No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
The ‘harder problem’ of the devil's fall is still a problem: a reply to Wood
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 December 2016
Abstract
William Wood has importantly distinguished between a ‘hard problem’ and a ‘harder problem’ in explaining the devil's fall. He points out that previous attempts to explain Satan's sin have focused only on the former and cleverly argues that consumer preference theory, when applied to Anselm's account of Satan's sin, can solve the latter. In this article, I demonstrate that Wood's solution (i) undermines itself, (ii) fails to absolve God of the charge of being tyrannical, (iii) surreptitiously reintroduces the harder problem, and (iv) eventually collapses back into the initial hard problem. I conclude by suggesting why one might nonetheless be motivated to distinguish between the two problems and what this implies about a belief in the devil's fall.
- Type
- Articles
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016
References
Adams, Marilyn Mccord (1992) ‘St. Anselm on evil: De casu diaboli’, Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale, 3, 423–451.Google Scholar
Anselm, (1968) S. Anselmi Cantuariensis Archiepiscopi Opera Omnia, Ad fidem codicum recensuit Franciscus Selesius Schmitt (Stuttgart – Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Frommann Verlag).Google Scholar
Anselm, (1998) Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works, Davis, Brian & Evans, G. R. (eds) (New York: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
Barnwell, Michael (2009) ‘
De casu diaboli: an examination of faith and reason via a discussion of the devil's sin’, Saint Anselm Journal, 6, 1–8.Google Scholar
Barnwell, Michael (2010) The Problem of Negligent Omissions: Medieval Action Theories to the Rescue (Leiden: Brill).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Christensen, David (2009) ‘Disagreement as evidence: the epistemology of controversy’, Philosophy Compass, 4, 756–767.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Deme, Daniel (2002) ‘The “origin” of evil according to Anselm of Canterbury’, Heythrop Journal, 43, 170–184.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goolsbee, Austan, Levitt, Steven, & Syverson, Chad (2016) Microeconomics, 2nd edn (New York: Worth Publishers).Google Scholar
Kane, G. Stanley (1981) Anselm's Doctrine of Freedom and the Will (Lewiston NY: Edwin Mellen Press).Google Scholar
Kelly, Thomas (2005) ‘The epistemic significance of disagreement’, in Szabó Gender, Tamar (ed.) Oxford Studies in Epistemology, I (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 167–196.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kent, Bonnie (1995) Virtues of the Will: The Transformation of Ethics in the Late Thirteenth Century (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press).Google Scholar
Macdonald, Scott (1999) ‘Primal sin’, in Matthews, Gareth B. (ed.) The Augustinian Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press), 110–139.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rogers, Katherin (2008) Anselm on Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Salvatore, Dominick (2008) Principles of Microeconomics, 5th edn (New York: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
Timpe, Kevin (2012) ‘The arbitrariness of the primal sin’, Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion, 5, 186–205.Google Scholar
van Inwagen, Peter (2000) ‘Free will remains a mystery’, Philosophical Perspectives, 14, 1–20.Google Scholar
Visser, Sandra & Williams, Thomas (2009) Anselm, Great Medieval Thinkers (New York: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
Willows, Adam M. (2014) ‘Augustine, the origin of evil, and the mystery of free will’, Religious Studies, 50, 255–269.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wood, William (2016) ‘Anselm of Canterbury on the fall of the devil: the hard problem, the harder problem, and a new formal model of the first sin’, Religious Studies, 52, 223–245.CrossRefGoogle Scholar