Circular explanations, cosmological arguments, and sufficient reasons

Midwest Studies in Philosophy

Volumn 21, Issue 1, 1997, Pages 188-201

  Rowe, William ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61049187982     PISSN: 03636550     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4975.1997.tb00523.x     Document Type: Article

References (15)

1. See, for example, Quentin Smith, "Infinity and the Past," Philosophy of Science 54 (1987): 63-75.
2. His argument is presented in Samuel Clarke, A Discourse Concerning the Being and Attributes of God, 9th ed. (London, 1738)
3. reprinted in British Philosophers and Theologians of the 17th and 18th Centuries (New York, 1978).
4. Gottfried Leibniz, Monadology (1714) in Leibniz Selections, ed. Philip P. Wiener (New York, 1951), paragraph 32.
5. Samuel Clarke, and Gottfried Leibniz, The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence (1717), ed. H. G. Alexander (Manchester, 1956), third reply.
6. A full explanation of some fact, as opposed to a partial explanation, is an explanation that logically implies the fact it explains. See Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God (Oxford, 1979), chapter 2.
7. For a critical discussion of this view of mine, see Richard Gale, On the Nature and Existence of Cod (Cambridge, 1991), 265-71.
8. Versions of this objection have been developed by Bennett, Ross, and Van Inwagen. See Jonathan Bennett, A Study of Spinoza's Ethics (Indianapolis, 1984), 115;
9. James F. Ross, Philosophical Theology (Indianapolis, 1969), 298-302;
10. Peter Van Inwagen, An Essay on Free Will (Oxford, 1983), 202-204.
11. See The Cosmological Argument (Princeton, 1975), 145-48.
12. See The Philosophical Review (July 1978): 445-50.
13. Quentin Smith, "Explanatory Rationalism and Contingent Truths," Religious Studies 31 (1995): 237-42. A similar paper was the occasion of a colloquium at the APA Central Division meeting in Chicago, April 1995. I served as commentator.
14. At a colloquium of the APA Central Division meeting in Chicago, April 1995.
15. Comments by Quentin Smith at a colloquium of the APA Central Division in Chicago, April 1995.