Desire and de-desire…

You are sitting at a coffee shop (hopefully not Starbucks?) when you begin to eavesdrop on two philosophy grad students bickering.
“A person is free to act as he desires,” says the one, wearing an orange sweat shirt and blue jeans, “but he is not free to choose his desires. He may choose to suppress some [...]

Is freedom the capacity to choose rightly?

Freedom as distinct from rationality

Michael Liccione has recently proposed identifying freedom as the capacity to choose rightly – see his post on Philosophia Perennis of September 9, 2008.  (It is fair to add that he makes this identification with an important qualification, to which I will turn later.)
It seems to me that to identify freedom, [...]

More Scattered Thoughts On Obedience

God does not ask of us virtue, moralism, blind obedience but a cry of assurance and of love from the depth of our hell–Paul Evdokimov
It is very easy to simply let the Magisterium tell you what to believe. I have a couple of friends who keep insisting that Rome should take care of many things, [...]

Are universes clickable?

Over at the conservative blog What’s Wrong with the World (‘W4′ for short), Lydia McGrew critiques what she calls The Fallacy of the Clickable Universe. Here’s how she starts:
When philosophers talk about the Problem of Evil (aka “the POE”), they sometimes cast the question like this: “Why did God create a universe in which Adam [...]

Questionis disputanda: Is freedom the capacity to choose rightly?

Obj. 1. It would seem that freedom is not the capacity to choose rightly, but the capacity to choose rightly or wrongly. For if one can only choose rightly, then one is not free to choose wrongly; hence one is predetermined to do right, which is incompatible with the capacity to choose.
Obj. 2. Moreover, the [...]

Freedom is for Worship

The setting is first century second Temple Judaism. It is hard to fully describe the worldview of second Temple Judaism because it was pluralistic. We know that there were many eschatological movements and it is safe to say that “eschatology” in that time meant a restoration of Israel and the cosmos under the one God. [...]

God and Infinite Choices

William Rowe, in Can God be Free? (2004), gives us three propositions
A) There necessarily exists an essentially omnipotent, essentially omniscient, essentially perfectly good being who has created a world.
B) If an omniscient being creates a world when there is a better world that it could have created, then it is possible that there exists a [...]