Dissertation

Most of my current research is devoted, of course, to my dissertation. My dissertation, entitled Liberation as Apophasis, is an attempt to argue that the project of opposing oppression and centering the voices of oppressed is integral to maintaining the creator-creature distinction within classical theism.

Apophasis (saying what God is not) facilitates the maintenance of the creator-creature distinction. That is, by apophasis we can clarify what God is not, so as not to confuse God with a creature (either a creature in the world or a creature of the mind's own making). However, oppression--by its very nature--depends on a critical mass of people tolerating oppression. But the toleration of oppression presupposes a false conception of The Good. But on classical theism, God is The Good. Therefore, the toleration of oppression presupposes a false conception of God.

Thus, the project of liberation becomes integral in maintaining the creator-creature distinction precisely because the project of liberation is a form of apophasis. 

John Duns Scotus

Another current project of mine is on John Duns Scotus's conception of divine simplicity. Scotus’s account of divine simplicity (henceforth DDS) is often characterized as a radical revision and weakening of the doctrine. My assertion is that--by drawing on the insights of contemporary mereology--John Duns Scotus’s account of DDS can plausibly be demonstrated to preclude all forms of mereological complexity, thus circumventing the charge that his account weakens the doctrine.

By drawing on the philosopher AJ Cotnoir's work on the Weak Supplementation Principle, we can articulate the following conditional: if mereological disjointedness (non-overlap) is necessary for proper parthood and certain aspects of a thing are entirely mereologically coincident (i.e. share all of the same parts), then the possession of coincident yet extramentally distinct aspects does entail any real composition. I argue that we have reason from Scotus's own corpus to hold that Scotus at least implicitly holds that mereological disjointedness is a necessary condition for proper parthood and that God has no mereologically disjointed parts. As such, Scotus's account of divine simplicity entails and maintains the absolute mereological non-composition of God. Thus, the popular objection to Scotus's account of simplicity that his account entails real composition fails.