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articles

1. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 77 > Issue: 3
Allan B. Wolter

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Thomas Williams has developed a radical interpretation of Duns Scotus’s voluntarism using an earlier interpretation of my own as a foil. He argues that the goodness of creatures and the rightness of actions are wholly dependent on the divine will, apart from any reference to the divine intellect, human nature, or any principle other than God’s own arbitrary will. I explain how his interpretation fails to account for the roles that essential goodness and divine justice play in divine volition. The unmitigated voluntarism that Williams develops does not conform to the full range of authentic Scotistic texts. Despite the interest Williams’s voluntarism may have if taken as a theoretical position, it does not do justice to the nuance and speculative depth of Scotus’s actual understanding of the divine will, whose creative artistry is repugnant to arbitrary volition. I am grateful to Williams for the provocation to develop further the richness of Scotus’s volutarism.
2. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 77 > Issue: 3
Julie R. Klein

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Through a close analysis of texts from the Second Objections and Replies to the Meditations, this article addresses the tension between the pursuit of certainty and the preservation of divine transcendence in Descartes’s philosophy. Via a hypothetical “atheist geometer,” the Objectors charge Descartes with pantheism. While the Objectors’ motivations are not clear, the objection raises provocative questions about the relation of the divine and the human mind and about the being of created or dependent entities inDescartes’s metaphysics. Descartes contends that there are real, eternal essences present in the human intellect as innate ideas. I argue that this claim implicates him in pantheism, not merely univocity. In the course of the analysis, I consider recent interpretations by Wells, Marion, and Hatfield.
3. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 77 > Issue: 3
John Haldane

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Being dedicated to the memory of the great Catholic philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe, who died in the month it was given, this Aquinas lecture begins with some reflections on the relationship between the anti-scientistic, anti-Cartesian position argued for by Anscombe and her teacher Wittgenstein, and the outlook of Thomas Aquinas. It then proceeds to explore the familiar Thomistic idea that philosophical reflection provides the means to establish the existence of God. Drawing in part on Aquinas, but also and perhaps unexpectedly on the idealism of Berkeley and on the semantic intuitionism of Michael Dummett (a former student of Anscombe), I argue that theism follows both from the assumption of realism and from the assumption of anti-realism, and that this fact reveals something of the complexity involved in the claim that God both creates and knows the world. Finally, I examine the relationship between Aristotelian-Thomistic pluralistic realism and the attempt by John McDowell to fashion a position that lies between Platonism and reductive naturalism.
4. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 77 > Issue: 3
John Lemos

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In his book, Created From Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism (1990), James Rachels argues that the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection undermines the view that human beings are made in the image of God. By this he means that Darwinism makes things such that there is no longer any good reason to think that human beings are made in the image of God. Some other widely read and respected authors seem to share this view of the implications of Darwinism, most notably Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. Unlike Dawkins and Dennett, Rachels gives a detailed argument for this view about the implications of Darwinism. In this article I explain Rachels’s argument and critically engage with it, arguing that he does not sufficiently well consider all of the options that are open to the theist in defending the view that human beings are made in the image of God.
5. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 77 > Issue: 3
Brendan Sweetman

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This paper considers two related claims in the work of D. Z. Phillips: that commitment to God precludes a distinction between the commitment and the grounds for the commitment, and that belief and understanding are the same in religion. Both these claims motivate Phillips’s rejection of natural theology. I examine these claims by analyzing the notion of commitment, discussing what is involved in making a commitment to a worldview, why commitment is necessary at all in religion, levels of commitment, and commitment and justification. I show that Phillips fails to distinguish between adopting a hypothesis, where justification would be germane, and committing to the hypothesis after one has adopted it, where justification is not so pressing. This failure fatally undermines his rejection of natural theology.
6. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 77 > Issue: 3
P.A. Woodward

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In her paper, “The Doctrine of Double Effect: Problems of Interpretation,” Nancy Davis attempts to find an interpretation of the means-end relationship that would provide a foundation for the Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE) and its reliance on the distinction between what an agent intends or brings about intentionally and what that agent merely foresees will result from his/her action, but does not intend (or bring about intentionally). Davis’s inability to find such an interpretation lessens the plausibility of the view that theDDE is an acceptable moral doctrine. In the present paper, it is suggested that Davis’s inability to find an interpretation of the means-end relationship that will support the DDE results from her assumption that an agent must intend to produce whatever he/she produces intentionally. Borrowing an argument from Michael Bratman, this article shows that Davis’s assumption is false. Thatrealization paves the way toward a defense of the DDE.

book reviews

7. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 77 > Issue: 3
David B. Burrell

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8. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 77 > Issue: 3
Riccardo Pozzo

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9. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 77 > Issue: 3
Thora Ilin Bayer

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10. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 77 > Issue: 3
John F. X. Knasas

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books received

11. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 77 > Issue: 3

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