A personal final work by the Pulitzer Prize- and Presidential Medal of Freedom-winning author of The Story of Civilization, found decades after his death, shares counsel on the pursuit of a meaningful life based on his research into world philosophies, religions and sciences. 30,000 first printing.

In this brief and incisive book, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Garry Wills tells the story of the Confessions--what motivated Augustine to dictate it, how it asks to be read, and the many ways it has been misread in the one-and-a-half millennia since it was composed. Following Wills's biography of Augustine and his translation of the Confessions, this is an unparalleled introduction to one of the most important books in the Christian and Western traditions. Understandably fascinated by the story of Augustine's life, (...) modern readers have largely succumbed to the temptation to read the Confessions as autobiography. But, Wills argues, this is a mistake. The book is not autobiography but rather a long prayer, suffused with the language of Scripture and addressed to God, not man. Augustine tells the story of his life not for its own significance but in order to discern how, as a drama of sin and salvation leading to God, it fits into sacred history. "We have to read Augustine as we do Dante," Wills writes, "alert to rich layer upon layer of Scriptural and theological symbolism." Wills also addresses the long afterlife of the book, from controversy in its own time and relative neglect during the Middle Ages to a renewed prominence beginning in the fourteenth century and persisting to today, when the Confessions has become an object of interest not just for Christians but also historians, philosophers, psychiatrists, and literary critics. With unmatched clarity and skill, Wills strips away the centuries of misunderstanding that have accumulated around Augustine's spiritual classic. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Laughing at Nothing: Humor as a Response to NihilismWill SlocombeLaughing at Nothing: Humor as a Response to Nihilism, by John Marmysz. 209 pp. Albany: SUNY Press, 2003; $54.50 cloth, $17.95 paper.Nihilism has become a (relatively) more popular theme in academia in recent years. Aside from the revival of standby texts such as Goudsblom's Nihilism and Culture and Rosen's Nihilism, there has been a glut of books in areas (...) as diverse as economics (Ritzer's The Globalization of Nothing), theology (Cunningham's Genealogy of Nihilism), and theory (Clemen's The Romanticism of Contemporary Theory). John Marmysz's contribution, Laughing at Nothing, is a refreshing change inasmuch as he invites us to laugh at nihilism and, in effect, to laugh with him at much of the scholarly work on nihilism. Primarily philosophical in tone, Laughing at Nothing is an academic treatise on nihilism and humor, an exploration of contemporary American culture, and a plea for understanding in a hostile environment.Marmysz is determined, as few others are, to see a positive potential in nihilism. Although he never uncovers a "positive" nihilism, he is willing to accept the idea that nihilism may be a valuable cultural concept. In his introduction, he stresses the fact that most critics of nihilism "underplay the constructive and positive role of nihilism in both individual and collective human history" (p. 10). This book attempts to undermine such trite interpretations of nihilism; evident from his observation that, "too often scholars proceed to draw conclusions about nihilism itself on the basis of philosophies that are, in fact, very poor models" (p. 11). This is an important point, and one to which I will return.All exegeses on nihilism must include a history of the concept to orient the reader within the given intellectual milieu, and Marmysz's is no exception. Moving comfortably from late eighteenth-century debates between Friedrich Jacobi and Johann Fichte to contemporary theories by Michael Gillespie, Cornel West, Yukio Mishima, and Karen Carr, Laughing at Nothing guides the reader through the intricacies of the arguments in three brisk chapters without [End Page 449] ever sacrificing clarity. This is no mean feat given the task that Marmysz has taken upon himself: to summarize more than 200 years of history and avoid the pitfalls of saying that nihilism is an aspect of modernity is a significant achievement (and one for which I am grateful).For most readers, however, the most important part of Laughing at Nothing will be Marmysz's own definition of nihilism, which is essentially thwarted idealism: "The full impact of the problem of nihilism strikes only when an individual passionately desires ultimate meaning, value, and purpose, but believes those things to be out of reach" (pp. 84-85). There are thus two elements to a nihilistic worldview: an idealized desire for a better world coupled with a belief that this can never be realized—"the real world is denigrated in comparison to the ideal, and the ideal is believed to be hopelessly out of reach" (p. 85). This, for Marmysz, is the basis of a "nihilistic incongruity," upon which the solution—humor—is founded.After Marmysz's treatment of a history of nihilism, it is unsurprising that his discussion of humor is as accomplished, skilfully navigating theories of Kant, Freud, Bergson, and Morreall. Marmysz's treatment of "incongruous" humor is impressive, basing itself on the idea that "humor allows us to confront incongruities and, instead of being overwhelmed by them, to understand them in an unusual and original fashion" (p. 152). For this reason, humor creates "the capacity to make incongruities unthreatening and to interpret them in a manner that produces amusement" (p. 153). This is, of course, critical to avoid the potential problems of nihilistic incongruity. Through an analysis of jokes, and the application of different theories about humor, Marmysz demonstrates that the "solution" to nihilism is disarmingly simple: we must learn to laugh at ourselves. Marmysz writes: "Nihilism reminds us that humans are not gods, and that despite all our accomplishments and wonders of civilization, humans cannot alter the fact that they only possess a finite amount of mastery and control over their own destinies... (shrink)

