Simple Trinitarianism and Feature-Placing Sentences

Abstract

Some Trinitarians, such as Thomas Aquinas, wish to claim that God is mereologically simple; that is, God has no parts distinct from Himself. In this paper, I present Simple Trinitarianism, a view that takes God to be simple but, diverging from Aquinas, does not identify the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit with anything in our ontology. Nonetheless, Simple Trinitarians would like Trinitarian sentences to be true; thus, they must give a non-standard semantics for those sentences. I will focus on one possible semantics a Simple Trinitarian may give: taking Trinitarian claims to be translatable into feature-placing sentences, which posit property instantiation without requiring commitment to any objects that instantiate those properties. 2 As Dan Howard-Snyder points out, this puzzle has two readings: we could take "God" to be a count-noun (synonymous with "a god"), or as a name (Howard-Snyder, "Trinity"). I will generally treat "God" as a name, using "a God" to indicate when I wish to use it as a count-noun. But please substitute the count-noun reading as you prefer. 3 See Martinich, "Identity and Trinity," Cain, "The Doctrine of the Trinity," and Kleinschmidt, "Many-One Identity" for a sample. I will set aside such responses in this paper. 4 See van Inwagen, "And Yet They Are Not Three Gods," and Brower and Rea, "Material Constitution and the Trinity," for example. I will also set aside responses like these in this paper. 5 I am borrowing Dale Tuggy's terminology and division here. See Tuggy, "Trinity."

An episodic account of divine personhood

“…3.Notice that this position differs from the ‘simple trinitarianism’ recently defended by Shieva Kleinshmidt (2016; 2018). While both views deny that the persons are to be identified with entities distinct from God, the view I aim to defend identifies them with God, whereas the simple trinitarian denies that they are in our ontology at all.…”

Simple Trinitarianism and empty names

“…So the Simple Trinitarian needs something to bridge the gap between their sparse ontology and the truth of the Trinitarian sentences. There are many ways we might do this, one of which I discuss in Kleinschmidt (2016). In the next section, I will look at how we might use a semantics involving empty names to give Simple Trinitarians the tools they need.…”

“…4.In Kleinschmidt (2016), I showed how Simple Trinitarianism could be paired with a semantics based on that used by ontological nihilists in order to allow us to endorse the truth of Trinitarian sentences without requiring the typical ontological commitments.…”

“…5.This section, in my descriptions of One-Self views and Social Trinitarianism, and in my initial introduction of Simple Trinitarianism, will overlap largely with Kleinschmidt (2016), §1. For more on these views, see Tuggy (2013) and Howard-Snyder (2015).…”

The Son of God and Trinitarian Identity Statements

“…1 When all is said and done, we will have a sense of 'is' that sharpens trinitarian discourse and 1 Much has been written by contemporary philosophers of religion and philosophical theologians pertaining to identity statements and the Trinity (see e.g. van Inwagen 1988, Rea 2003, Merricks 2006, Hughes 2009, Kleinschmidt 2016. Our claim here is not that our articulation of trinitarian identity statements is the only or even the best articulation, which would be beyond the scope of a single research article.…”