Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Actualities, Possibilities and Worlds

The book manuscript is all finished, submitted, and is about to move into production at Continuum.  Some of the material in the book was written this summer, some was written back when I was a graduate student, and some was written in between.  Memorably to me, some of the material on Spinoza was written in the hospital while my wife was asleep in labor with our first child.

The base for the manuscript was my dissertation, though a lot of new material was added, especially on a Spinozistic-Tractarian account of possibility that should be taken much more seriously than it is.  And this summer while revising I cut a number of passages, especially some technical ones, which looked to me like "the author is just trying to impress his dissertation committee."

Amusingly, as I was revising the manuscript I found that in it I had given and endorsed an argument against divine command theory that recently I criticized in print, where I attributed the argument to Wes Morriston.  When I wrote my critique, I completely forgot that I had once made the argument myself!  I actually find my own version of the argument fairly convincing, but not being able to decide if the argument or the critique was better, I cut the argument from the manuscript.

3 comments:

Jarrett Cooper said...

Congrats! Hopefully the production process goes smoothly.

I'm a little confused. Do you find the divine command theory compelling or lacking? I can't tell if you critiqued the divine command theory, or if you gave an argument for it.

Alexander R Pruss said...

I don't find the divine command theory compelling, but I also am not convinced by the Morriston argument against it.

Jarrett Cooper said...

Gotcha.

If I may ask, is there any meta-ethical (I hope I'm saying this properly) theory you endorse or do find the most compelling?