Update!!! (Finally...)

Wow, it's been a long time since I've blogged on here - about three years! That's what happens when you have two more kids come along and finish off your dissertation! So, update on what's happened since the last post:

October 3-4 2008: I participated in the first Midwest Philosophy and Theology Conference at Lincoln University and met some awesome people there in the process. My paper was entitled "A Mea Culpa for the Felix Culpa?: A Greater Goods Response to the Problems of Evil and Hell" and was an exploration of theodicy or defense without appealing to libertarian freedom (although, as I indicate at the end of the paper, I think the best theodicy or defense will probably need to combine these approaches in some way). The proceedings can be found here. I recommend Anderson and Lim's papers, which were very interesting.

Just a couple weeks later: new baby!!!

Spring 2009: Pacific APA in Vancouver. I gave an abridged version of half of one of my dissertation chapters. For the abstract, along with those of the rest of the meeting, see here.

March 2009: Move to the Bay Area.

Fall 2009: Finish dissertation! Time, Tense, and Mind: A Case Study in Metaphysics and Perspectival Representation is all done! Now if only I could get a job...

Spring 2010: Nope, instead, I get into the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley in their Masters of Biblical Languages Program (since the only logical thing after not being able to find employment is go back for another degree...). As a master's student, I am affiliated with one of the GTU's member schools, so my choice is the DSPT (Dominican School for Philosophy and Theology) - which is interesting since I'm not Roman Catholic - with Sister Barbara Green as my adviser.

Fall 2010: Start my new program. That's about where I am now. I'll post some more new stuff as I'm able (we had yet another baby in March!).

Graduate Conference on Essentialism

Well, blogging will probably be light for a while (in case you couldn't tell already!) - with dissertation work and job applications all in the mix, it's a wonder I ever find time to do anything else. That means putting a lot of future blog posts on the backburner as I try to finish up here at Davis and move on to the next stage of my career. The next few months will be extremely busy as I get application materials together, teach three sessions of phil religion and exegetical stuff at FBC, give a paper at the Midwest Philosophy and Theology Conference, TA for Minds, Brains and Computers here at Davis, work on chapter 4 of my dissertation, and so on. Already it's been busy. Last weekend we had a Graduate Conference on Essentialism here at Davis, organized by our very own Dana Goswick. It was a really fun time and I got to meet and have interesting discussions with some cool people from out of town (as well as some new incoming Davis grad students). I was a commentator for Melissa Ebbers' paper on Chalmers 2D argument against materialism. We also had some interesting papers concerning vague composition, quantifier variance, and other cool topics. The free food was pretty nice too!

BSD 2008

I just got back from the 2008 Berkeley-Standford-Davis Graduate Student Conference in Philosophy and it was a lot of fun (we here at Davis were the hosts this year). Unfortunately, I only got to go to talks in the morning sessions, but I did get to hang out at dinner and 'talk shop'. During the first session I commented on Patrick Todd's paper "Freedom, Presentism, and Truth Supervenes on Being". His paper was showing how the principle of the open future (OF) for the presentist was incompatible with the conjunction of truth supervening on being (TSB) and future semantic settledness (FSS). In my comments I argued that, as formulated, OF was directly incompatible with TSB. During discussion time, Patrick and I talked a little about how to amend the formulation of OF so that he wouldn't get that result. I think we came up with relatively similar strategies for how the revision would go. It was a good paper and Patrick's a cool guy - it was nice talking with him. It's nice to be around people who like both metaphysics and philosophy of religion stuff! (Not too many of those hereabouts)

During the second session, our own Jonathan Dorsey argued that our conception of the physical should not include a constraint against fundamental mentality (hence the title of the paper, 'Against the No Fundamental Mentality Constraint'). I was a bit weary at first, but the argument's growing on me.

Overall, it was a pretty good time.

BSD Conference

Saturday I attended the annual Berkeley-Stanford-Davis Graduate Conference in Philosophy which was held this year on the Berkeley campus. It was nice to see my alma mater again. Anyway, I attended a few interesting talks. One of them, of course, was my own. :)

The title of my paper was "The Modal and Temporal Problems from Concern". The basic idea was that certain theories of modality (necessity and possibility) as well as certain theories of time and persistence across time all have a similar problem in that they interpret the modal and temporal facts of reality in such a way that we would have no good reason to care for such facts and such facts could give us no good reasons to act in the ways we ordinarily think such facts justify us in doing so. So for instance, the theory of presentism says that the past and future do not exist - they are not real. So in order to give future tensed or past tensed statements the right truth-values, they have to interpret "past" facts or "future" facts as really facts about the present time. Ordinarily, we would take the past fact that, say, I committed some heinous act as a giving us good reason to punish me or blame me, etc. But, (I will leave the specific details of the paper aside) the sorts of facts the presentist identifies with such a past fact cannot do that - it cannot give us any reason at all for punishing me or otherwise holding me responsible for my past action. After all, on the presentist view, there is no such thing as my past heinous action to blame me for in the first place.

I got some good feedback from others at the conference. Mostly what came out was that I had forgotten to make explicit a few things in the paper, which I will soon remedy (that's what conferences are for, after all!). All in all, it was a good time.

