Fischer’s Fate with Fatalism

Authors

  • Christoph Jäger University of Innsbruck

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.24204/ejpr.v9i4.2027

Abstract

John Martin Fischer’s core project in Our Fate (2016) is to develop and defend Pike-style arguments for theological incompatibilism, i. e., for the view that divine omniscience is incompatible with human free will. Against Ockhamist attacks on such arguments, Fischer maintains that divine forebeliefs constitute so-called hard facts about the times at which they occur, or at least facts with hard ‘kernel elements’. I reconstruct Fischer’s argument and outline its structural analogies with an argument for logical fatalism. I then point out some of the costs of Fischer’s reasoning that come into focus once we notice that the set of hard facts is closed under entailment.

References

Adams, Marilyn McCord. 1967. ‘Is the Existence of God a “Hard” Fact?’ The Philosophical Review, 76: 492–503, reprinted in Fischer 1989a: 74–85. doi:10.2307/2183285.

Finch, Alicia. 2017. ‘Logical Fatalism’, in The Routledge Companion to Free Will, ed. Kevin Timpe, Megan Griffith, and Neil Levy, 191-202. New York: Routledge.

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Finch, Alicia, and Ted Warfield. 1999. ‘Fatalism: Logical and Theological’, Faith and Philosophy, 16: 233–38. doi:10.5840/faithphil199916218.

Fischer, John Martin. 1983. ‘Freedom and Foreknowledge’, The Philosophical Review, 92: 67–79, reprinted in, and quoted from, Fischer 1989a: 86–96. doi:10.2307/2184522.

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Fischer, John Martin (ed.). 1989a. God, Foreknowledge, and Freedom (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press).

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Widerker, David. 1989. ‘Two Fallacious Objections to Adams’s Soft/Hard Fact Distinction’, Philosophical Studies, 57: 103–07. doi:10.1007/BF00355665.

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Published

2017-12-19

How to Cite

Jäger, Christoph. 2017. “Fischer’s Fate With Fatalism”. European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 9 (4):25-38. https://doi.org/10.24204/ejpr.v9i4.2027.