Pascal is well known to be an early modern disciple of Augustine, but it has not always been sufficiently emphasized that Pascal’s Augustinianism differs profoundly from its source in many ways. The following essay examines his re-ordering of Augustine’s psychology and its implications for philosophy and religion in the modern period. For Augustine, intellect and will are equal moments in the activity of mens, but Pascal is radically voluntarist. For him, the will’s relation to the good radically transcends (...) intellect’s relation to being. This moves Pascal to a position closer in some respects to neo-Platonism. It also prevents him from appropriating Augustine’s claim that the triadic human mens is a created analogue of the Trinity. Pascal drops Augustine’s teaching on this point, with profound consequences for his conception of humanity’s relation to God. (shrink)

For centuries, Augustine of Hippo's writings have moved and fascinated readers. With the fresh, keen eye of a writer whose own intellectual analysis has won him a Pulitzer Prize, Garry Wills examines this famed fourth-century bishop and seminal thinker whose grounding in classical philosophy informed his influential interpretation of the Christian doctrines of mind and body, wisdom and God.Saint Augustine explores both the great ruminator on the human condition and the everyday man who set pen to parchment. It challenges many (...) misconceptions - among them those regarding his early sexual excesses. Here, for students, Christians, and voyagers into the new millennium, is a lively and incisive portrait of one who helped to shape our thought. (shrink)

Washington eludes us, even in the city named for him. Other leaders are accessible there—Lincoln brooding in square-toed rectitude at his monument, a Mathew Brady image frozen in white, throned yet approachable; Jefferson democratically exposed in John Pope’s aristocratic birdcage. Majestic, each, but graspable.Washington’s faceless monument tapers off from us however we come at it—visible everywhere, and perfect; but impersonal, uncompelling. Yet we should remember that this monument, unlike the other two, was launched by private efforts. When government energies were (...) stalled, in the 1830s, subscriptions kept the project alive. Even when Congress took over the project, stones were added by the citizenry, those memorial blocks one can study while descending the long inner stairway. The classical control of the exterior hides a varied and spontaneous interior—an image of the puzzle that faces us, the early popularity of someone lifted so high above the populace. The man we can hardly find was the icon our ancestors turned to most easily and often. We are distanced from him by their generosity, their willingness to see in him something more than human.The larger they made Washington, the less they left us to admire—until, in Horatio Greenough’s George Washington, he becomes invisible by sheer vastness. Greenough took for his model what the neoclassical period believed was the greatest statue ever created, by the greatest sculptor who ever lived—the Elean Zeus of Phidias. Since that chryselephantine wonder was no longer extant, artists had to rely on the description given by Pausanias in the Description of Greece, and on coins of Elis that celebrated the work. Here is what Pausanias had to say.The seated god is himself fashioned from gold and ivory; the garland on his head appears to be real olive shoots. In his right hand he holds a Victory, also of gold and ivory, offering a ribbon, a garland on her head. In the god’s left hand there is a scepter, encrusted with every kind of metal, and the bird on the tip is an eagle.1 1. Pausanias Description of Greece 5. 11. Garry Wills, a prize-winning author and journalist, is Henry R. Luce Professor of American Culture and Public Policy at Northwestern University. Among his many books are Nixon Agonistes , Inventing America , and The Kennedy Imprisonment . His forthcoming book, Cincinnatus: George Washington in the Englightenment, will appear in June 1984. His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry was “Critical Inquiry in Clausewitz”. (shrink)

