Supervaluationism and the timeless solution to the foreknowledge problem

  1. Cobreros, Pablo 1
  1. 1 Department of Philosophy University of Navarra
Revista:
Scientia et fides

ISSN: 2300-7648

Año de publicación: 2016

Volumen: 4

Número: 1

Páginas: 61-75

Tipo: Artículo

DOI: 10.12775/SETF.2016.015 DIALNET GOOGLE SCHOLAR lock_openAcceso abierto editor

Otras publicaciones en: Scientia et fides

Objetivos de desarrollo sostenible

Resumen

If God knew I were going to write this paper, was I able to refrain from writing it this morning? One possible response to this question is that God's knowledge does not take place in time and therefore He does not properly fore-know. According to this response, God knows absolutely everything, it's just that He knows everything outside of time. The so-called timeless solution was one of the influential responses to the foreknowledge problem in classical Christian Theology. This solution, however, seemed to lose support in the recent debate. For example, Pike claims that "the doctrine of God's timelessness entered Christian Theology (only) because Platonic thought was stylish at the time" (Pike, 1970, 190) and Hasker (2001) catalogues this as one of the minor solutions to the problem. One possible source for this general attitude towards timelessness is the thought that the very idea of timelessness is incoherent. In this paper I argue that that the timeless solution to the foreknowledge problem is congenial with the supervaluationist theory of branching time and that this formal framework provides, in fact, a precise characterization of the timeless solution to the foreknowledge problem. The views presented in this paper are in line with those of Kretzmann and Stump (1981), Leftow (1991) and De Florio and Frigerio (2015).

Referencias bibliográficas

  • Adams, M. (1967). Is the existence of God a ‘hard’ fact? Philosophical Review, 76: 492–503.
  • Belnap, N. and Green, M. (1994). Indeterminist and the thin red line. Philosophical Perspectives, 8: 365–388.
  • Cobreros, P. and Tranchini, L. (2014). Supervaluationism: Truth, value and degree functionality. Though, 3: 136–144.
  • De Florio, C. and Frigerio, A. (2015). In defense of the timeless solution to the problem of human free will and divine foreknowledge. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 78: 5–28.
  • Fine, K. (1975). Vagueness, truth and logic. Synthese, 30(3), 265-300.
  • Hasker, W. (2001). The foreknowledge conundrum. In Long, E. T. (ed). In Issues in Contemporary Philosophy of Religion, edited by Eugene Thomas Long, 97–114. Dordrecht–Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
  • Keefe, R. (2000). Theories of Vagueness. Cambridge University Press.
  • Kretzmann, N. and Stump, E. (1981). Eternity. The Journal of Philosophy, 78: 429–458.
  • Leftow, B. (1991). Time and Eternity. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
  • Loss, R. (2012). Branching time, actuality and the puzzle of retrospective determinacy. Thought, 1: 16–25.
  • MacFarlane, J. (2008). Truth in the garden of forking paths. In M. Kölbel and M. García-Carpintero (eds) Relative Truth, Oxford University Press: 81–102.
  • Perloff, M. and Belnap, N. (2011). Future contingents and the battle tomorrow. The Review of Metaphysics, 64: 581–602.
  • Pike, N. (1965). Divine omniscience and voluntary action. Philosophical Review, 74: 27–46.
  • Pike, N. (1970). God and Timelessness. Schocken Books, New York.
  • Prior, A. (1967). Past, Present and Future. Oxford at the Claredon Press.
  • Saunders, J. T. (1966). Of God and freedom. The Philosophical Review, 75: 219–225.
  • Thomason, R. (1970). Indeterminist time and truth-value gaps. Theoria, 36: 264–281.
  • van Fraassen, B. C. (1966). Singular terms, truth-value gaps and free logic. Journal of Philosophy, 63: 481-495.
  • Zagzebski, L. (2016). Foreknowledge and free will. In E. N. Zalta (ed) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2016/entries/free-will-foreknowledge/
Fuente de los datos: Dialnet