23 found
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  1.  48
    Time Biases: A Theory of Rational Planning and Personal Persistence.Meghan Sullivan - 2018 - Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
    Should you care less about your distant future? What about events in your life that have already happened? How should the passage of time affect your planning and assessment of your life? Most of us think it is irrational to ignore the future but harmless to dismiss the past. But this book argues that rationality requires temporal neutrality.
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  2. Against Time Bias.Preston Greene & Meghan Sullivan - 2015 - Ethics 125 (4):947-970.
    Most of us display a bias toward the near: we prefer pleasurable experiences to be in our near future and painful experiences to be in our distant future. We also display a bias toward the future: we prefer pleasurable experiences to be in our future and painful experiences to be in our past. While philosophers have tended to think that near bias is a rational defect, almost no one finds future bias objectionable. In this essay, we argue that this hybrid (...)
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  3. Metaphysics.Peter Van Inwagen, Meghan Sullivan & Sara Bernstein - 2023 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  4. The Minimal A-theory.Meghan Sullivan - 2012 - Philosophical Studies 158 (2):149-174.
    Timothy Williamson thinks that every object is a necessary, eternal existent. In defense of his view, Williamson appeals primarily to considerations from modal and tense logic. While I am uncertain about his modal claims, I think there are good metaphysical reasons to believe permanentism: the principle that everything always exists. B-theorists of time and change have long denied that objects change with respect to unqualified existence. But aside from Williamson, nearly all A-theorists defend temporaryism: the principle that there are temporary (...)
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  5. Change We Can Believe In (and Assert).Meghan Sullivan - 2012 - Noûs 48 (3):474-495.
  6. Problems for Temporary Existence in Tense Logic.Meghan Sullivan - 2012 - Philosophy Compass 7 (1):43-57.
    A‐theorists of time postulate a deep distinction between the present, past and future. Settling on an appropriate logic for such a view is no easy matter. This Philosophy Compass article describes one of the most vexing formal problems facing A‐theorists. It is commonly thought that A‐theories can only be formally expressed in a tense logic: a logic with operators like P and F . And it seems natural to think that we live in a world where objects come to exist (...)
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  7. An A-theory without tense operators.Meghan Sullivan - 2016 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 46 (4-5):735-758.
    A-theorists think there is a fundamental difference between the present and other times. This concern shows up in what kinds of properties they take to be instantiated, what objects they think exist and how they formalize their views. Nearly every contemporary A-theorist assumes that her metaphysics requires a tense logic – a logic with operators like and. In this paper, I show that there is at least one viable A-theory that does not require a logic with tense operators. And I (...)
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  8. Yet Another “Epicurean” Argument.Peter Finocchiaro & Meghan Sullivan - 2016 - Philosophical Perspectives 30 (1):135-159.
    In this paper, we develop a novel version of the so-called Lucretian symmetry argument against the badness of death. Our argument has two features that make it particularly effective. First, it focuses on the preferences of rational agents. We believe the focus on preferences eliminates needless complications and emphasizes the urgency to respond to the argument. Second, our argument utilizes a principle that states that a rational agent's preferences should not vary in arbitrary ways. We argue that this principle underlies (...)
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  9. Modal Logic as Methodology.Meghan Sullivan - 2014 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 88 (3):734-743.
  10.  94
    The A-theory: A Theory.Meghan Sullivan - 2011 - Dissertation, Rutgers University - New Brunswick
    A-theories of time postulate a fundamental distinction between the present and other times. This distinction manifests in what A-theorists take to exist, their accounts of property change, and their views about the appropriate temporal logic. In this dissertation, I argue for a particular formulation of the A-theory that dispenses with change in existence and makes tense operators an optional formal tool for expressing the key theses. I call my view the minimal A-theory. The first chapter introduces the debate. The second (...)
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  11.  72
    Personal Volatility.Meghan Sullivan - 2017 - Philosophical Issues 27 (1):343-363.
