State of affairs (f) is identifiable with or analyzable as a conjunctive state of affairs with three conjuncts: (1) Plato decides to write a dialogue, (2) there is no antecedent sufficient causal condition of Plato's deciding to write a dialogue, and (3) there is no concurrent sufficient causal condition of Plato's deciding to write a dialogue.
Conjunctive state of affairs(describing how this particular state is composed of multiple parts)
A situation made up of multiple separate conditions or facts that all must be true at the same time (like connecting things with 'and').
Conjuncts(the three separate conditions being listed in this analysis)
Individual parts or conditions that are joined together; think of them as separate claims connected by 'and'.
Identifiable with(describing the relationship between the overall state and its parts)
Can be understood as being the same thing as, or equivalent to, something else.
Plato(the person whose decision to write is being analyzed in this example)
An ancient Greek philosopher (around 428-348 BCE) who wrote famous dialogues exploring big questions about knowledge, justice, and reality.
state of affairs(Chisholm 1970)
A genus of which both events and facts are treated as species, used to capture their close ontological kinship without fully identifying them.
sufficient causal condition(Critique of cosmological argument for God's existence)
A condition that is enough on its own to bring about an effect; the text notes there are at least two relevant senses of this phrase that must be distinguished
Because of the wide disparity among contingent states of affairs, (a)–(f), one might despair of finding an analysis of omnipotence that both deals satisfactorily with all of these states of affairs and implies that an omnipotent being has, intuitively speaking, sufficient power. Is such pessimism warranted, or is omnipotence analyzable?