Hud Hudson - Böcker

All of us some of the time, and some of us all of the time, strive to achieve our own happiness and well-being solely on the dubious strength of our own individual skills, knowledge, willpower, and ingenuity. And we fail, often succumbing to one of the many masks of the capital vice known as Sloth.This volume explores the occasions or consequences of such failures or else strategies for their avoidance. The chapters are loosely connected insofar as they are either inquiries into certain kinds of temptation or confessions of the costs of discovering that one has been thus seduced into sin, or exhortations to prepare oneself to avoid those temptations and their costs. Primary themes include the noetic effects of sin and their impact on interpersonal relationships, forbidden knowledge and self-censorship, duties and rewards of academic mentoring, the theology of creation, chronophobia and existential angst, skeptical theism and its costs, revelation and testimonial knowledge, a common challenge for Judaism and Christianity and Islam, and the philosophy of pessimism and its peculiar temptations.

Frequently, alleged irreconcilable conflicts between science and religion are instead misdescribed battles concerning negotiable philosophical assumptions--conflicts between metaphysics and metaphysics. Hud Hudson provides a two-stage illustration of this claim with respect to the putative inconsistency between the doctrines of The Fall and Original Sin and the deliverances of contemporary science. The tension in question emerges through a study of the many forms the religious doctrines have assumed over the centuries and through a review of some well-established scientific lessons on the origin and history of the universe and of human persons. The first stage: After surveying various paths of retreat which involve reinterpreting and impoverishing Original Sin and minimizing and dehistoricizing The Fall, one version of moderate realism about the doctrines is articulated, critically evaluated, and found both consistent with contemporary science and suitable to play a crucial role in the theist's confrontation with the Problem of Evil. The second stage: Recent work in the philosophy of time and in the philosophy of religion provides intriguing support for a Hypertime Hypothesis (a species of multiverse hypothesis), distinctive for positing a series of successive hypertimes, each of which hosts a spacetime block. After arguing that the Hypertime Hypothesis is a genuine epistemic possibility and critically discussing its impact on a number of debates in metaphysics and philosophy of religion, Hudson reveals a strategy for unabashed, extreme literalism concerning The Fall and Original Sin which nevertheless has the extraordinary and delightful feature of being thoroughly consistent with the reigning scientific orthodoxy.

Fallenness and Flourishing opens with defenses of the philosophy of pessimism, first on secular grounds and then again on distinctively Christian grounds with reference to the fallenness of human beings. It then details traditional Christian reasons for optimism with which this philosophy of pessimism can be qualified. Yet even among those who accept the general religious worldview underlying this optimism, many nevertheless willfully resist the efforts required to cooperate with God and instead pursue happiness and well-being (or flourishing) on their own power. On the assumption that we can acquire knowledge in such matters, arguments are presented in favour of objective-list theories of well-being and the Psychic Affirmation theory of happiness, and the question 'How are people faring in this quest for self-achieved happiness and well-being?' is critically investigated. The unfortunate result is that nearly everywhere, people are failing. The causes of failure, it is argued, are found in the noetic effects of sin--especially in inordinate self-love and self-deception, but also in insufficient self-love--and such failure manifests both in widespread unhappiness and in that most misunderstood of the seven deadly sins, sloth. After a literary tour designed to reveal the many different ways that sloth can damage a life, Hud Hudson provides a constructive proposal for responding to this predicament featuring the virtue of obedience. This virtue is analysed, illustrated, and located in a new theory of well-being.

Hud Hudson offers a fascinating examination of philosophical reasons to believe in hyperspace. He begins with some stage-setting discussions, offering his analysis of the term 'material object', noting his adherence to substantivalism, confessing his sympathies regarding principles of composition and decomposition, identifying his views on material simples, material gunk, and the persistence of material objects, and preparing the reader for later discussions with introductory remarks on eternalism, modality and recombination, vagueness, bruteness, and the epistemic role of intuitions. The subsequent chapters are loosely organized around the theme of hyperspace. Hudson explores nontheistic reasons to believe in hyperspace in chapter 1 (e.g. reasons arising from reflection on incongruent counterparts and fine-tuning arguments), theistic reasons in chapter 7 (e.g. reasons arising from reflection on theistic puzzles known as the problem of the best and the problem of evil), and some distinctively Christian reasons in chapter 8 (e.g. reasons arising from reflection on traditional Christian themes such as heaven and hell, the Garden of Eden, angels and demons, and new testament miracles). In the intervening chapters, Hudson inquires into a variety of puzzles in the metaphysics of material objects that are either generated by the hypothesis of hyperspace, focusing on the topics of mirror determinism and mirror incompatibilism, or else informed by the hypothesis of hyperspace, with discussions of receptacles, boundaries, contact, occupation, and superluminal motion. Anyone engaged with contemporary metaphysics will find much to stimulate them here.

Hud Hudson offers a fascinating examination of philosophical reasons to believe in hyperspace. He begins with some stage-setting discussions, offering his analysis of the term 'material object', noting his adherence to substantivalism, confessing his sympathies regarding principles of composition and decomposition, identifying his views on material simples, material gunk, and the persistence of material objects, and preparing the reader for later discussions with introductory remarks on eternalism, modality and recombination, vagueness, bruteness, and the epistemic role of intuitions. The subsequent chapters are loosely organized around the theme of hyperspace. Hudson explores nontheistic reasons to believe in hyperspace in chapter 1 (e.g. reasons arising from reflection on incongruent counterparts and fine-tuning arguments), theistic reasons in chapter 7 (e.g. reasons arising from reflection on theistic puzzles known as the problem of the best and the problem of evil), and some distinctively Christian reasons in chapter 8 (e.g. reasons arising from reflection on traditional Christian themes such as heaven and hell, the Garden of Eden, angels and demons, and new testament miracles). In the intervening chapters, Hudson inquires into a variety of puzzles in the metaphysics of material objects that are either generated by the hypothesis of hyperspace, focusing on the topics of mirror determinism and mirror incompatibilism, or else informed by the hypothesis of hyperspace, with discussions of receptacles, boundaries, contact, occupation, and superluminal motion. Anyone engaged with contemporary metaphysics will find much to stimulate them here.

Hud Hudson presents an innovative view of the metaphysics of human persons according to which human persons are material objects but not human organisms. In developing his account, he formulates and defends a unique collection of positions on parthood, persistence, vagueness, composition, identity, and various puzzles of material constitution.The author also applies his materialist metaphysics to issues in ethics and in the philosophy of religion. He examines the implications for ethics of his metaphysical views for standard arguments addressing the moral permissibility of our treatment of human persons and their parts, fetuses and infants, the irreversibly comatose, and corpses. He argues that his metaphysics provides the best foundation in the philosophy of religion for the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body.Hudson addresses a broad range of metaphysical issues, but among his most strikingly original contributions are his defense of the "Partist" view (according to which a material object can exactly occupy multiple, overlapping regions of spacetime) and his argument for the compatibility of Christianity with a materialistic theory of human persons.