There is a story related concerning Bertrand Russell that makes what I hope is anelegant introduction to the following paper. It is said that as a young man LordRussell, while out for a walk, became, in the course of his meditations, perfectlyconvinced of the validity of the ontological argument for the existence of God.Alas, he did not have a notebook handy and by the time he returned to his studyto write down his discovery found that he had completely lost the (...) train of thoughtwhich had led to so remarkable a conclusion . In the followingpaper I will attempt nothing so grand as the retrieval of Russell‟s lost insight. Iwill however, be attempting a recuperation of another kind. To be brief, I will beasking what the ontological argument meant to its originator, Anselm ofCanterbury, as well as how it might be significant for contemporary discussionsconcerning the so-called “negative theology.” Here I refer in particular to theongoing debate between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion to which, asMarion himself has recognized, Anselm‟s thought has a vital contribution tomake. (shrink)

As unstintingly irreligious as he was, Karl Marx was not an atheist. He was a staunch opponent of supernatural belief, yet neither did he embrace agnosticism as the position of claiming no answer to the question whether or not God exists. Rather, Marx argued that it was incoherent and pointless even to pose that very question. His irreligion is best understood not primarily as an ontological stance on the existence or nonexistence of God, but rather as part and parcel of (...) a philosophical worldview radically committed to sweeping such questions aside, to centering the human perspective ontologically and epistemologically, to overthrowing “all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicable being,” and to taking as its core principle that “man is the highest being for man.” A “religious worldview” for Marx includes not only the plainly divine, but any perspective that subordinates the value of human beings to a superior entity, operating externally to human beings and imperviously to their influence. I begin by explaining the relationship between Marx's historical materialism and his position on the existence of God. It may seem obvious how irreligion would follow from a philosophical materialist stance. I show that Marx's historical materialist irreligion, however, warrants a closer and more nuanced assessment than we might at first realize. I go on to discuss why Marx's historical materialism leads him to regard questions about the existence of God as fundamentally misguided. I then unpack the meanings of Marx's infamous statement that religion is “the opium of the people.” I conclude with a discussion of Marx's pronouncement that “the criticism of religion ends with the teaching that man is the highest being for man,” a teaching that separates mere atheism from radical irreligion. (shrink)

Roger Garaudy, the Hellenic tradition, and imaginative space.--Kazantzakis' making of God.--Existentialism and language.--The argument of water.--Literature as ikonic language.--Literature and morality.

The following paper argues that Blaise Pascal, in spite of his famous opposition between the God of the Philosophers and the God of “Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” has significant affinities with the tradition of Renaissance Platonism and is in fact a Platonist in his overall outlook. This is shown in three ways. Firstly, it is argued that Pascal’s skeptical fideism has roots in the notion of faith developed in post-Plotinian neo-Platonism. Secondly, it is argued that Pascal makes considerable use of (...) the Platonic notion of an indefinite dyadic principle. Thirdly, it is argued that Pascal’s religious psychology gives a centrality to the body that brings it close to the theurgical standpoint of figures like Iamblichus. Pascal is then contrasted to figures like Cusanus and Pico in that a dyadic principle of opposition is more prominent in his work than a triadic logic of mediation. (shrink)

K. J. Mckay includes Sappho i u in his interesting discussion of doors that open spontaneously at the advent of a god. He glides without mention over the fact that workmen are ordered to do the opening and that the workmen's task—an extensive one, justifying a use of the plural —is not simply to open the door but to increase the whole structure's height (). Later in his essay , while discussing Psalm 24, McKay remembers that the idea of gates (...) opening upward is found in Oriental literature, not in Greek. It is odd that, three pages earlier, he forgot to apply this information to Sappho. (shrink)

