Tom's Philosophy Page

    People come to philosophy in many different ways and for many different reasons.  My own reasons were largely religious in nature.  As an undergraduate, I wanted to discover the extent to which the religious beliefs I had acquired in my youth could withstand close scrutiny, and I was especially eager to find a satisfactory reply to the anti-theistic argument from evil .  But others may begin with a pressing moral or political issue, or with perplexities about the nature of mind and its relationship to the body, or with a puzzle about the justification of knowledge claims, or with a question about what really exists (in some primary sense), or with a host of other possible questions.  If you are genuinely curious about something and willing to think hard and carefully about it, then you are already on the road that leads to philosophy.

    All areas of philosophy are fascinating, but the areas of greatest interest for me are the philosophy of religion and metaphysics.  The philosophy of religion is simply hard and careful thinking about religion, but you should not confuse it with religious apologetics, or think of it as a part of organized religion.  Some of the most important philosophers of religion have been either atheists or agnostics; indeed, doubts about the existence of God are just what might lead one to the discipline.  Traditionally, philosophers of religion have had perhaps three important objectives: (i) to assess philosophical arguments for and against the existence of God, (ii) to examine the coherence of specific theological concepts, such as the concept of divine omnipotence , and (iii) to evaluate whether some religious doctrines, or some theological propositions, are logically consistent with others.  Here are two illustrations of the latter objective:  A philosopher might ask (a) whether divine foreknowledge is compatible with human free will and might ask (b) whether the doctrine of hell, as traditionally understood, is compatible with God's being both omnipotent and perfectly loving .  I have addressed the first question myself in two papers: "On Divine Foreknowledge and Bringing about the past," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (March, 1986), pp. 455-469, and "Theological Fatalism and Modal Confusion," International Journal for Philosophy of Religion (1993).  And I address the second question, among other things, in a book entitled The Inescapable Love of God, which I plan to make available on another website .

    As a branch of philosophy, metaphysics may be very different from what you expect; a course in metaphysics may have little directly to say, for example, about Ouija boards, astral bodies, ghosts, seances, hypnotic regression, or the occult.  Whether disembodied existence is logically possible is indeed a legitimate metaphysical question, and one could also make any aspect of the occult a legitimate object of philosophical analysis.  But like any other philosophy course, a course in metaphysics will emphasize a careful logical analysis of the concepts in question.  A central issue in traditional metaphysics concerns, very simply, the nature of reality (as opposed to appearance):  Is the physical world, or matter in motion, real? Is mind or consciousness real? Can one be reduced to, or explained in terms of, the other?  Or, might it be that reality, what exists in the most primary sense, is neither physical nor mental, but something radically different from both?

    One of the most important of all metaphysical concepts is that of necessity: what willy nilly must be. What sorts of things, if any, are necessary or could not have been otherwise?  Many of the perennial arguments about the existence and nature of God, about the very idea of a nature or an essence, about the relationship between the mind and the body, about time and the possibility of time travel, about causation and the nature of causal explanation, about human freedom and the power of choice are, in one way or another, arguments about what is, and is not, necessary.  Such arguments--sometimes called modal arguments, because they employ so-called modal concepts --are tricky and carry a real potential for serious confusion.  I have always found the temptations that lead to fatalism especially intriguing, and I also have an abiding interest in the free will/determinism controversy.  But though I take the concept of freedom very seriously myself, I also suspect that recent philosophers of religion have generated a lot of confusion in their use of it, particularly in the context of the problem of evil and the question of one's eternal destiny.

Published Papers:
In what follows I provide access to some of my own published papers, many of which deal with my contention that any form of theism that includes the traditional doctrine of hell is logically inconsistent. Some of these articles are aimed at a rather narrow audience of professional philosophers, others at a more general audience, and still others at an audience somewhere in between. I'll put an asterisk (*) by the more accessible articles. In order to maintain the integrity of the articles, including footnotes and endnotes, I will put most of them in a PDF format; so you will need an Adobe Acrobat Reader, which you can download free by clicking here .

Philosophy Links:

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