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A Puzzle with Its Own Literature, and a Way Around It

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A Puzzle with Its Own Literature, and a Way Around It

Article one gives the classical scholastic reply to the stone paradox, that "a stone God cannot lift" fails to describe any possible object. The puzzle has its own dedicated literature in twentieth-century analytic philosophy, and one proposed solution sidesteps the classical reply rather than repeating it.

George Mavrodes's 1963 paper "Some Puzzles Concerning Omnipotence" gave the paradox its standard modern form and argued along broadly the same lines article one reports: the phrase names a self-contradictory task rather than an achievable one exceeding God's power, so the inability to perform it is no limitation. C. Wade Savage and others refined the logical structure of the argument through the following decade, distinguishing more carefully between different formal statements of the paradox and showing that several popular versions equivocate on what "a stone too heavy to lift" is even supposed to mean.

Peter Geach proposed a different route altogether, arguing that "omnipotent," meaning able to do absolutely anything nameable, was never a coherent concept for classical theism to have committed itself to in the first place, and that "almighty," meaning having power over all things without any implied claim to an unlimited list of specific abilities, better captures what the biblical and creedal traditions actually mean. On Geach's account the entire stone puzzle is a confusion generated by a mistranslation of emphasis, pantokrator misread as a claim about an inventory of possible acts rather than as a claim about God's rule, which article one notes was already the concern behind the Greek term before the Latin omnipotentem reshaped how the West heard it.

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