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Articles 1 - 7 of 7
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Infinite Power And Finite Powers, Kenneth L. Pearce
Infinite Power And Finite Powers, Kenneth L. Pearce
Kenneth L Pearce
No abstract provided.
Berkeley's Philosophy Of Religion, Kenneth L. Pearce
Berkeley's Philosophy Of Religion, Kenneth L. Pearce
Kenneth L Pearce
Traditionally, religious doctrines and practices have been divided into two categories. Those that purport to be justified by natural reason alone are said to be part of natural religion, while those which purport to be justified only by appeal to supernatural revelation are said to be part of revealed religion. One of the central aims of Berkeley's philosophy is to understand and defend both the doctrines and the practices of both natural and revealed (Christian) religion. This chapter will provide a survey of this aspect of Berkeley's thought.
Language And The Structure Of Berkeley's World, Kenneth L. Pearce
Language And The Structure Of Berkeley's World, Kenneth L. Pearce
Kenneth L Pearce
Berkeley's philosophy is meant to be a defense of commonsense. However, Berkeley's claim that the ultimate constituents of physical reality are fleeting, causally passive ideas appears to be radically at odds with commonsense. In particular, such a theory seems unable to account for the robust structure which commonsense (and Newtonian physics) takes the world to exhibit. The problem of structure, as I understand it, includes the problem of how qualities can be grouped by their co-occurrence in a single enduring object and how these enduring objects can bear spatiotemporal, causal, and other relations to one another. I argue that Berkeley's …
Review Of The Puzzle Of Existence: Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?, Kenneth L. Pearce
Review Of The Puzzle Of Existence: Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?, Kenneth L. Pearce
Kenneth L Pearce
No abstract provided.
Understanding Omnipotence, Kenneth L. Pearce, Alexander R. Pruss
Understanding Omnipotence, Kenneth L. Pearce, Alexander R. Pruss
Kenneth L Pearce
An omnipotent being would be a being whose power was unlimited. The power of human beings is limited in two distinct ways: we are limited with respect to our freedom of will, and we are limited in our ability to execute what we have willed. These two distinct sources of limitation suggest a simple definition of omnipotence: an omnipotent being is one that has both perfect freedom of will and perfect efficacy of will. In this paper we further explicate this definition and show that it escapes the standard objections to divine omnipotence.
Thomas Reid On Character And Freedom, Kenneth L. Pearce
Thomas Reid On Character And Freedom, Kenneth L. Pearce
Kenneth L Pearce
According to Thomas Reid, an agent cannot be free unless she has the power to do otherwise. This claim is usually interpreted as a version of the Principle of Alternate Possibilities. Against this interpretation, I argue that Reid is committed to the seemingly paradoxical position that an agent may have the power to do otherwise despite the fact that it is impossible that she do otherwise. Reid's claim about the power to do otherwise does not, therefore, entail the Principle of Alternate Possibilities. When it is an agent's character that deprives her of alternate possibilities, she is not thereby deprived …
The Semantics Of Sense Perception In Berkeley, Kenneth L. Pearce
The Semantics Of Sense Perception In Berkeley, Kenneth L. Pearce
Kenneth L Pearce
George Berkeley's linguistic account of sense perception is one of the most central tenets of his philosophy. It is intended as a solution to a wide range of critical issues in both metaphysics and theology. However, it is not clear from Berkeley's writings just how this ‘universal language of the Author of Nature’ is to be interpreted. This paper discusses the nature of the theory of sense perception as language, together with its metaphysical and theological motivations, then proceeds to develop an account of the semantics of the perceptual language, using Berkeley's theory of reference for human language as a …