HeyJaredProvisional Philosophical Reflections
This is a place to post some of my work which I don't try to publish in academic journals. The pieces are provisional. The place is a phrontistery.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 11
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- Sep 30, 2026
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- Jul 26, 2026
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The Challenges of Pauline Interpretation (opens the original)
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Paul the apostle wrote much of the New Testament.[1] His ideas have thoroughly influenced the world. Yet he frequently used language that is difficult to take literally. This point raises a challenge about how to interpret his writing and whether/how it ought to be used in the development of theological doctrine. Consider some examples.In 2 Cor. 12:9, he reports that God told him: “my power is made perfect in weakness.” (NIV) (Let’s set aside questions about whether the NIV is an accurate transl
The Problem of Imprecatory Prayer (opens the original)
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The imprecations of the Old Testament (especially the imprecatory Psalms) pose a challenge of interpretation. An imprecation is a speech-act that includes a curse, that is, an invocation of evil upon someone else. Taken literally, imprecations involve the use of language to express a desire for harm toward another. Having a desire for harm to come to another suggests (though does not entail) having malice toward the other. The Psalms contain many imprecations.[1] How should they be interpreted?O
What Explains Rational Creators of Rational Entities? (opens the original)
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In this post, I raised the question of whether or not human beings are made in God’s image and what the answer indicates for AI.Suppose that atheistic naturalism is true. There is no God; there are no non-natural entities. As Papineau puts it, “there is nothing more to the mental, biological and social realms than arrangements of physical entities.” What explains the existence of rational creators of derived rationality (i.e., humans who create frontier AI entities) if we suppose tha
Is AI God-like? (opens the original)
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Suppose that atheism is true. It follows that humans were not created by God and that the doctrine of the imago Dei (DID) is false.* On standard naturalistic versions of atheism, humans were not created by any intelligent entity. What does this supposition of atheism signify regarding the existence of frontier AI models? For one thing, there is a fundamental difference between such models and humans: the former are created, and indeed created in the image and likeness of human reasoners. The lat
A Triadic Challenge to Consequentialism (opens the original)
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I’ve been scrutinizing consequentialism. In a previous post, I raised a challenge: suppose that someone commits murder and immediately thereafter, the universe ceases to exist and hence there are no consequences to the murder. Isn’t it still morally wrong?The consequentialist might respond that the death of the murdered person is the wrong-making outcome. This reply raises a significant question. In a case of murder, is death a result, or is it a constitutive aspect of the murder? One might argu
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