Andrew Bassford

Assistant Teaching Professor, CMU-Q

Bio

My research ranges across metaphysics, logic, the philosophy of religion, ethics, and the history of philosophy. A common thread is method: I bring the scholastic tradition of Thomas Aquinas and his medieval and modern successors into conversation with contemporary philosophy, using each to shed light on the other. One current project concerns paradoxes about God and logic. Can an all-powerful God create a stone too heavy for God to lift? In God and the Problem of Logic (Cambridge University Press, 2023), I defend an answer associated with Descartes, on which God's power is not bound by the laws of classical logic. In related papers, I explore how alternative logics, including ones that allow a statement to be both true and false, might resolve other theological puzzles. A second project concerns hylomorphism, Aristotle's theory that physical things are compounds of matter and form. I study unusual versions of it, including one that I argue was developed independently by the twelfth-century Chinese philosopher Zhu Xi, and another devised in early twentieth-century Germany to update Aristotle's view in light of modern physics. I have also published on essence and possibility (what makes a thing what it is, and how it might have been otherwise), on how we can be justified in generalizing from past experience, on ethical questions such as whether we can be obligated to do what we cannot do, and on memory and trauma in PTSD.

Publications and further details: https://philpeople.org/profiles/andrew-dennis-bassford