Peter Forrest

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at University of New England

In this paper I argue that the problems solved by universals require not merely that we know they exist but that we know them by acquaintance. I begin by explicating this thesis of acquaintance with universals. I then show how it solves some familiar problems. After that I reply to the objection that something weaker will do such as David Lewis’ di...

The first section surveys Australian philosophy of religion, putting greater emphasis on the more distinctively Australian contributions, without any implication that it is good for there to be distinctively Australian contributions. It also exhibits connections between the philosophy of religion and Australian contributions to other areas of philo...

Consider the things that exist—the entities—and let us suppose they are mereologically structured, that is, some are parts of others. The project of ontology within the bounds of bare mereology use this structure to say which of these entities belong to various ontological kinds, such as properties and particulars. My purpose in this paper is to de...

William Rowe in his Can God be Free? (2004) argues that God, if there is a God, necessarily chooses the best. Combined with the premise that there is no best act of creation, this provides an a priori argument for atheism. Rowe assumes that necessarily God is a ‘morally unsurpassable’ being, and it is for that reason that God chooses the best. In t...

Several authors, including Stephen Law in this journal, have argued that the case for an evil God is (about) as strong as for a good God. In this article I take up the challenge on behalf of theists who, like Richard Swinburne, argue for an agent of unrestricted power and knowledge as the ultimate explanation of all contingent truths. I shall argue...

I am not a pantheist and I don’t believe that pantheism is consistent with Christianity. My preferred speculation is what I call the Swiss Cheese theory: we and our artefacts are the holes in God, the only Godless parts of reality. In this paper, I begin by considering a world rather like ours but without any beings capable of sin. Ignoring extrate...

Mereotopology is that branch of the theory of regions concerned with topological properties such as connectedness. It is usually developed by considering the parthood relation that characterizes the, perhaps non-classical, mereology of Space (or Spacetime, or a substance filling Space or Spacetime) and then considering an extra primitive relation....

Book Information Warranted Christian Belief. By Alvin Plantinga. Oxford University Press. New York. 2000. Pp. xx + 508.

Book Information Epistemic Justification. By Richard Swinburne. Clarendon Press. Oxford. 2001. Pp. vi + 262. Hardback, US$55.00.

Book Information Reenchantment without Supernaturalism: A Process Philosophy of Religion. By David Ray Griffin. Cornell University Press. Ithaca. 2001. Pp. viii + 426. Hardback, US$55.00. Paperback, US$24.95.

In his recent paper in Sophia, ‘Theodicy: The Solution to the Problem of Evil, or Part of the Problem?’ Nick Trakakis endorses the position that theodicy, whether intellectually successful or not, is a morally obnoxious enterprise. My aim in this paper is to defend theodicy from this accusation. I concede that God the Creator is a moral monster by...

In this paper I provide an ontology for the co-variant vectors, contra-variant vectors and tensors that are familiar from General Relativity. This ontology is developed in response to a problem that Timothy Maudlin uses to argue against universals in the interpretation of physics. The problem is that if vector quantities are universals then there s...

I argue for the following four theses: (1) The Dread Thesis: human beings should fear having false religious beliefs concerning some religious doctrines; (2) The Radical Uncertainty Thesis: we, namely most human beings in our culture at our time, are in a situation where we have to commit ourselves on the truth or falsity of some propositions of ul...

Contemporary epistemology of religion may conveniently be treated as a debate over whether evidentialism applies to the belief-component of religious faith, or whether we should instead adopt a more permissive epistemology. Here by 'evidentialism' I mean the initially plausible position that a belief is justified only if "it is proportioned to the...

Who's Afraid of Special Relativity? Too many philosophers who shouldn't be. In particular presentists and Growing Block theorists tend to prefer alternatives. The presentist William Craig [Craig, W.L., 2001. Time and the Metaphysics of Relativity. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht], for instance, holds a neo-Lorentzian position, and the Growing...

The Bayesian OrthodoxyIdealizationTwo Approaches to a Theory of ProbabilityAdjustment for Nonclassical LogicsCarnap's Confirmation TheoryProportional SyllogismsKyburg's Fuzzy ProbabilitiesLevi's Indeterminate SystemsQualitative Theories of ProbabilityThe Dynamics of Subjective ProbabilityProbability Theory and Quantum Theory

Armstrong holds the Supervenience Theory of instantiation, namely that the instantiation of universals by particulars supervenes upon what particulars and what universals there are, where supervenience is stipulated to be explanatory or dependent supervenience. I begin by rejecting the Supervenience Theory of instantiation. Having done so it is the...

This paper concerns the structure of appearances. I argue that to be appeared to in a certain way is to be aware of one or more universals. Universals therefore function like the sense-data, once highly favoured but now out of fashion. For instance, to be appeared to treely, in a visual way, is to be aware of the complex relation, being tree-shaped...