K. J. Mckay includes Sappho i u in his interesting discussion of doors that open spontaneously at the advent of a god. He glides without mention over the fact that workmen are ordered to do the opening and that the workmen's task—an extensive one, justifying a use of the plural —is not simply to open the door but to increase the whole structure's height (). Later in his essay, while discussing Psalm 24, McKay remembers that the idea of gates opening (...) upward is found in Oriental literature, not in Greek. It is odd that, three pages earlier, he forgot to apply this information to Sappho. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Ho, Ho, History Arius and Theological Controversy The Council of Nicaea – a Jolly Occasion Float like an Acolyte, Sting like the See Does Theology Really Matter? Here Comes Santa Claus – into the Twenty‐First Century The Nicholas of History and the Santa of Faith?

Maurice Merleau-Ponty claims that we as body-subjects have an immediate sensational understanding of the world. A body that perceives and experience the world before any thought and word can render it. The words we use describing sensations are interpretations of sense-experiences, and will never render the total bodily understanding of the world. This article gives a brief insight of what an understanding of Merleau-Ponty’s body-subject implies for the researcher in body-phenomenological studies of toddlers.

Strikingly different approaches to the question of whether God wills evil are evident when one compares Aquinas’s account of evil with theodicies developd by prominent contemporary philosophers of religion. Aquinas, along with most medieval philosophers, insists that God does not will moral evil. But a number of contemporary Christian philosophers seem to set aside this traditional understanding of God’s rectitude. Consider Alvin Plantinga’s justly celebrated free-will defense. Unlike many contemporary philosophers who focus almost exclusively on human and animal (...) suffering, Plantinga recognizes that the problem of moral evil must be confronted. Nevertheless, nothing in his defense makes it impermissible for God to will moral evil. And a patch on the defense which stipulates such action as impermissible will appear to be just what it is: ad hoc, and not of a piece with the original defense. For Plantinga’s sense that what counts in grading a world is the ratio of moral good to moral evil does not easily accommodate the imagined revision. Or consider Eleonore Stump’s position that when a person’s evil desires flag, from fatigue or even from the sudden appearance of a revulsion towards the evil, God may intervene to harden the person’s heart and strengthen his evil desires. On her account, it seems, God may directly will moral evil for the sake of some greater good. (shrink)

A divine approval theory in ethics may be construed as one of a class of subjective-reaction theories, those which hold that the rightness or wrongness of actions is constituted by the response to these actions (e.g., approval or disapproval) on the part of some person or persons, actual or ideal. There are peculiar difficulties connected with a divine approval theory, arising from God's omnipotence. But waiving difficulties which apply especially or peculiarly to a divine approval account, we can see by (...) a simple argument that the entire set of subjective-reaction theories is subject to the logical difficulty that taking attitudes as definitive or otherwise constitutive of ethical value is self-defeating. (shrink)

A divine approval theory in ethics may be construed as one of a class of subjective-reaction theories, those which hold that the rightness or wrongness of actions is constituted by the response to these actions (e.g., approval or disapproval) on the part of some person or persons, actual or ideal. There are peculiar difficulties connected with a divine approval theory, arising from God's omnipotence. But waiving difficulties which apply especially or peculiarly to a divine approval account, we can see by (...) a simple argument that the entire set of subjective-reaction theories is subject to the logical difficulty that taking attitudes as definitive or otherwise constitutive of ethical value is self-defeating. (shrink)

Within the pantheon of the great television series of recent decades, "The Wire" (D. Simon & E. Burns, HBO, 2002-2006) undoubtedly occupies a prominent place for critics and audiences. “The Wire”, disguised as a police thriller, is a serial story that stands out for its cyclical structure, tragic archetypes and a choral look that makes the difference from the rest of current television content. Three characteristics (the corality, the tragedy, and the cyclical time) that make up the essence of Greek (...) theater. And as soon as we start analyzing The Wire we see what is hidden in the characters and plots of one of the most prestigious series in history owe their essence to the cosmogony and Greek mythology, the root of all our culture. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie Jahrgang: 58 Heft: 4 Seiten: 505-524.

