McDaniel's New Critique of Grounding-Based Formulations of PSR

McDaniel, Kris. "The principle of sufficient reason and necessitarianism", Analysis (2018).

Here's the abstract:

Peter van Inwagen (1983: 202–4) presented a powerful argument against the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which I henceforth abbreviate as ‘PSR’. For decades, the consensus was that this argument successfully refuted PSR. However, now a growing consensus holds that van Inwagen’s argument is fatally flawed, at least when ‘sufficient reason’ is understood in terms of ground, for on this understanding, an ineliminable premiss of van Inwagen’s argument is demonstrably false and cannot be repaired. I will argue that this growing consensus is mistaken and that a powerful argument relevantly similar to van Inwagen’s should still concern us, even when we understand ‘sufficient reason’ in terms of ground.

The penultimate draft can be found here.

No comments:

A Modal Cosmological Argument for Atheism

Consider the following principle:  WEAK PMC: Possibly, every concrete object (and aggregate of such) that has an originating or sustaining e...

Buy Me A Coffee
This blog is fueled by coffee; if you'd like to support content creation, I'd appreciate it!