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This important philosophical reflection on love and sexuality
from a broadly Christian perspective is aimed at philosophers,
theologians, and educated Christian readers. Alexander R. Pruss
focuses on foundational questions on the nature of romantic love
and on controversial questions in sexual ethics on the basis of the
fundamental idea that romantic love pursues union of two persons as
one body."One Body" begins with an account, inspired by St. Thomas
Aquinas, of the general nature of love as constituted by components
of goodwill, appreciation, and unitiveness. Different forms of
love, such as parental, collegial, filial, friendly, fraternal, or
romantic, Pruss argues, differ primarily not in terms of goodwill
or appreciation but in terms of the kind of union that is sought.
Pruss examines romantic love as distinguished from other kinds of
love by a focus on a particular kind of union, a deep union as one
body achieved through the joint biological striving of the sort
involved in reproduction. Taking the account of the union that
romantic love seeks as a foundation, the book considers the nature
of marriage and applies its account to controversial ethical
questions, such as the connection between love, sex, and commitment
and the moral issues involving contraception, same-sex activity,
and reproductive technology. With philosophical rigor and
sophistication, Pruss provides carefully argued answers to
controversial questions in Christian sexual ethics. "This is a
terrific--really quite extraordinary--work of scholarship. It is
quite simply the best work on Christian sexual ethics that I have
seen. It will become the text that anyone who ventures into the
field will have to grapple with--a kind of touchstone. Moreover, it
is filled with arguments with which even secular writers on sexual
morality will have to engage and come to terms." --Robert P.
George, Princeton University
""One Body" is an excellent piece of philosophical-theological
reflection on the nature of sexuality and marriage. This book has
the potential to become a standard go-to text for professors and
students working on sex ethics issues, whether in philosophy or
theology, both for the richness of its arguments, and the scope of
its coverage of cases. " --Christopher Tollefsen, University of
South Carolina "Alexander Pruss here develops sound and humane
answers to the whole range of main questions about human sexual and
reproductive choices. His principal argument for the key answers is
very different from the one I have articulated over the past
fifteen years. But his argumentation is at every point attractively
direct, careful, energetic in framing and responding to objections,
and admirably attentive to realities and the human goods at stake."
--John Finnis, University of Oxford
This is an original exploration of the philosophical arguments for
and against the possibility of other worlds. "Actuality,
Possibility and Worlds" is an exploration of the Aristotelian
account that sees possibilities as grounded in causal powers. On
his way to that account, Pruss surveys a number of historical
approaches and argues that logicist approaches to possibility are
implausible. The notion of possible worlds appears to be useful for
many purposes, such as the analysis of counterfactuals or
elucidating the nature of propositions and properties. This
usefulness of possible worlds makes for a second general question:
Are there any possible worlds and, if so, what are they? Are they
concrete universes as David Lewis thinks, Platonic abstracta as per
Robert M. Adams and Alvin Plantinga, or maybe linguistic or
mathematical constructs such as Heller thinks? Or is perhaps
Leibniz right in thinking that possibilia are not on par with
actualities and that abstracta can only exist in a mind, so that
possible worlds are ideas in the mind of God? "Continuum Studies in
Philosophy of Religion" presents scholarly monographs offering
cutting-edge research and debate to students and scholars in
philosophy of religion. The series engages with the central
questions and issues within the field, including the problem of
evil, the cosmological, teleological, moral, and ontological
arguments for the existence of God, divine foreknowledge, and the
coherence of theism. It also incorporates volumes on the following
metaphysical issues as and when they directly impact on the
philosophy of religion: the existence and nature of the soul, the
existence and nature of free will, natural law, the meaning of
life, and science and religion.