Thomas Aquinas thinks, in agreement with Cicero and Aristotle, that friends typically will the same things. If this is so, how can we, given our very imperfect knowledge of God’s will, be His friends? I argue that for Aquinas, when we are unable to grasp any goodness in the object of God’s will, friendship does not require from us to will what we know God wills. Willing what God wills without grasping the goodness present in the (...) willed thing—would that be at all possible—fails to increase our likeness to God and harms, rather than contributes to friendship. Aquinas does not drop conformity of wills as a requirement of friendship but believes that we should not aspire to more conformity of wills than it is humanly possible to achieve. (shrink)

In The Existence of God Richard Swinburne argues that ‘if there is a God, any experience which seems to be of God, will be genuine – will be of God.’ On the face of it this claim of the essential veridicality of any religious experience, given the existence of God, is incredible. Consider what is being claimed by looking at a particularly dramatic example – but one that is well within the purview of Swinburne's claim. The ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ (...) who murdered at least thirteen women, claimed to hear voices telling him to kill. He took these voices to be divine. While it is easy enough to suspect the killer's sanity, it is not so easy to doubt his sincerity. Yet since Swinburne claims that God probably exists, he is committed to the view that the Ripper had a series of genuine religious experiences – so much for the arduous preparations sometime taken as necessary for a ‘vision’ of God. (shrink)

In The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture, Yoram Hazony suggests that it is part of Rabbinic tradition that in the Akedah, Abraham never intended to sacrifice Isaac. In a recent paper, Sam Lebens argued that in making this claim, Hazony is misrepresenting Rabbinic tradition. In this paper, I show that Hazony can concede to Lebens’s argument and still have something interesting to say about the Akedah, namely, that it provides an opportunity to reflect on what might happen when a ‘Shepherd’ is (...) commanded by God to violate what they understand to be a principle of natural law. (shrink)

This book analyzes the main problems of Friedrich Nietzsche's critical philosophy, such as the theory of being, the theory of knowledge and the theory of values. It also addresses his positive program which is based on a number of fundamental conceptions, namely the will to power, the Übermensch, bestowing virtue and the notion of the eternal recurrence. The «death of God» must, in Nietzsche's opinion, lead to a revolution in human consciousness which requires the creation of a new frame (...) of reference for values. To realize this aim, Nietzsche invokes the will which has the normative power to create values and even to overcome time. The author sets his focus on the «tragic gay science» that has never been fully elucidated and still affords new perspectives for interpretation. (shrink)

"This book focuses on arguments from suffering against the existence of God and on a variety of issues concerning agency and value that they bring out. The central aim is to show the extent and power of arguments from evil. The book provides a close investigation of an under-defended claim at the heart of the major free-will-based responses to such arguments, namely that free will is sufficiently valuable to serve as the good, or prominently among the goods, that (...) provides a God-justifying reason for permitting evil in our world. Offering a fresh examination of traditional theodicies, it also develops an alternative line the author calls a divine intimacy theodicy. It makes an extended case for rejection of the position of skeptical theism. The book expands upon an argument from evil concerning a traditional doctrine of hell, which reveals a number of interesting issues concerning fault, agency, and blameworthiness. In response to recent work contending that the problem of evil is defanged since God's baseline attitude toward human beings is indifference, the book defends the essential perfect moral goodness of God. Finally it takes up the question of whether or not it makes sense to live a religious life as an agnostic or as an atheist"--. (shrink)

God, free will, and time: the free will offense part II Content Type Journal Article Category Article Pages 1-10 DOI 10.1007/s11153-011-9328-z Authors J. L. Schellenberg, Mount Saint Vincent University, 166 Bedford Highway, Halifax, NS B3M2J6, Canada Journal International Journal for Philosophy of Religion Online ISSN 1572-8684 Print ISSN 0020-7047.