Report on the APA

Sorry about the lack of blogging lately - I've been in the Bay Area at the annual Pacific Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association. It was kinda cool seeing all these famous people and not knowing they were famous people until someone called them by name. Anyway, I caught the first two sessions of the second and last day of the Mini-Conference on Models of God and it was semi-interesting. I sat in for the first session on open theism, which was interesting. Alan Rhoda made the good point, which I had not considered before, that an open theist might take the point of view that the future is settled in the sense that every meaningful statement about the future is either determinately true or determinately false. This sort of open theist, by stating that God does not know all future contingents, denies that God knows everything - there are truths about the future that God just doesn't know. I think that's not a very plausible position to take, if not incoherent, but it's a point well-taken that this sort of position would also count as an open theist position.

Another panelist made the claim that a lot of the debaters in the controversy over open theism are simply evaluating things based on differing values or ordering of values. For instance, non-open theists think that a God who takes risks is somehow less than God - it is not befitting of God or his greatness. Open theists respond that, on the contrary, a God who doesn't is somehow less than God - it is not befitting of God or his greatness to constrain people. This clearly seems to be a disagreement about values at the fundamental level - if you start with grandeur then you're not likely to be an open theist whereas if you start with love and self-sacrifice you are more likely to be one. While much of this debate may be like this, however, I think a lot of it is not. Whether open theism can do justice to biblical prophecy, biblical teaching on God's knowledge and control, whether it can provide a coherent or plausible view of time and God, and so on are not subjects in which values mainly come to the fore - these are primarily exegetical and metaphysical issues.

Another one of the panelists reported and agreed with the writings of some open theist scholar to the effect that the development of the doctrine of the Trinity, far from being influenced by or a product of Greek philosophical thought as is sometimes claimed, was actually a reaction to such influence. According to this viewpoint, Arius and other heterodox thinkers, influenced by Greek ideas of the kinds of gulfs between human and divine and oneness and simplicity, etc., objected to the deity of Christ and the doctrine of the Trinity was an attempt to resist what was thought to be an effort to squeeze the Divine Persons into the procrustean bed built for it by Greek thought and sensibilities. He also claimed, however, that Trinitarianism was the answer to the anti-open theism of the day and that reflection on the Trinity demands open theism. This move, however, was vastly unclear and I really have no idea how one is supposed to get from Trinity to God not knowing future contingents - this was quite a leap.

I also saw the panel on panentheism but this was pretty unclear and boring (at least to me). The first speaker was not a native speaker and unfortunately I wasn't able to clearly make out a lot of what he said because the accent was so thick. So I wasn't quite sure what his paper was about and he wasn't quite sure what was going on when audience members asked questions, which was too bad. Panentheism (for those who don't know) is, by the way, the view that God includes the world in himself. God is more than the world, but the world is not a separate being from God even though God and the world are different entities. The basic metaphor of many panentheists is that the world is "God's body" in some weird sense. I'm not sure about the whole "God's body" thing - which is pretty weird - but something like panentheism used to be highly attractive to me. I think an adequate theory of God ought to take on the kernel of truth in panentheism but jettison the whole "God's body" business and treating the physical world as if it was a literal proper part of God.

In the remainder of the conference, I went to a lot of talks. A lot were hard for me to follow and I didn't get much out of them - this was most of the time due to lack of sleep, my generally poor attention span even under normal conditions, being too far in the back or unable to see the speaker well, etc. A few of the ones of note from Thursday and Friday: David Papineau argued that identity theorists must not really fully believe mind-brain identity since even to them the association seems contingent. If they really fully believed it, this wouldn't even appear contingent to them. David Chalmers noted that in a substantive dispute, the terminological dispute associated with the dispute is due to the dispute itself whereas in a merely terminological dispute the order of dependency is reversed. Chalmers gave a heuristic for uncovering merely terminological disputes: disallow the offending the word and make each party rephrase their position without it. If the respective rephrasings do not conflict, this is a merely terminological dispute. If they do, then it isn't. Some words, however, cannot be so eliminated. Chalmers dubs these "bedrock" and debates involving these words are probably going to be substantive rather than merely terminological since there are no more basic words in which to frame the disagreement and display the lack of substantive disagreement.

On Saturday morning, I commented on Stephan Torre's paper "In Defense of a Formulation of the Date Theory" (I think I got that title about right). It went pretty well. I'll have to keep in touch with Stephan since we have some similar projects in trying to defend a tenseless view of time. The last time session of Saturday was on a paper attempting to show that our temporal biases in our concern for others is conflicted and irrational. Our very own Cody Gilmore commented on the paper and argued against the thesis. During the discussion period, I offered some objections of my own. At a session on perception later that day, all I remember is that the idea of a Spinozistic system was introduced. In a Spinozistic system (perhaps perception is one of these as is testimony), this system directly gives us a belief which we only afterwards evaluate and decide whether to reject it or keep it. This nicely explains how brainwashing and cult indoctrination works - keep telling people stuff often enough and don't give them the opportunity or ability to evaluate or decide for themselves whether to keep such beliefs and they will keep them by default.

At the Society for the Philosophy of Time group meeting Saturday night, Cody presented the idea of a new theory of persistence - distension theory. According to this theory, objects wholly occupy temporally thick regions of spacetime where the thickness is determined by size, complexity, and kind. This is a pretty interesting view, and congenial to me in various ways. It's definitely better than endurantism, I think, but I'll have to think more about how it compares with perdurantism.

This coming Saturday - another conference in the Bay Area...