This is an original exploration of the philosophical arguments for
and against the possibility of other worlds. "Actuality,
Possibility and Worlds" is an exploration of the Aristotelian
account that sees possibilities as grounded in causal powers. On
his way to that account, Pruss surveys a number of historical
approaches and argues that logicist approaches to possibility are
implausible. The notion of possible worlds appears to be useful for
many purposes, such as the analysis of counterfactuals or
elucidating the nature of propositions and properties. This
usefulness of possible worlds makes for a second general question:
Are there any possible worlds and, if so, what are they? Are they
concrete universes as David Lewis thinks, Platonic abstracta as per
Robert M. Adams and Alvin Plantinga, or maybe linguistic or
mathematical constructs such as Heller thinks? Or is perhaps
Leibniz right in thinking that possibilia are not on par with
actualities and that abstracta can only exist in a mind, so that
possible worlds are ideas in the mind of God? "Continuum Studies in
Philosophy of Religion" presents scholarly monographs offering
cutting-edge research and debate to students and scholars in
philosophy of religion. The series engages with the central
questions and issues within the field, including the problem of
evil, the cosmological, teleological, moral, and ontological
arguments for the existence of God, divine foreknowledge, and the
coherence of theism. It also incorporates volumes on the following
metaphysical issues as and when they directly impact on the
philosophy of religion: the existence and nature of the soul, the
existence and nature of free will, natural law, the meaning of
life, and science and religion.
Necessary Existence breaks ground on one of the deepest questions
anyone ever asks: why is there anything? The classic answer is in
terms of a necessary foundation. Yet, why think that is the correct
answer? Pruss and Rasmussen present an original defense of the
hypothesis that there is a concrete necessary being capable of
providing a foundation for the existence of things. They offer six
main arguments, divided into six chapters. The first argument is an
up-to-date presentation and assessment of a traditional
causal-based argument from contingency. The next five arguments are
new "possibility-based" arguments that make use of
twentieth-century advances in modal logic. The arguments present
possible pathways to an intriguing and far-reaching conclusion. The
final chapter answers the most challenging objections to the
existence of necessary things.
Infinity is paradoxical in many ways. Some paradoxes involve
deterministic supertasks, such as Thomson's Lamp, where a switch is
toggled an infinite number of times over a finite period of time,
or the Grim Reaper, where it seems that infinitely many reapers can
produce a result without doing anything. Others involve infinite
lotteries. If you get two tickets from an infinite fair lottery
where tickets are numbered from 1, no matter what number you saw on
the first ticket, it is almost certain that the other ticket has a
bigger number on it. And others center on paradoxical results in
decision theory, such as the surprising observation that if you
perform a sequence of fair coin flips that goes infinitely far back
into the past but only finitely into the future, you can leverage
information about past coin flips to predict future ones with only
finitely many mistakes. Alexander R. Pruss examines this seemingly
large family of paradoxes in Infinity, Causation and Paradox. He
establishes that these paradoxes and numerous others all have a
common structure: their most natural embodiment involves an
infinite number of items causally impinging on a single output.
These paradoxes, he argues, can all be resolved by embracing
'causal finitism', the view that it is impossible for a single
output to have an infinite causal history. Throughout the book,
Pruss exposits such paradoxes, defends causal finitism at length,
and considers connections with the philosophy of physics (where
causal finitism favors but does not require discretist theories of
space and time) and the philosophy of religion (with a cosmological
argument for a first cause).
The Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) says that all contingent
facts must have explanation. In this 2006 volume, which was the
first on the topic in the English language in nearly half a
century, Alexander Pruss examines the substantive philosophical
issues raised by the Principle Reason. Discussing various forms of
the PSR and selected historical episodes, from Parmenides, Leibnez,
and Hume, Pruss defends the claim that every true contingent
proposition must have an explanation against major objections,
including Hume's imaginability argument and Peter van Inwagen's
argument that the PSR entails modal fatalism. Pruss also provides a
number of positive arguments for the PSR, based on considerations
as different as the metaphysics of existence, counterfactuals and
modality, negative explanations, and the everyday applicability of
the PSR. Moreover, Pruss shows how the PSR would advance the
discussion in a number of disparate fields, including meta-ethics
and the philosophy of mathematics.
The Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) says that all contingent
facts must have explanation. In this 2006 volume, which was the
first on the topic in the English language in nearly half a
century, Alexander Pruss examines the substantive philosophical
issues raised by the Principle Reason. Discussing various forms of
the PSR and selected historical episodes, from Parmenides, Leibnez,
and Hume, Pruss defends the claim that every true contingent
proposition must have an explanation against major objections,
including Hume's imaginability argument and Peter van Inwagen's
argument that the PSR entails modal fatalism. Pruss also provides a
number of positive arguments for the PSR, based on considerations
as different as the metaphysics of existence, counterfactuals and
modality, negative explanations, and the everyday applicability of
the PSR. Moreover, Pruss shows how the PSR would advance the
discussion in a number of disparate fields, including meta-ethics
and the philosophy of mathematics.
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