A Logic of Creating

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-219
Author(s):  
Walter B. Redmond ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Modal Logic ◽  
Modal Interpretation ◽  
States Of Affairs ◽  
Existence Of God

I describe a “logic of creating” inspired by the “existential” argument of the existence of God in St. Thomas Aquinas’s De Ente et Essentia. suggest a modal reading of his reasoning based upon states-of-affairs said to be actual, contingent, necessary and the like. I take “creating” as teasing actuality out of possibility. After explaining the modal logic that I am assuming and relating it to Christian understandings of meaning and being, I present my modal interpretation, contrasting it with the views of three modern philosophers. In an appendix I will analyze the text of St. Thomas’s existential proof.

scholarly journals Gödel: The Third Degree

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham Oppy
Keyword(s):  
Modal Logic ◽  
Ontological Argument ◽  
Third Order ◽  
Existence Of God ◽  
The Third

Graham Oppy explores formulations of Gödel’s ontological argument for the existence of God in third-order modal logic and argues that these arguments do not allow us to decide between theistic and naturalistic positions.

The Naturalistic Fallacy and the Question of the Existence of God

1972 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 207-220
Author(s):  
J. Brenton Stearns
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
No Value ◽  
States Of Affairs ◽  
Existence Of God ◽  
Value Judgment ◽  
The World ◽  
Logical Reason ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
The Given

One of the widely held philosophical doctrines of this century in the English speaking world is that there is no logical bridge between fact and value, between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’. Human nature may be such that all or most of us approve common states of affairs. That is, there seem to be experiential or psychological ways of bridging the gap. But, on this view, no value judgment is ever inconsistent with any description of the world or of part of the world. Describe the world as you will, there is no logical reason to move on to any specific value judgment about the event or events under the given description.

The Logic of Questions and the Existence of God

1980 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
James J. Heaney
Keyword(s):  
Logic Of Questions ◽  
States Of Affairs ◽  
Existence Of God

O.I. When we ask ‘Does God exist?’, what kind of question are we asking and, further does it make a difference that it is one kind of question rather than another? To find answers to these we will begin by investigating the various kinds of questions to which it seems ‘Does God exist?’ belongs, including questions about physical states of affairs, questions requesting reasons, and questions concerned somehow with the difficult notion of ‘existence’. As part of this initial inquiry we will also examine the relation of presupposition to question and the significance of both negation and assertion in questions.

Aquinas’ Third Way Modalized

1998 ◽  
pp. 147-155
Author(s):  
Robert E. Maydole
Keyword(s):  
Modal Logic ◽  
Cosmological Argument ◽  
Existence Of God ◽  
Third Way ◽  
The Third

The Third Way is the most interesting and insightful of Aquinas' five arguments for the existence of God, even though it is invalid and has some false premises. With the help of a somewhat weak modal logic, however, the Third Way can be transformed into a argument which is certainly valid and plausibly sound. Much of what Aquinas asserted in the Third Way is possibly true even if it is not actually true. Instead of assuming, for example, that things which are contingent fail to exist at some time, we need only assume that contingent things possibly fail to exist at some time. Likewise, we can replace the assumption that if all things fail to exist at some time then there is a time when nothing exists, with the corresponding assumption that if all things possibly fail to exist at some time then possibly there is a time when nothing exists. These and other similar replacements suffice to produce a cogent cosmological argument.

Modal operators and functional completeness, II

1977 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 391-399 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. K. Thomason
Keyword(s):  
Modal Logic ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Kripke Semantics ◽  
Functional Completeness ◽  
Possible World ◽  
States Of Affairs ◽  
Propositional Modal Logic ◽  
Modal Operators ◽  
Fixed Frame ◽  
State Of Affairs

In the Kripke semantics for propositional modal logic, a frame W = (W, ≺) represents a set of “possible worlds” and a relation of “accessibility” between possible worlds. With respect to a fixed frame W, a proposition is represented by a subset of W (regarded as the set of worlds in which the proposition is true), and an n-ary connective (i.e. a way of forming a new proposition from an ordered n-tuple of given propositions) is represented by a function fw: (P(W))n → P(W). Finally a state of affairs (i.e. a consistent specification whether or not each proposition obtains) is represented by an ultrafilter over W. {To avoid possible confusion, the reader should forget that some people prefer the term “states of affairs” for our “possible worlds”.}In a broader sense, an n-ary connective is represented by an n-ary operatorf = {fw∣ W ∈ Fr}, where Fr is the class of all frames and each fw: (P(W))n → P(W). A connective is modal if it corresponds to a formula of propositional modal logic. A connective C is coherent if whether C(P1,…, Pn) is true in a possible world depends only upon which modal combinations of P1,…,Pn are true in that world. (A modal combination of P1,…,Pn is the result of applying a modal connective to P1,…, Pn.) A connective C is strongly coherent if whether C(P1, …, Pn) obtains in a state of affairs depends only upon which modal combinations of P1,…, Pn obtain in that state of affairs.

scholarly journals Uma avaliação do argumento ontológico modal de Plantinga

2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-84
Author(s):  
Domingos Faria
Keyword(s):  
Modal Logic ◽  
Ontological Argument ◽  
The Other ◽  
Possible World ◽  
Existence Of God ◽  
Good Argument ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One

Abstract My aim in this paper is to critically assess Plantinga’s modal ontological argument for existence of God, such as it is presented in the book “The Nature of Necessity” (1974). Plantinga tries to show that this argument is (i) valid and (ii) it is rational to believe in his main premise, namely “there is a possible world in which maximal greatness is instantiated”. On the one hand, I want to show that this argument is logically valid in both systems B and S5 of modal logic. On the other hand, I think that this argument is not a good argument to show that God exists or that it is rational to believe in God.

Modal Logic

1980 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian F. Chellas
Keyword(s):  
Modal Logic
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