial role both in everyday thinking and in philosophical reasoning; this volume offers much-needed philosophical illumination of conceivability, possibility, and the relations between them.

Descartes propounded the allegedly "strange", "peculiar", "curious" and "incoherent" doctrine that necessary truths are made true by God's voluntary act. It is generally held that this doctrine must be kept out of sight while other Cartesian topics are being discussed. This paper offers an interpretation of this Cartesian doctrine under which it comes out as reasonable, consistent with the rest of his philosophy, and possible even true. According to this interpretation--which is more respectful of and close to Descartes's text than (...) is the customary one--Descartes equated the alethic modalities with facts about human intellectual limitations, somewhat in the manner of Wittgenstein. Thus, God created modalities creating humans in the way he did. (shrink)

A scholarly edition of Essay Concerning Human Understanding by P. H. Nidditch. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

These original essays offer evidence that a growing number of Anglo-American philosophers are finding in the classical discussion of God's existence and nature fertile sources for critical reflection on issues in the philosophy of religion. Nelson Pike challenges Aquinas' claim that God is not responsible for evil and shows how the rejection of this claim bears on the problem of evil. Richard Swinburne defends the classical Christian understanding of heaven and hell, arguing that it is both philosophically plausible and compatible (...) with the Christian conception of God's goodness. Philip Quinn proposes a defensible version of the classical assertion that God's conserving a creature in existence is tantamount to his continuously creating that creature. Thomas Flint and Alfred Freddoso present an analysis of omnipotence which they claim to be both philosophically adequate and consonant with the orthodox Christian belief that God is both omnipotent and incapable of sinning. James Ross's main purpose is to dislodge the assumption that God's power is properly and adequately thought of as the power to cause (or bring about or actualize) states of affairs. Clement Dore reinterprets and defends Descartes' often maligned Fifth Meditation argument for God's existence. Finally, Mark Jordan explicates the metaphysical foundations of Aquinas' doctrine of divine names. (shrink)

The book is an extended study of the problem of consciousness. After setting up the problem, I argue that reductive explanation of consciousness is impossible , and that if one takes consciousness seriously, one has to go beyond a strict materialist framework. In the second half of the book, I move toward a positive theory of consciousness with fundamental laws linking the physical and the experiential in a systematic way. Finally, I use the ideas and arguments developed earlier to defend (...) a form of strong artificial intelligence and to analyze some problems in the foundations of quantum mechanics. (shrink)