God’s Place in Logical Space

Abstract

It has been argued recently that classical theism and Lewisian modal realism are incompatible theses. The most substantial argument to this effect takes the form of a trilemma. It argues that no sense can be made of God’s being a necessary being in the modal realistic picture, on pain of, among other things, modal collapse. The question of this essay is: Is that so? My goal here is to detail the reasons that have been offered in support of this contention and then defend the coherence of theistic modal realism from the trilemma. I call my reply to the argument an “Anselmian-Thomistic” defense, since it appeals to resources from classical medieval philosophy, especially from Anselm and Aquinas.

Heraclitean Flux Metaphysics

“…The reader might benefit by comparing perdurantism and endurantism to the two dominant positions of identity within possible worlds modal metaphysics, counterpart theory and transworld identity theory, respectively (cf. Lewis 1968, Chisholm 1967, Bassford 2020, Bassford 2021.…”