Brian Leftow
Biographic Data
| ID | 977014 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Brian Leftow |
| GIVEN NAMES | Brian |
| FAMILY NAME | Leftow |
| SIGNATURE | LEFTOW B |
| AFFILIATIONS | Fordham University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3617-5094 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1988 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Conceivability and perfect being theology
According to Jeff Speaks, one sort of perfect being theology takes its rise from a description of God as the greatest conceivable being. Speaks offers two problems for this project. One is finding a suitable sense of ‘conceivable’. The other concerns what he calls ‘troublemakers’, attributes that seem to show that God cannot be the greatest conceivable being. Speaks brings these together in a dilemma
Can the constitution be saved
I reply to William Hasker's ‘The Trinity as Social and Constitutional’, continuing our debate over the use of the metaphysical concept of constitution to explicate the Christian doctrine of the Trinity
Is Perfect Being Theology Informative
Jeff Speaks has recently argued that perfect being theology treating God as the greatest possible being—he calls it alethic perfect being theology—cannot deliver new information about God. This argument is central to his critique of all forms of perfect being theology. For as Speaks sees it, other forms of perfect being theology may collapse into alethic perfect being theology, i.e. fail in the end to be a different sort of project. I lay out how…
The Trinity is still unconstitutional
I argue that we should not model the Trinity using the concept of constitution, and reply to William Hasker's recent defence of the constitutionalist position, also developing my own views in some respects
The Trinity is unconstitutional
Some marble, appropriately worked, comes to constitute a statue: constitution is the relation between the resulting statue and the marble it is made of. Some recent authors use the concept of constitution to explicate or at least provide an analogy for the doctrine of the Trinity. I argue that this won't do, because there is no viable candidate for the role the marble plays in the statue's case
A naturalist cosmological argument
I rebut a ‘naturalist’ counter to Swinburne's Bayesian cosmological argument, based on the supposedly superior simplicity of naturalism
Whither philosophy of religion
The post-war expansion of university faculties climaxed in the early 1970s. Since then, there have been more professional philosophers than ever before in history: a startling claim, but sober truth. In analytic philosophy, they have worked with more rigour and better training than even the Scholastics. It would take a surprising lack of talent among us, or perhaps argue some deep defect in the questions we ask, if the result were not more progre…
God's Impassibility, Immutability, and Eternality
The article discusses Aquinas's views on God's impassibility, immutability, and eternality. Aquinas argued that God has no passions and God's perfection rules out his negative emotions, such as sorrow, fear, envy, or anger. He mentioned that God cannot be angry because he cannot feel sorrow and he cannot be injured. Aquinas believed that the emotional side of impassibility is a minor detail in the doctrine of God. God's causal impassivity is a co…
God's Impassibility, Immutability, and Eternality
God's Omnipotence
Thomas Aquinas (1224/6–1274) lived an active, demanding academic and ecclesiastical life that ended while he was still comparatively young. He nonetheless produced many works, varying in length from a few pages to a few volumes. The Oxford Handbook of Aquinas is an introduction to this influential author and a guide to his thought on almost all the major topics on which he wrote. The book begins with an account of Aquinas's life and works. The ne…
God's Omnipotence
Aquinas argued that God's power is infinite because God needs no help from anything else to produce his effects, the number of his effects is unlimited, and its intensity is unlimited. Aquinas believed that God necessarily wills himself to be, be good, be happy, and so cannot produce the contrary volitions. Aquinas's line of thought generates a subordinate metaphysical account of why God can produce only noncontradictory states of affairs. It is …
Two Trinities: Reply to Hasker
William Hasker replies to my arguments against Social Trinitarianism, offers some criticism of my own view, and begins a sketch of another account of the Trinity. I reply with some defence of my own theory and some questions about his
Swinburne on divine necessity
Most analytic philosophers hold that if God exists, He exists with broad logical necessity. Richard Swinburne denies the distinction between narrow and broad logical necessity, and argues that if God exists, His existence is narrow-logically contingent. A defender of divine broad logical necessity could grant the latter claim. I argue, however, that not only is God's existence broad-logically necessary, but on a certain understanding of God's rel…
Omnipotence
Impossible worlds
Richard Brian Davis offers several criticisms of a semantics I once proposed for subjunctive conditionals with impossible antecedents. I reply to these
No best world: Moral luck
William Rowe and others argue that if ours is a possible world than which there is a better, it follows that God does not exist. If this is correct, then if there is no best possible world, it is not so much as possible that God exist. I reject the key premise of Rowe's argument. The key to seeing that it is false, I suggest, is seeing that God is subject to something fairly called moral luck. In this first part of the article, I set up Rowe's ar…
