Abstract
A brief summary of the results so far obtained is in order at this point. We have seen that to say a being is omniscient is to say that that being justifiably believes all and only true propositions, and to say that a being is essentially omniscient is to say that that being is necessarily such that he justifiably believes all and only true propositions. Further, we have seen the failure of the arguments for the claim that there is an incompatibility between persons’ having freedom and a being’s having essential foreknowledge of what persons will do.
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Notes and References
Augustine, De Trinitate, XV, 13.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologia, Ia, 14, 8.
Charles Adams and Paul Tannery (eds) Oeuvres de Descartes, 12 volumes (Paris: Leopold Cerg, 1897–1910) vol. I, p. 147.
That a view of this sort might be possible is defended in Thomas V. Morris’s recent piece, ‘Necessary Beings’, Mind, 94 (1985) pp. 263–72.
I intend the notion of bringing about to be understood so that there are no causally sufficient conditions for an action in question when a person can be properly said to have brought about something.
An excellent discussion of Molina’s views can be found in Robert Adams, ‘Middle Knowledge and the Problem of Evil’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 14 (1977) pp. 109–17.
Ibid.
David Lewis, ‘Causation’, in Sosa (ed.) Causation and Conditionals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).
Jonathan Bennett, ‘Counterfactuals and Temporal direction’, Philosophical Review, 93 (1984) pp. 57–91.
Marshall Swain, Reasons and Knowledge (Ithaca: Cornell University Press) pp. 58–65.
Cf. Adams’s account of Suarez’s position in ‘Middle Knowledge’.
Adams, p. 110. I have altered his numbering of propositions in this passage and in the others which I shall quote to accord with mine.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 111.
Ibid.
Adams gives the following locations for counter-examples to the law of CEM: Lewis, Counterfactuals, pp. 79f., and John Pollock, ‘Four Kinds of Conditionals’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 12 (1975) p. 53.
Adams, p. 111.
Adams, p. 110.
Note that the ‘because’ in these explanations is not causal.
Anthony Kenny, The God of the Philosophers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).
Ibid., pp. 68–71.
Adams, pp. 113–14.
Ibid., p. 114.
Ibid.
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© 1986 Jonathan L. Kvanvig
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Kvanvig, J.L. (1986). The Nature of God’s Knowledge. In: The Possibility of an All-Knowing God. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18437-8_4
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