New Job and the Fall

The adventure continues at Centre College. It's a two year Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy position. One hope is that during my time there that I'll (finally) begin revising my dissertation. The good news is that I've had such a long time away from it, and have published some since finishing, that I feel the book will be much better than if I had worked on it directly after finishing my D.Phil.. Working out in more detail Henry's theory of real relations was essential (in "Henry of Ghent on Real Relations and the Trinity: The Case for Numerical Sameness Without Identity").

This summer I'll be finishing up some book reviews, a chapter on Duns Scotus' religious epistemology for a collection of essays, and prepare for the Fall semester.

"Indexicals and the Trinity: Two Non-Social Models"

Next month I've got a new article coming out in the inaugural issue of the Journal of Analytic Theology. It's called "Indexicals and the Trinity: Two Non-Social Models."

In this article I give a historical argument and a constructive argument.

The former is this: Brian Leftow's often used name "Latin Trinitarianism" for non-social Trinitarianism in the latin west is insufficiently informative. I cite several counter-examples.

The latter is this: if you join together some insights from David Kaplan and John Perry about indexicals (expressions like, "I love you," in which the referent of the pronoun is context dependent), Richard of St. Victor's definition of personhood, and the claim that the divine persons share numerically the same tokens of thought (including indexical and ambiguous tokens), then you get a new non-social model of the Trinity. I call Leftow's non-social model "hard LT" and mine "soft LT." Soft LT is nearer to Social models, but fails to be a social model. One consequence is that Leftow's "LT" not only doesn't have a monopoly on "Latin" models of the Trinity, but it isn't the only available non-social model on offer. There's at least two (and very likely others too).