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The UC San Diego Philosophy Department Presents:

Historical Perspectives on God's Order, Man's Order and the Order of Nature

March 4th to March 6th at UC San Diego

Organized by Eric Watkins

Abstracts and Papers


 • Marilyn McCord Adams, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “Powers versus Laws: God and the Order of Nature in Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham

Against the background of current debates about whether the regularities of the natural world are to be seen as governed by natural laws or explained by causal powers, medieval Aristotelians strike a distinctive pose.  When it comes to physics, biology, psychology, and cosmology, they are all Aristotelians who locate the explanation of quasi-regularities in inward principles of motion (formal functional principles) that are or give rise to causal powers.  Laws, by contrast, are promulgated by voluntary agents to regulate the behavior of voluntary agents.  When it comes to the order of the world, natural agency is one contributor.  But the laws and policies of an omnipotent God – not least as to when, where, and how much to concur with natural agency – make a decisive difference.  In this paper, I chart how these contrasting explanatory factors are related by Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham.

• Robert Merrihew Adams, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “Power, Cause, and Law in Malebranche’s Occasionalism

No 17th century philosopher contributed more importantly to the development of modern understandings of causality than Nicolas Malebranche. This paper will examine the question, how the causal concepts involved in Malebranche's occasionalist theory, and his arguments for it, are related to those that are presupposed in his views about divine and human freedom.

• Karl Ameriks, University of Notre Dame, “Kant and the End of Theodicy

Kant appears to have a very ambiguous response with regard to theodicy. He distinguishes his Critical position sharply from the theodicies of his predecessors, and he even speaks of a "failure of all philosophical theodicies"--and yet his own work, through the Critiques, the history essays, and the Religion, has as its end a position that seems much more positive about the general idea underlying traditional theodicies than is often recognized. His final theoretical position is characterized by a remarkably strong insistence on a tightly structured descriptive system of natural laws, which may be "mechanistic" all the way down and excludes miracles and other popular ways of introducing supernatural effects. Nonetheless, Kant seems equally committed to a normative and quasi-providential "Miltonic" vision of the created realm as a drama with effects that serve an all inclusive non-natural purpose, justifying the ways of God to man after all. Although Kant's complex position here may have several advantages over other approaches, it does seem difficult to justify even on its own terms.

• Martha Bolton, Rutgers University, “Leibniz on Monadic Change

According to Leibniz, every simple substance—mind, soul, or soul-like entelechy—is a living mirror of the universe. Everything that exists, every thing that happens, and the order which prevails throughout the universe can be inferred from what is contained in any given simple substance considered at any moment. In an effort to develop the theme of this conference, the present paper examines the order that obtains among the successive acts of a simple substance. Three issues are considered: (i) the theoretical significance of the claim that the force inherent in simple substances entails cognition, or something analogous to sensation and appetite which we are aware of within ourselves; (ii) the difference between the laws of final cause that govern change in a simple substance and the laws of efficient causality to which bodily changes are subjected; (iii) the degree to which any of the several laws to which an individual immaterial substance conforms determine the particular changes which occur in that substance.

• Andrew Chignell, Cornell University, “Kant on Hoping for a Miracle

Kant says that his rational religion is developed as a response to the question “What may I hope?” This is puzzling for two reasons. First, Kant is known for advocating the much stronger attitude of belief or faith (German: “Glaube”) towards traditional religious doctrines about God’s existence and the immortality of the soul. Second, Kant seems to endorse a modal condition on rational hope that requires its object to be, for all the subject knows, metaphysically possible. Clearly this will allow run-of-the-mill, causally impossible miracles to be the objects of rational hope. Kant goes on, however, to specify the main and most important object of religious hope (namely, the conversion of a radically evil will) in such a way that it does not obviously satisfy his own condition. In this paper I consider the nature of rational hope in light of the constraints imposed by both natural and divine order, and then offer a proposal regarding how to rescue Kant’s overall account.

• Daniel Garber, Princeton University, “Divine Laws and Divine Decrees: Laws of Nature in Descartes and Leibniz”

In this paper I discuss the different ways in which God grounds the laws of nature for Descartes and Leibniz. In Descartes, the laws of nature follow out of the way in which an immutable God sustains the world from moment to moment, while in Leibniz, they follow out of decrees, metaphysical principles that God (freely) chooses to impose on this best of all possible worlds. These strategies are in radical contrast to those of Hobbes and Spinoza, who attempt to impose order on the world without appeal to a transcendent God.

• Desmond Hogan, Princeton University, “Kant's Theory of Divine and Secondary Causation

The paper considers Kant’s contributions to the debate between proponents of occasionalism, conservationism, and general concurrence as the three main competing models of God’s relation to creaturely causes in the late medieval and early modern periods. Contrary to a widely accepted idea that the critical philosophy forbids metaphysical theorizing regarding God‘s relation to creaturely causes, Kant’s mature writings defend conservationism against the concurrentism of Leibniz, Wolff and Baumgarten. It is thus necessary to ask how Kant’s preferred model of divine and secondary causation relates to his transcendental idealism, and how he can uphold its correctness in the face of critical strictures on knowledge.

• Steve Nadler, University of Wisconsin, Madison, “The Order of Nature and Moral Luck: Maimonides on Divine Providence

A look at the way in which the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides explains the workings of divine providence, and especially how the virtuous person, through the use of reason and intellect, might be able to take advantage of the order of nature and escape the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. We will focus on a particularly troublesome passage that has baffled commentators since the 12th century.

• Donald Rutherford, University of California, San Diego, “Laws and Powers in Leibniz

Laws and powers vie for theoretical primacy in Leibniz’s philosophy. The concept of law is integral to his understanding of the order of nature and of God’s providential direction of creation. At the same time, however, he holds that natural laws themselves must be explained in terms of natural powers: intrinsic sources of activity from which instances of change arise. My paper defends the thesis that for Leibniz laws and powers are equally basic from an explanatory point of view: laws presuppose powers and powers presuppose laws. In conclusion I advance a speculative hypothesis about the character of the laws that play a fundamental explanatory role in Leibniz’s account of substantial change. Surprisingly, I suggest, these turn out to include the very physical laws that initiate his claim for a metaphysical grounding of laws in substantial powers.

• Eric Watkins, University of California, San Diego, “Kant on Man, God, and the Order of Nature

Most early modern philosophers have thought that God is the source of both the laws of nature and the moral law, even as they disagree about whether the content and normativity of these laws stem from God’s immutability, God’s will, or some other divine attribute. It is often thought that Kant responds by secularizing and anthropomorphizing the natural and moral order such that he, in effect, replaces God with man. For on his account man is responsible for the lawfulness of nature and for the content and authority of the moral law (through autonomy). In this paper, I argue that Kant adopts a much more nuanced view of the source of order in both the moral and natural world, one that is interesting both for assessing Kant’s reaction to the early modern period and for thinking about what positions might be attractive in a contemporary context.