In _Did God Care?_ Dylan Burns offers the first comprehensive survey of providence in ancient philosophy, from Plato to Plotinus, that takes into full account the importance and innovations of early Christian thinkers, including Coptic Gnostic and Syriac sources.

In a recent book and article, James Sterba has argued that there is no free will defense. It is the purpose of this article to show that, in the most technical sense, he is wrong. There is a version of the free will defense that can solve what Sterba (rightly) takes to be the most interesting and severe version of the logical problem of moral evil. However, I will also argue that, in effect (or, we might say, (...) in practice), Sterba is correct. The only working version of the free will defense requires embracing a view that entails consequences theists traditionally have not and cannot accept. Consequently, the one and only free will solution is not viable. Unless some other solution can be found (Sterba argues there is none), the logical problem of evil, as Sterba understands it, either commits one to atheism, or a version of theism that practically all theists would regard as a heresy. (shrink)

This essay considers what the logical implications for God's free will would be if God possessed the characteristics that he is often said to have, such as Immutability. If God does not have free will it undermines the Free Will Defense for the Problem of Evil and the case for free will generally. Those who believe in human free will often believe that it exists because humans possess an immaterial soul; however, if God does not (...) have free will then the religious case for free will is weakened. (shrink)

I argue that God could give us the robust power to do other than we do in a deterministic universe.

In this paper we will give a critical account of Plantinga’s well-known argument to the effect that the existence of an omnipotent and morally perfect God is consistent with the actual presence of evil. After presenting Plantinga’s view, we critically discuss both the idea of divine knowledge of conditionals of freedom and the concept of transworld depravity. Then, we will sketch our own version of the Free-Will Defence, which maintains that moral evil depends on the misuse of (...) human freedom. However, our argument does not hinge on problematic metaphysical assumptions, but depends only on a certain definition of a free act and a particular interpretation of divine omniscience. (shrink)

God’s Willing Knowledge argued that Scotus should be seen as offering a non-libertarian view of freedom. Some critics of this interpretation point to Scotus’s texts that offer a synchronic view of possibility, which is seen as necessarily implying a libertarian view. Other critics point to the debt that Scotus owes to his libertarian predecessors and argue that Scotus follows their view. In order to address these critics, in the first section of the paper, some of the thinkers Scotus draws upon (...) or reacts to in forming his views about freedom are examined. It turns out that Scotus’s non-libertarian view of freedom as it relates to divine omniscience is rather typical of medieval views. In the subsequent sections of the paper, Scotus’s texts are examined to show his non-libertarian views. Moreover, various criticisms offered against the argument of God’s Willing Knowledge are answered. (shrink)

This book argues that Kierkegaard, influenced by Kant's critique of metaphysics, did not attempt to integrate human and divine agencies in any speculative theory. Instead, Kierkegaard deploys them to encourage different passions and dispositions that can be integrated in a coherent human life.

Why would God create a world at all? Further, why would God create a world like this one? The Neoplatonic framework of classical philosophical theology answers that God’s willing is an affirmation of God’s own goodness, and God creates to show forth God’s glory. Mark Johnston has recently argued that, in addition to explaining why God would create at all, this framework gives extremely wide scope to divine freedom. Timothy O’Connor objects that divine freedom, on this view, cannot be so (...) wide as Johnston supposes: the creation of a fundamentally unjust world, for instance, could not be a way of affirming the divine goodness. I argue that O’Connor does not go far enough. While the Neoplatonic framework helps to explain why God would create at all, it does nothing to secure God’s freedom to create less than the best. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Did God Deprive Pharaoh of Free Will?Don LeviWhen Pharaoh was reeling from certain later plagues he agreed to free the Israelites. But each time after the plague stopped, God stiffened Pharaoh's heart, and he refused to let them go. Since it was God who did it, Pharaoh had to refuse to release the Israelites; he could not have let them go. So, he was deprived of free (...) class='Hi'>will by God.In this article I question this reasoning. I question whether we can conclude from the fact that God did it that Pharaoh could not release them; and from the fact that Pharaoh could not release them, that he did not have free will. I also question whether it is possible to understand what the free will is that God is supposed to have given to all of us and taken from Pharaoh.IThe Exodus is the story of how the Israelites escaped from slavery and constituted themselves as a people. "I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage" (Exodus 20.2).1 This is how God introduces the Ten Commandments: He is the One who led the Israelites out of Egypt; they are the people whom He freed.The stiffening motif underscores how much more powerful God is than Pharaoh. God tells Moses that Pharaoh will let the Israelites go "only because of a greater might" (3.19), and Pharaoh, replies: "Who is the Lord that I should heed Him and let Israel go?" (5.2). That God is by far the more powerful is underscored by having God say that He will "stiffen Pharaoh's heart so that he will not let the people go" (4.21), and by having Him do so, in the cases of several later plagues. After [End Page 58] each plague Pharaoh agrees to release them, only to change his mind when the plague lifted (or, in the case of the final one, when he has released the Israelites), either because he or God stiffened his heart. The disastrous consequences of these reversals reveal him to be concerned with his status as a god-king rather than with the welfare of his people. The motif is part of the developing argument in the Tanakh for a state ruled, not by a Pharaoh or king, but by God and His laws, as transmitted by His prophet, Moses.The problem of whether God deprived Pharaoh of free will by stiffening his heart is a version of the Problem of Evil, albeit with a focus on what God did, not what He did not do. And this focus on God's apparent misbehavior is not an isolated phenomenon. As Kaufman points out, "The Bible ascribes to God actions that, to our way of thinking, lack moral grounds, or even run counter to our moral sense. Indeed, at times they seem to reflect a ruthless, capricious, demonic being."2 To make God more powerful than Pharaoh the text seems to make God too much like Pharaoh.A different understanding of the story arises if we think of the Israelites as its audience, and if we remind ourselves that it is a stage in their developing relationship with God. As Kaufman explains it, the things said about God in the Exodus story as well as elsewhere "express in their own way boundless adoration and reverence of the One" (Religion, p. 75). Later, the Israelites may find different ways of expressing that adoration and reverence. However, what Kaufman is saying is that by making God's behavior towards Pharaoh seem supramoral and demonic, the Torah really is finding a way to express its awe of Him.Nevertheless, in what follows we will try to understand the text as telling us about God, independently of that developing relationship. We will confine our attention to the question of how God's actions deprived Pharaoh of free will. Is that what stiffening someone's heart does; or is it the fact that God did the stiffening? What is interesting is that those who have tried to offer solutions to the problem do not try to answer these questions... (shrink)

Contrary to John Bramhall and critics like him, Thomas Hobbes takes the view that no account of liberty or freedom can serve as the relevant basis on which to distinguish moral from nonmoral agents or explains the basis on which an agent becomes subject to law and liable to punishment. The correct compatibilist strategy rests, on Hobbes’s account, with a proper appreciation and description of the contractualist features that shape and structure the moral community. From this perspective human agents may (...) indeed use their liberty to make themselves moral agents. In doing this, however, they are not employing a distinct kind of liberty but rather using a liberty that they share with animals and other nonmoral agents to perform a distinct kind of act (i.e., consent) whereby they become moral agents subject to law and any punishments that are required to enforce it. ____ -/- Originally published in the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy in Early Modern Europe - eds. D. Clarke & C. Wilson, OUP 2011 -/- Republished in Recasting Hume and Early Modern Philosophy: Selected Essays - OUP 2021: Paul Russell]. (shrink)

The author critically examines and rejects alvin plantinga's defense of the free will theodicy, As presented in chapter six of plantinga's "god and other minds". If the author's arguments are correct, Then any attempt on the part of the rational apologist to explain evil by reference to man's free will must be considered futile. Since the arguments presented will be seen as supporting natural atheology (which, For plantinga, Is "the attempt...To show that, Given what we know, It (...) is impossible or unlikely that God exists"), The article ends with the claim that both rational apologetics and natural atheology are conceptually confused, And that this confusion can be traced to their failure to understand the nature of religious belief. (shrink)

The Free Will Defence , as we shall understand it here, is an attempt to show that God exists and he is omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good is logically consistent with There is moral evil in the actual world.