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  12. (1 other version)Semantics for Blasphemy.Meghan Sullivan - 2010 - In Jonathan L. Kvanvig (ed.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion Volume. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Use of divine names is strictly regulated in the three Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Unlike most ordinary names, “God,” “Jesus,” and “Allah,” have a particular moral significance for the faithful. Misuse of the names constitutes a form of blasphemy—a sin. Tomes have been written about the origin of holy names in these traditions and the role that they play in devotional practices. I have no such grand theological ambitions here. Instead, in this short essay I will raise a (...)
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  13.  70
    Philosophy as a Way of Life.Meghan Sullivan - 2023 - Ethics 133 (4):587-609.
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  14.  15
    Peter Van Inwagen's Defense.Meghan Sullivan - 2014 - In Justin P. McBrayer & Daniel Howard-Snyder (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to The Problem of Evil. Wiley. pp. 396–410.
    This chapter presents Peter van Inwagen's defense to the local argument from evil. According to van Inwagen, God may have been required to allow at least some contingent pointless evils because he faced a kind of sorites problem in deciding which world to create. This response stands in contrast to the more common strategy – skepticism about our ability to detect contingent pointless evils. The chapter unpacks van Inwagen's proposed explanation of pointless evils, surveys and responds to three objections, and (...)
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  15. What Matters in Psychological Continuity? Using Meditative Traditions to Identify Biases in Intuitions about Personal Persistence.Preston Greene & Meghan Sullivan - 2022 - In Kevin Tobia (ed.), Experimental Philosophy of Identity and the Self. London: Bloomsbury.
  16.  52
    Scheduling Deliberation.Meghan Sullivan - 2023 - Philosophical Perspectives 36 (1):329-344.
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  17. The Irrelevance of Essence.Meghan Sullivan - 2015 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 91 (2):499-507.
  18. Objective Becoming.Meghan Sullivan - 2018 - Philosophical Review 127 (3):418-422.
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  19. Boring Ontological Realism.Meghan Sullivan - 2017 - Res Philosophica 94 (3):399-413.
    Boring ontological realists hold that objects exist at times and persist over time without having substantive essences. Boring realism is a consequence of the minimal A-theory of time and the most sensible formulations of necessitism. This kind of realism is at odds with a ubiquitous realist thesis, which I call the persistenceessence link. This essay surveys some examples of the persistence-essence link and argues that it is best understood as a thesis about grounding. If we understand the link in terms (...)
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  20.  41
    Metaphysics as Mish-Mash.Meghan Sullivan - 2016 - The Philosophers' Magazine 74:82-85.
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  21.  80
    Teaching & Learning Guide for: Problems with Temporary Existence in Tense Logic.Meghan Sullivan - 2012 - Philosophy Compass 7 (4):290-292.
    Over the past century, there has been considerable debate over whether and how anything changes with respect to existence. Most A‐theorists of time (presentists, growing block theorists, and branch theorists) think things come to exist or cease to exist. B‐theorists of time (four‐dimensionalists, in particular) think objects do not change with respect to existence. In my Compass article, I outline a serious difficulty that A‐theorists face in trying to reason about temporary existents. The most straightforward logics for time and existence (...)
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  22.  20
    Public Conversion, Private Reason, and Institutional Crisis.Meghan Sullivan - 2018 - Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 92:87-98.
    Following the 2018 Pennsylvania grand jury report, which detailed the sexual abuse of clergy members, many have questioned the value of personal institutional commitment to the Catholic Church, preferring instead more individualistic expressions of faith. Alongside the sex abuse crisis, the age of free information makes the Church’s epistemology appear antiquated. This article explores the individualistic versus community-based practice of Catholicism, drawing a distinction between private conversion versus public conversion. The article offers a defense of public conversion, arguing it explains (...)
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  23.  12
    The good life method: reasoning through the big questions of happiness, faith, and meaning.Meghan Sullivan - 2022 - New York: Penguin Press. Edited by Paul Leonard Blaschko.
    Notre Dame Philosophy professors Meghan Sullivan and Paul Blaschko have gone deep with that work in their wildly popular and influential undergraduate course GOD AND THE GOOD LIFE, in which they wrestle with the big questions about how to live and what makes life meaningful. Now they invite us into the classroom to tackle such issues as what justifies your beliefs, whether you should practice a religion, and what sacrifices you should make for others--as well as to investigate what Aristotle, (...)
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