Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Euthyphro Paradox

  • Euthyphro Again: The ‘Bite the Bullet’ Response

    From the IEP entry on Divine Command Theory: a. Bite the Bullet One possible response to the Euthyphro Dilemma is to simply accept that if God does command cruelty, then inflicting it upon others would be morally obligatory. In Super 4 Libros Sententiarum, William of Ockham states that the actions which we call “theft” and “adultery”…

  • Euthyphro Dilemma, Divine Simplicity, and Modal Collapse

    Top o' the Stack. Another deep dive into one of the gnarliest conundra in natural theology. The problem may be cast in the mold of an aporetic tetrad: 1) Classical theism is untenable if the ED cannot be defeated. 2) The ED can be defeated only if DDS is true. 3) DDS entails the collapse…

  • The Euthyphro Problem, Islam, and Thomism.

    Top o' the Stack. The problem is genuine but insoluble. Or so I conclude. What say you?

  • The Euthyphro Dilemma, Divine Simplicity, and Modal Collapse

    The Question God commands all and only the morally obligatory. But does he command it because it is obligatory, or is it obligatory because he commands it? The question naturally arises, but issues in a dilemma. A dilemma is a very specific sort of problem in which there are exactly two alternatives, neither of which…

  • Is There Such a Thing as Metaphysical Explanation?

    M. L. writes,   I've been enjoying your critique of [Peter] van Inwagen. [The reader is presumably referring to  my "Van Inwagen on Fiction, Existence, Properties, Particulars, and Method" in Studia Neoaristotelica: A Journal of Analytical Scholasticism, 2015, vol. 12, no. 2, 99-125]  I was initially astonished at his claim that metaphysics/ontology doesn't explain, but…

  • Metaphysical Grounding and the Euthyphro Dilemma

    The locus classicus of the Euthyphro Dilemma (if you want to call it that) is Stephanus 9-10 in the early Platonic dialog, Euthyphro. This aporetic dialog is about the nature of piety, and Socrates, as usual, is in quest of a definition. Euthyphro proposes three definitions, with each of which Socrates has no trouble finding…

  • The Euthyphro Problem, Islam, and Thomism

    Peter Lupu called me last night to report that it had occurred to him that the famous Euthyphro Dilemma, first bruited in the eponymous early Platonic dialog, reflects a difference between two conceptions of God. One is the God-as-Being-itself conception; the other is the God-as-supreme-being conception.  After he hung up, I recalled that in June,…

  • Metaphysical Grounding and the Euthyphro Dilemma

    The locus classicus of the Euthyphro Dilemma (if you want to call it that) is Stephanus 9-10 in the early Platonic dialog, Euthyphro. This aporetic dialog is about the nature of piety, and Socrates, as usual, is in quest of a definition. Euthyphro proposes three definitions, with each of which Socrates has no trouble finding…

  • The Eliminativist/Reductivist Distinction: Three Further Examples

    For Part I of this discussion, and the first six examples, see here.  Recall that my concern is to show via a variety of examples that the eliminativist-reductivist distinction is useful and important and indeed indispensable for clear thinking about a number of topics. 7. Truth is warranted assertibility.   Someone who makes this claim presumably intends…

  • Islam and the Euthyphro Problem

    Horace Jeffery Hodges  has a couple of informative and well-documented posts, here and here, on the divine will and its limits, if any, in Judaism and Christianity on the one hand, and in Islam, on the other. One way to focus the issue is in terms of the Euthyphro dilemma. The locus classicus is Stephanus…