Does God have Beliefs?

1986 ◽  
Vol 22 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 287-306 ◽  
Author(s):  
William P. Alston
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Philosophical Theology ◽  
Voluntary Action ◽  
Divine Foreknowledge ◽  
Justified Belief ◽  
Divine Omniscience ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Fourth Component ◽  
Classic Argument

Beliefs are freely attributed to God nowadays in Anglo–American philosophical theology. This practice undoubtedly reflects the twentieth–century popularity of the view that knowledge consists of true justified belief (perhaps with some needed fourth component). (After all no one supposes that God has beliefs in addition to, or instead of knowledge.) The connection is frequently made explicit. If knowledge is true justified belief then whatever God knows He believes. It would seem that much recent talk of divine beliefs stems from Nelson Pike's widely discussed article, ‘Divine Omniscience and Voluntary Action’. In this essay Pike develops a version of the classic argument for the incompatibility of divine foreknowledge and free will in terms of divine forebelief. He introduces this shift by premising that ‘A knows X’ entails ‘A believes X’. As a result of all this, philosophers have increasingly been using the concept of belief in defining ‘omniscience’.

Chisholm, Roderick Milton (1916–1999)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Benfield
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
Theory Of Knowledge ◽  
Strict Sense ◽  
Standard Text ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Analytic Philosopher ◽  
Philosophical Writings ