I am an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Brigham Young University. I’m interested in metaphysics, in particular the relationships that essence, ground, and metaphysical generation bear to one another. I’m also interested in various issues in philosophy of religion and philosophical theology.
I’m also involved in the Latter-day Saint Philosophy Project which you can learn more about by following this link.
Metaphysics
[Nothing Explains Essence] Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy (forthcoming)
Abstract:
Essentialist facts, facts about what is essential to what, are explanatorily distinctive. They can often be appealed to in the course of metaphysically explaining some fact, while themselves serving as explanatory ends. In other words, when one arrives in the course of an explanation at an essentialist fact, it often seems like a legitimate place to stop. In certain contexts, they seem to provide a metaphysical backstop to making further explanatory demands. This paper defends the view that essentialist facts are zero-grounded. Just as we can think of certain logical truths as truths derivable from the empty set of premises, we can think of the zero-grounded facts as the facts that obtain in virtue of the empty set of facts. On this picture, the essentialist facts are grounded, but they are grounded literally in nothing—grounded for free, automatically, and by default.
This view has been unpopular for many reasons, including concerns about the obscurity of the notion of zero-grounding. Concerns notwithstanding, I make the case that the zero-grounding view fares better than the alternative ground-theoretic accounts in making sense of certain explanatory roles essences plausibly play. After some preliminary remarks on how we should understand what an essentialist fact is as well as which ones serve as explanation stoppers, I introduce a widespread and attractive picture of what the essentialist facts are; they are domain fixing facts. I then argue that this feature of the essentialist facts well-positions them to serve as explanation stoppers. Afterwards, I argue that the zero-ground view best accommodates the domain-fixing conception of essence.
[On the Reduction of Constitutive to Consequential Essence] Ergo vol 9 (55) July 2023
Abstract:
Fine has introduced an important distinction between constitutive and consequential essence. The constitutive essence of an object comprises truths directly definitive of the object whereas the consequential essence comprises the class of truths following logically from the directly definitive truths (subject to certain constraints). Essence theorists then face a challenge: how shall we draw the line between the truths directly definitive of an object and those that are mere consequences of them? Fine offers an answer. We start with the object’s consequential essence and then filter out from its consequential essence the propositions that are there on account of being partly grounded in others. The object’s constitutive essence comprises what’s left. I argue against this account by presenting a range of cases where it is clear that certain truths ought to count as constitutively essential for certain objects but where Fine’s account rules them out.
[Essentialist Non-Reductivism] Philosophers’ Imprint vol. 22, Jan 2023
Abstract:
According to many contemporary metaphysicians, we ought to theorize in terms of grounding because of its promise to explicate the idea of reality having a layered structure. However, a tension emerges when one combines the layered structure view with the view that higher-level facts are not reducible to lower-level facts. This tension emerges from two problems. The first problem arises from the fact that grounding explanations entail true universal generalizations. In order to satisfy this constraint, we will face serious pressure to make sure the entities involved in the grounded facts are appropriately connected to the entities involved in the grounding facts, otherwise the generalizations associated with those grounding claims will come out false. However, ensuring the appropriate connections seemingly leaves no way for the non-reductivist to fully squeeze out reference to higher-level entities as we descend the levels of ground. This threatens the result that some higher-level facts must be taken as fundamental, which the non-reductivist cannot accept.
I argue that we can resolve the tension by taking the connections at issue to be essentially true. We can call this view essentialist non-reductivism. One significant upshot of the argument is that we can see not only that essentialist non-reductivism successfully resolves the tension, but that in principle no better solution could be offered.
[Title Redacted for Blind Review]
Abstract: We argue that contra Leech (2020, 2018); Romero (2019); Mackie (2020) that essentialists can muster a plausible answer to the question “from essence, whence necessity?” By appeal to the domain-fixing conception of essence advanced by Fine (2005), Dasgupta (2016), and others, we show that there is a principled way to secure the modal import of the essentialist truths.
Philosophy of Religion/Philosophical Theology
[Sider’s Puzzle and the Mormon Afterlife] (with Derek Haderlie), Journal of Analytic Theology vol. 8, Aug 2020. Runner up in the Diversifying the Journal of Analytic Theology prize competition
Abstract:
There is a puzzle about divine justice stemming from the fact that God seems required to judge on the basis of criteria that are vague. Justice is proportional, however, God it seems violates proportionality by sending those on the borderline of heaven to an eternity in hell. This is Ted Sider’s problem of Hell and Vagueness. On the face of things, this poses a challenge only to a narrow class of classical Christians, those that hold a retributive theory of divine punishment. We show that this puzzle can be extended to the picture of divine judgement and the afterlife found in Mormon theology. This is significant because at first glance, the Mormon picture of the afterlife looks like it fails to co-operate with Sider’s puzzle. In Mormon theology, there are not two afterlife states, but three: a low, a middle, and a high kingdom. There is no afterlife state quite like Hell, and the states that function similarly to Hell aren’t places of eternal suffering.
We argue that appearances are misleading. While it may be true that no place in the Mormon afterlife is bad in the sense that its inhabitants suffer eternal bodily harm, it is true that many of the places in the Mormon afterlife are bad in the sense that their inhabitants lack access to significant goods. This allows Sider’s puzzle to re-engage as a puzzle about distributive Justice. After setting out this version of the puzzle, we argue that Mormon theology has sufficient resources to reject proportionality as a constraint on divine judgment by adopting a nuanced version of universalism.
[Faith: How to be Partial while Respecting the Evidence] (with Derek Haderlie) in Australasian Philosophical Review vol 5, May 2022.
Abstract:
Some think that partiality is normative requirement of faith. Katherine Dormandy disagrees, arguing that partiality runs afoul of epistemic norms that faith requires. We offer an account of how one can respect the partiality requirement while respecting the epistemic norms as well. Central to the account is the role that confrontation plays in negotiating faith relationships where the parties have damning evidence about the object of faith. We claim that in confrontation one satisfies the seemingly competing norms for faith.
[Evil and Embodiment: Towards a Latter-day Saint Non-Identity Theodicy (forthcoming) Religious Studies]
Abstract:
We offer an account of the metaphysics of persons rooted in Latter-day saint scripture that vindicates the essentiality of origins. We then give theological support for the claim that prospects for the success of God’s soul making project are bound up in God creating particular persons. We observe that these persons would not have existed were it not for the occurrence of a variety of evils (of even the worst kinds), and we conclude that Latter-day saint theology has the resources to endorse a strong soul-making non-identity theodicy.
We then introduce two complications for this account rooted in the problem of horrendous evils. First, horrendous evils threaten to undermine our confidence that God is good to each created person within the context of their life. And second, horrendous evils raise concerns about the value of persons whose existence depends on the occurrence of those evils. We may wonder whether those whose existence depends on the occurrence of horrendous evils are valuable enough to motivate God’s allowance of those evils. We show that by attending to important structural features of a post-mortem, pre-eschatological state called the spirit world, Latter-day Saints can ameliorate these concerns about horrendous evils
[Title Redacted for Blind Review]
Abstract:
One variant of the problem of hiddenness we can call the conversational problem of hiddenness. Divine love, it seems, should move God to address us; to hail or call out to us in a way that it is clearly God addressing us and clearly us who is being addressed. God’s so addressing us could remove our epistemic excuses for disbelief. But God is largely silent. Being explicitly addressed by God in this way is exceptional, and seems unavailable to many.
I offer a partial explanation as to why. First, I argue that there is a deep connection between being addressed by God in a way that removes reasonable grounds for disbelief and being called by God to speak on God’s behalf. Second, I argue that that a range of illocutionary harms (harms that affect one’s ability to perform speech acts one is normally socially entitled to) can be brought about by deputizing someone to speak on one’s behalf. These harms are exacerbated in the case of being deputized to speak on behalf of God. In particular, it can frustrate one’s attempts to speak merely for one’s self. Thus, God has reasons for failing to so address us. Doing so threatens our linguistic agency. Now God can address us without causing illocutionary harm, but the natural ways God can do so fail to remove grounds for reasonable disbelief. So, in order to avoid threat of undermining our linguistic agency, God addresses us in ways that preserve reasonable doubt about God’s existence.
In Progress:
A paper on essence and explanatory arguments
A paper on essence and physicalism
A paper on Divine Hiddenness
A paper on the role of speech acts in religious rites
A paper on preferentialist conceptions of divine judgment
Taylor-Grey Miller
Department of Philosophy
Brigham Young University
email: taylorgrey [dot] miller [at] gmail