No best world: Creaturely freedom
William Rowe and others argue that if this is a possible world than which there is a better, it follows that God does not exist. I now reject the key premise of Rowe's argument. I do so first within a Molinist framework. I then show that this framework is dispensable: really all one needs to block the better-world argument is the assumption that creatures have libertarian free will. I also foreclose what might seem a promising way around the ‘mor…
The Cambridge Companion to Anselm
Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109), Benedictine monk and the second Norman archbishop of Canterbury, is regarded as one of the most important philosophers and theologians of the Middle Ages. The essays in this volume explore all of his major ideas both philosophical and theological, including his teachings on faith and reason, God's existence and nature, logic, freedom, truth, ethics, and key Christian doctrines. There is also discussion of his lif…
A Latin Trinity
Latin models of the Trinity begin from the existence of one God, and try to explain how one God can be three Persons.I offer an account of this based on an analogy with time-travel.A time-traveler returning to the same point in time repeatedly might have three successive events in his/her life occurring at that one location in public time.So too, God's life might be such that three distinct parts of His life are always occurring at once, though w…
On a principle of sufficient reason
In The Metaphysics of Creation and The Metaphysics of Theism , Norman Kretzmann defends an argument for God's existence which he claims to find in Aquinas. I assess this argument's key premise, a principle of sufficient reason, that: ‘PSR2: Every existing thing has a reason for its existence either in the necessity of its own nature or in the causal efficacy of some other beings’. PSR2 requires God's nature to explain His existence. Kretzmann doe…
Presentness, Dates and Eternity
The Greater-Good Defense
Journal Article Book Reviews Get access The Greater-Good Defense. By Melville Stewart. (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1993. Pp. xi + 202. Price 855.00.) Brian Leftow Brian Leftow Fordham University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 46, Issue 184, July 1996, Pages 405–407, https://doi.org/10.2307/2956458 Published: 01 July 1996
Time and Eternity
Journal Article Book Reviews Get access Time and Eternity. By Brian Leftow. (Cornell UP, 1991. Pp. xiv + 378. Price $42.95.) Philip L. Quinn Philip L. Quinn University of Notre Dame Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 46, Issue 182, January 1996, Pages 131–133, https://doi.org/10.2307/2956319 Published: 01 January 1996
Anselm on the Necessity of the Incarnation
Anselm's Cur Deus Homo argues that only by the Incarnation can God save humanity. This seems to sit ill with the claim that God is omnipotent and absolutely free, for this entails that God could save humanity in other ways. I show that features of Anselm's concept of God and treatment of necessity make the claim that the Incarnation is a necessary means of salvation problematic. I then show that for Anselm, all conditions which make the Incarnati…
Change, Cause and Contradiction
Journal Article Book Reviews Get access Change, Cause and Contradiction. By Robin Le Poidevin. (London: Macmillan, 1991. Pp. xi + 160. Price $49.95.) Brian Leftow Brian Leftow Fordham University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 44, Issue 176, July 1994, Pages 406–409, https://doi.org/10.2307/2219629 Published: 01 July 1994
The Roots of Eternity
The claim that God is eternal is a standard feature of late–classical and mediaeval philosophical theology. It is prominent in discussions of the relation of God's foreknowledge to human freedom, and its consequences pervade traditional accounts of other kinds of divine knowledge, of God's will, and of God's relation to the world. So an examination of the concept of eternity promises to repay our efforts with a better understanding of the history…
Anselmian Explorations
Time, Actuality and Omniscience
Many traditional theists have said that (i) God is propositionally omniscient, i.e. knows all truths. Many traditional theists also hold that (2) God is timeless. That is, these theists hold that though God exists, there is no time at which He exists, and He does not exist earlier or later than anything. Some recent philosophers, among them Arthor Prior, Robert Coburn, Norman Kretz mann, Nicholas Wolterstorfl Richard Gale and Patrick Grim, have a…
The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas
Why didn't God Create the World Sooner
The Western monotheisms agree that (1) God has created the universe, and that (2) at some point in the past, the universe began to exist. Thus they believe that (1) and (2) are compatible. Yet one can argue that (1) and (2) are incompatible, so that the Western theistic picture of creation is inconsistent. Augustine's Confessions quotes a famous argument that (1) entails~(2): What was God doing before he made heaven and earth? ... if (God) did no…
Timelessness and foreknowledge
God, Time and Knowledge
Time and Eternity
Change, Cause and Contradiction
Journal Article Book Reviews Get access Change, Cause and Contradiction. By Robin Le Poidevin. (London: Macmillan, 1991. Pp. xi + 160. Price $49.95.) Brian Leftow Brian Leftow Fordham University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 44, Issue 176, July 1994, Pages 406–409, https://doi.org/10.2307/2219629 Published: 01 July 1994
Anselm on the Necessity of the Incarnation