My case against the orthodox position is a consequence of the Banach-Tarski theorem together with the intuition that every region has a quantity, where the quantity or volume is a finitely additive measure. The weakest link in this argument is that the Banach-Tarski theorem depends on the Axiom of Choice. So I hope, if nothing else, to have persuad...

Part One of this paper is a case against classical mereology and for Heyting mereology. This case proceeds by first undermining the appeal of classical mereology and then showing how it fails to cohere with our intuitions about a measure of quantity. Part Two shows how Heyting mereology provides an account of sets and classes without resort to any...

As a preliminary, I shall clarify the kenotic position by arguing that a position which is often called kenotic is actually a quasi-kenotic version of the classical account, according to which Jesus had normal divine powers but chose not to exercise them. After this preliminary, I discuss three problems with the strict kenotic account. The first is...

Starting from the acceptance of the Egalitarian Principle I exhibited a version which I considered too lax (BEP) and one I considered too strict (NEP), arriving at a version (MEP) which allows that there can be tolerance-limiting reasons for adhering to traditions but only if they are based on unreasoned knowledge claims. In fact, I hold that the s...

While the Phase Space formulation of quantum mechanics has received considerable attention it has seldom been defended as a viable interpretation. In this paper I expound the Phase Space Picture, use it to provide a quasi-classical ‘hidden variables’ interpretation of quantum mechanics and offer a defence of it against various objections.

This paper is a contribution to the programme of moderating Social Trinitarianism to achieve a fairly orthodox result. I follow Swinburne in relying heavily on divine thisnessless and in the important speculation that the Trinity arose from a primordial God. In this paper I explain why I disagree with Swinburnes's account of how the Trinity came in...

Argument en faveur de l'idee de responsabilite collective. Respectant les principes de la justice distributive dans le comportement des communautes, l'A. defend les quatre theses suivantes, qui considerent la communaute comme une personne et examinent les relations entre la communaute et les personnes qui lui appartiennent: la these des mefaits col...

Par analogie avec le role du demon dans l'epistemologie de Descartes, l'A. interprete la these de l'anti-Dieu chez Murphree dans le sens d'une figure designant le role cognitif des attitudes emotionnelles. Examinant l'attitude optimiste qui sous-tend le theisme et l'attitude pessimiste qui sous-tend l'anti-theisme chez Murphree, l'A. montre que la...

L'A. defend la these de la compatibilite de la mecanique quantique avec le point de vue du sens commun portant: 1) sur la determination de la realite, 2) l'independance de l'observateur par rapport a la realite, 3) le statut de l'observation vraie, 4) l'idee d'action a distance indirecte, a partir de la conciliation de la formulation wignerienne de...

In this paper I compare two versions of non-eliminative physicalism (reductive physicalism and supervenience physicalism) with four of the five theses of classical theism: divine non-contingency, divine transcendence, divine simplicity, and the aseity thesis. I argue that: 1. Both physicalism (either version) and classical theism require intuition-...

The basic idea of this essay is that the past is no longer contingent, hence that which has always been past was never contingent, and is, therefore, necessary in a time-independent fashion.1 In this way we can give an account of physical necessity in terms of the passage of time. My purpose is to clarify this somewhat obscure idea, and to argue fo...

One obvious problem for comparative philosophers is that of interpretation. Is ‘maya' to be translated as ’illusion', as ‘appearance’, or what?1 Indeed we might suspect that the two famous Advaitins, Gaudapada and Sarikara, meant rather different things by ‘maya’. We might also note the importance of the attitudes associated with the judgement that...

In this paper I present the Discrete Space-Time Thesis, in a way which enables me to defend it against various well-known objections, and which extends to the discrete versions of Special and General Relativity with only minor difficulties. The point of this presentation is not to convince readers that space-time really is discrete but rather to co...

Le but de cet article est de montrer comment on peut heriter de la responsabilite de ce que les ancetres culturels ont fait, transmettre l'aura a d'autres qui vivront dans le futur, et enfin etre ne en etat de peche originel. Telles sont les trois parties de ce travail qui par analogie cherche a donner un argument de credibilite a l'existence du pe...

Science and NecessityBigelowJohn and PargetterRobertCambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, x + 410 pp. - Volume 33 Issue 4 - Peter Forrest

In this paper I explore a position, Monism, of which we have an initial, pre-reflective, understanding, but which stands in need of further clarification. The initial understanding is that to be a Monist is to deny that (in reality) there are any differences, and/or to assert that (in reality) all is one. The qualification “in reality” already hint...

1. Theism can be defended against the Philosophical Problem of Evil, provided one rejects the Principle of Perfectionism, without relying on the Greater Good Defence or, unless one is a libertarian, the Free-Will Defence. 2. A corollary of the All Good Possible Worlds Defence and the No Best Possible World Defence, is that God’s goodness need no...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Harvard University, 1973.