Naturalism is standardly defended by explanatory comparison or by deference to the sciences. The first route cannot win the case for naturalism, since the theoretical virtues are claimed by both sides; the second changes the subject. I defend a third route. If the natural totality is closed, so that nothing outside it grounds or explains it, and is rich enough to contain inquirers who pose questions about it as a totality, then certain forms of structured unanswerability are to be expected, and the canonical limit-questions exemplify them. I distinguish three forms. Two rest on results that are theorems given their premises; the third is conditional on a structural feature of the relevant order, and I price the difference. Classical explanatory theism treats the same questions as answerable by a transcendent ground, and its candidate answers land on the foreclosed positions. I argue that the theist cannot absorb Closure without cost: either God is the outside that answers the questions, in which case the theist predicts answers and the questions are unanswered, or God is within a closed reality, in which case the theist must restrict what God explains to the contingent order and give up the claim to explain reality as such. The argument is abductive, conditional on displayed premises, and comparative. This provides conditional support for Closure over classical explanatory theism, and the worldview debate is relocated onto those premises.
This study examines how Nishida Kitarō’s early philosophy redefines the concept of God within the framework of pure experience (junsui keiken, 純粋経験). Reading An Inquiry into the Good (1911) alongside the Fragments on Pure Experience (1903–1912) and the Lectures on Religion (1913–1914), it traces how the concept of God develops from the logic of experience rather than from any transcendent domain. For Nishida, the religious demand arises from life’s inner need to unify the finite and the infinite; God, accordingly, is not a being among beings but the unifying activity (tōitsu, 統一) through which knowing and being are one. Against the familiar picture of Nishida as a champion of immanence against a monolithic “Western dualism,” the study argues that his position is a non-dualism that refuses both the separation of theism and the fusion of monistic pantheism, and that his true target is the metaphysics of substance: a target contested within the Western tradition itself, as his endorsement of Nicholas of Cusa’s coincidentia oppositorum in the recently published (2020) autograph notebooks of the Lectures on Religion attests. On this reading, the early notion of God as unifying activity is the structural antecedent of absolute nothingness (zettai mu, 絶対無): a unity that is no object of knowledge and no determinate thing, yet that by which all things are established, already, in all but name, the mature concept of place (basho, 場所).
The recent surge of interest in the philosophical study of life’s meaning generated multiple challenges to a default, often taken-for-granted theistic position—Divine Purpose Theory (DPT). This paper defends DPT against Koons’s Euthyphro Dilemma (KED), which questions whether a purpose is meaningful because God assigned it or did God assign that purpose because it is meaningful. The first horn implies that God’s purpose is arbitrary, while the second horn renders God otiose in life’s meaning. Koons points out that the standard theistic response to KED fails because it generates asecond-order Euthyphro dilemma that remains unresolved. This paper first argues that we can resolve the second-order Euthyphro dilemma if we read Koons’s interlocutor—Alston—more charitably. Second, this paper shows how KED misses the target. While DPT is an account of life’s meaningfulness, KED is only about purposes’ meaningfulness. In addition, this paper also argues that KED, even as a challenge to an account of purposes’ meaningfulness, is a false dilemma. Last, this paper modifies KED into a version (Revised-KED) that specifically targets DPT as an account of life’s meaningfulness and argues that committing to the first horn of Revised-KED does not imply that God is arbitrary in God’s choice of purposes.
Jason Thibodeau has offered a new version of the “Horrendous Deeds Objection” to modified divine command theories of meta-ethics (MDCT). According to MDCT, God has “moral grounding power”, whereby “a being b has moral grounding power just in case the commands of b constitute moral obligations”. Thibodeau asks us to imagine the existence of Yod, a being just like God who lacks omnibenevolence. Because Yod is omnipotent, he has the same powers God has. Consequently, if God’s commands can ground morality, so can Yod’s. However, Yod can command horrendous deeds. So, a divine command theory entails the false conclusion that horrendous deeds can be morally permissible. I will argue that Thibodeau’s argument is unsound once we understand what the word “power” means in the locution “moral grounding power”. A key premise of Thibodeau’s argument is false: if God has moral grounding power, it is logically impossible for any other omnipotent being to have it. I will respond to two recent objections that Thibodeau has made to this response: (A) This response falsely assumes that one person’s type-identical commands cannot constitute another person’s commands; and (B) This response makes it objectionably inexplicable why God has this “power” and no other omnipotent being does.
This article argues that the form of a text matters as much as, if not more than, its content. Using Fakhr al-Din ‘Irāqī’s Lamaʿāt (Divine Flashes) as a case study, this article explores the significance of the poetic form and the role of the reader/listener in interpreting and experiencing the poem. The article argues that a close analysis of ʿIrāqī’s work reveals a careful deployment of literary devices and rhetorical strategies to induce an affective experience in the reader, which facilitates a distinct form of “knowing.” I argue that by shifting our focus from what a poetic work says to what it does, we can glimpse hitherto unappreciated varieties and textures of Islamic philosophy, broadly construed. This approach allows us to glean not only the meaning of the text but also how it moves the reader, drawing upon the reader’s full range of senses, imagination, and intellect.
