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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Definition (D3) does not unduly limit the power of an omnipotent agent.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.D3 excludes essentially indexed states of affairs—e.g., 'Caesar himself crosses the Rubicon'—which cannot be reduced to unrestrictedly repeatable states without remainder.
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    • 2.An omnipotent being who cannot bring about haecceity-dependent states of affairs is genuinely less powerful than one who can, contra the claim that D3 imposes no undue limitation.
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    • 3.Plantinga's work on thisness and Duns Scotus's haecceitas establish that individual essences ground states of affairs irreducible to qualitative, repeatable descriptions.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.Flint and Freddoso's analysis shows D3 covertly smuggles in a Humean regularity assumption: that all causally producible states are type-repeatable across possible agents.
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    • 2.However, libertarian agent causation—defended by Roderick Chisholm and Timothy O'Connor—entails that some states of affairs are producible only by a specific agent with a specific causal history.
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    • 3.If any state of affairs is agent-essentially producible rather than repeatable across agents, D3 systematically misrepresents the scope of omnipotent power by excluding it from the domain.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.An agent's bringing about a state of affairs can always be 'cashed out' in terms of that agent's bringing about an unrestrictedly repeatable state of affairs that it is possible for some agent to bring about.
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    • 2.Necessarily, for any state of affairs s, if an agent a brings about s, then either s is an unrestrictedly repeatable state of affairs which it is possible for some agent to bring about, or else a brings about s by bringing about q, where q is an unrestrictedly repeatable state of affairs which it is possible for some agent to bring about.
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    • 3.For instance, an omnipotent agent can bring about the state of affairs that in one hour Parmenides lectures for the first time, by bringing about the unrestrictedly repeatable state of affairs that in one hour Parmenides lectures, when this lecture is Parmenides's first.
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