Fischer on Foreknowledge and Explanatory Dependence

Authors

  • Philip Swenson Rutgers University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.24204/ejpr.v9i4.2034

Abstract

I explore several issues raised in John Martin Fischer’s Our Fate: Essays on God and Free Will. First I discuss whether an approach to the problem of freedom and foreknowledge that appeals directly to the claim that God’s beliefs depend on the future is importantly different from Ockhamism. I suggest that this dependence approach has advantages over Ockhamism. I also argue that this approach gives us good reason to reject the claim that the past is fixed. Finally, I discuss Fischer’s proposal regarding God’s knowledge of future contingents. I suggest that it may be able to secure comprehensive foreknowledge.

References

Fischer, John Martin. 2016. Our Fate: Essays on God and free will. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Foley, Richard. 1992. “The Epistemology of Belief and the Epistemology of Degrees of Belief.” American Philosophical Quarterly 29 (2): 111–24. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20014406.

James, William. 1896. “The Will to Believe.” The New World 5: 327–47.

Hawthorne, John, Daniel Rothschild, and Levi Spectre. 2016. “Belief is weak.” Philosophical Studies 173 (5): 1393–1404. doi:10.1007/s11098-015-0553-7.

Hunt, David P. 1993. “Divine Providence and Simple Foreknowledge.” Faith and Philosophy 10 (3): 394–414. doi:10.5840/faithphil19931036.

Plantinga, Alvin. 1986. “On Ockham’s Way Out.” Faith and Philosophy 3 (3): 235–69. doi:10.5840/faithphil19863322.

Swenson, Philip. 2016. “Ability, Foreknowledge, and Explanatory Dependence.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94 (4): 658–71. doi:10.1080/00048402.2015.1130731.

Todd, Patrick. 2013. “Soft facts and ontological dependence.” Philosophical Studies 164 (3): 829–44. doi:10.1007/s11098-012-9917-4.

Zimmerman, Dean. 2012. “The Providential Usefulness of Simple Foreknowledge.” In Reason, Metaphysics, and Mind: New Essays on the Philosophy of Alvin Plantinga, ed. by Kelly J. Clark and Michael C. Rea, 174–96. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Published

2017-12-19

How to Cite

Swenson, Philip. 2017. “Fischer on Foreknowledge and Explanatory Dependence”. European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 9 (4):51-61. https://doi.org/10.24204/ejpr.v9i4.2034.