Ben Page’s Philosophical Ruminations

In a recent article Ryan Mullins (2026) offers a reply to Page’s (2025a) contention that a defender of timelessness can deny the existence of a ‘Precreation moment’ in order to avoid various arguments against timelessness and can do so without doing anything theologically suspect. Mullins suggests this cannot be done, and that a defender of timelessness is going to be left embracing a theologically unorthodox account of God’s relationship to creation. Here I’ll argue that Mullins’s response misses the mark in various ways and leaves everything Page claimed unscathed.

{Paper}

In recent years the notion of grounding has been extensively discussed within metaphysics, whilst there has also been a revival of interest within Thomistic thought. In this paper I want to explore the connections between one aspect of Thomistic metaphysics, namely its account of per se or essentially ordered causal chains, and grounding. The aim of the paper is to suggest that the two are very closely connected, and that contemporary metaphysicians would do well to attend to Medieval debates in further thinking about grounding. In order to do this the paper first outlines a dominant view of per se causal chains and then goes on to explicate an influential notion of grounding. After this it draws out the similarities and differences between per se causal chains and grounding and concludes with some thoughts as to how they might be related.

{Paper}

There is an objection posed against Brian Leftow’s conception of a timeless God which claims that God cannot know the temporal order of events, with Craig going so far as to assert that on Leftow’s view God’s life will be chaotic. If this objection is right then Leftow’s God cannot know the end from the beginning. This paper sets out the objection, describing how it arises from Leftow’s Anselmian view of God’s relationship to Creation and then shows several ways in which the objection can be overcome. Much of this centres around discussions of the direction of time and how Leftow’s God could know this direction. The paper then concludes by noting that what has come before can be modified so that other conceptions of divine timelessness can also explain how God knows the temporal order of Creation’s events.

{paper}

The thought that even though God has created, He actually existed alone without creation, what I’ll call ‘Precreation’, seems to be a key premise in some contemporary arguments against divine atemporalism. The question this paper addresses is whether we have any strong reasons for affirming Precreation. Before answering this question I will discuss how Precreation is understood and then how some arguments against divine atemporalism employ this notion. The bulk of the paper then examines the main arguments for endorsing Precreation and concludes that they don’t provide good grounds for adopting it. As a result, I suggest that atemporalists shouldn’t be troubled by those arguments against their view which require Precreation since they can plausibly reject those premises.

{Paper}

Non-reductive theories of powers/dispositions/capacities/potencies/potentialities are of much interest within contemporary metaphysics. There have been many discussions which attempt to explicate their nature as well as numerous others which suggest their application. Here I focus on providing an introduction to the former, the metaphysics of non-reductive powers, whilst briefly commenting on the latter, their applications. The paper will therefore offer a map of the debates and positions taken within present discussion.

{Paper}