Not a day went by after the last rave when I discovered two things. First, that I had overstated my objection regarding haecceities not being instantiated primitive essences. Let us say that what might be roughly called the soul is an emergent property that bears an asymmetrical relationship with instances of itself over time (a present soul has identity with its past instances but not its future instances). Even with such a characterization, it still makes sense to ask what a person would do in some other state of affairs. It also makes sense to state that it is possible that given soul would act in one and only one way at some specific state of affairs such that soul both determined its outcome (that is to say that the state of affairs did cause the person to act as she did) and could do no other. In short, a counterpart analysis to subjective counterfactuals can still apply. In fact, for reasons that I hope to bring up next time (I know, I said something like that last time) I think that such an analysis does apply, at least in some cases. Note, however, that the counterpart analysis does not overcome the feeling that when one says “I could have entered the Peace Corps rather than go to graduate school” that the “I” that went to the graduate school is the same “I” that could have entered the Peace Corps and not some counterpart.
The other thing that I should like to point out is that my objection to Molinism is not the so-called grounding argument. I bring this up only because when I first started formulating my objection, I would say things about God basing (or grounding) his decision on whether to create one world rather than another on what its constituents would do, but since very different worlds where equally possible based on what God could strongly actualize, there was no basis for determining which of these world would in fact be actualized. The confusion here is that the grounding argument states that the truth value of propositions must be grounded in actual states of affairs rather than possible ones. Here, I would agree propositions need no such grounding (think of the proposition “Blue is a color,” which would seem to be true prior to the existence of any blue thing).
Incidentally, I just finished Peter van Inwagen’s 2003 Gifford Lecture series entitled
The Problem of Evil. Even though there was a fair bit with which I did not agree (for example, I was not entirely pleased with his view of human freewill and so come down differently on his view of Thomism and counterfactuals), it was is a most stimulating, agreeable, and approachable volume. Anyone who can get through a paragraph of the stuff I put out should find van Inwagen a walk in the part. In truth, van Inwagen’s writing is generally characterized by equal parts clear prose and clear thinking.
Comments (1)
"a present soul has identity with its past instances but not its future instances"
Funny you should say that, as I've a post waiting in the wings that might cause you to do another double-take in a by-the-by sort of way. I'm working on the last paragraph now, in fact.
And, I've heard of 'The Problem of Evil' and have intended to pick it up in the past, thanks for the reminder. Glad to hear it's less thick than your stuff; I need to really have my head screwed on to muddle though your writings more often than not.