Anselm's Cur Deus Homo argues that only by the Incarnation can God save humanity. This seems to sit ill with the claim that God is omnipotent and absolutely free, for this entails that God could save humanity in other ways. I show that features of Anselm's concept of God and treatment of necessity make the claim that the Incarnation is a necessary means of salvation problematic. I then show that for Anselm, all conditions which make the Incarnati…
The Greater-Good Defense
Journal Article Book Reviews Get access The Greater-Good Defense. By Melville Stewart. (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1993. Pp. xi + 202. Price 855.00.) Brian Leftow Brian Leftow Fordham University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 46, Issue 184, July 1996, Pages 405–407, https://doi.org/10.2307/2956458 Published: 01 July 1996
Time and Eternity
Journal Article Book Reviews Get access Time and Eternity. By Brian Leftow. (Cornell UP, 1991. Pp. xiv + 378. Price $42.95.) Philip L. Quinn Philip L. Quinn University of Notre Dame Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 46, Issue 182, January 1996, Pages 131–133, https://doi.org/10.2307/2956319 Published: 01 January 1996
Presentness, Dates and Eternity
On a principle of sufficient reason
In The Metaphysics of Creation and The Metaphysics of Theism , Norman Kretzmann defends an argument for God's existence which he claims to find in Aquinas. I assess this argument's key premise, a principle of sufficient reason, that: ‘PSR2: Every existing thing has a reason for its existence either in the necessity of its own nature or in the causal efficacy of some other beings’. PSR2 requires God's nature to explain His existence. Kretzmann doe…
The Cambridge Companion to Anselm
Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109), Benedictine monk and the second Norman archbishop of Canterbury, is regarded as one of the most important philosophers and theologians of the Middle Ages. The essays in this volume explore all of his major ideas both philosophical and theological, including his teachings on faith and reason, God's existence and nature, logic, freedom, truth, ethics, and key Christian doctrines. There is also discussion of his lif…
A Latin Trinity
Latin models of the Trinity begin from the existence of one God, and try to explain how one God can be three Persons.I offer an account of this based on an analogy with time-travel.A time-traveler returning to the same point in time repeatedly might have three successive events in his/her life occurring at that one location in public time.So too, God's life might be such that three distinct parts of His life are always occurring at once, though w…
No best world: Moral luck
William Rowe and others argue that if ours is a possible world than which there is a better, it follows that God does not exist. If this is correct, then if there is no best possible world, it is not so much as possible that God exist. I reject the key premise of Rowe's argument. The key to seeing that it is false, I suggest, is seeing that God is subject to something fairly called moral luck. In this first part of the article, I set up Rowe's ar…
No best world: Creaturely freedom
William Rowe and others argue that if this is a possible world than which there is a better, it follows that God does not exist. I now reject the key premise of Rowe's argument. I do so first within a Molinist framework. I then show that this framework is dispensable: really all one needs to block the better-world argument is the assumption that creatures have libertarian free will. I also foreclose what might seem a promising way around the ‘mor…
Impossible worlds
Richard Brian Davis offers several criticisms of a semantics I once proposed for subjunctive conditionals with impossible antecedents. I reply to these
Omnipotence
Two Trinities: Reply to Hasker
William Hasker replies to my arguments against Social Trinitarianism, offers some criticism of my own view, and begins a sketch of another account of the Trinity. I reply with some defence of my own theory and some questions about his
Swinburne on divine necessity
Most analytic philosophers hold that if God exists, He exists with broad logical necessity. Richard Swinburne denies the distinction between narrow and broad logical necessity, and argues that if God exists, His existence is narrow-logically contingent. A defender of divine broad logical necessity could grant the latter claim. I argue, however, that not only is God's existence broad-logically necessary, but on a certain understanding of God's rel…
God's Impassibility, Immutability, and Eternality
The article discusses Aquinas's views on God's impassibility, immutability, and eternality. Aquinas argued that God has no passions and God's perfection rules out his negative emotions, such as sorrow, fear, envy, or anger. He mentioned that God cannot be angry because he cannot feel sorrow and he cannot be injured. Aquinas believed that the emotional side of impassibility is a minor detail in the doctrine of God. God's causal impassivity is a co…
God's Impassibility, Immutability, and Eternality
God's Omnipotence
Thomas Aquinas (1224/6–1274) lived an active, demanding academic and ecclesiastical life that ended while he was still comparatively young. He nonetheless produced many works, varying in length from a few pages to a few volumes. The Oxford Handbook of Aquinas is an introduction to this influential author and a guide to his thought on almost all the major topics on which he wrote. The book begins with an account of Aquinas's life and works. The ne…
Philosophy (31 works) · Epistemology (28 works) · Theology and Philosophy of Evil (17 works) · Theology (13 works) · Computer Science (12 works) · Philosophy and Theoretical Science (10 works) · Argument (complex analysis) (8 works) · Medieval Philosophy and Theology (7 works) · Eternity (5 works) · Karl Barth and Christian Theology (5 works)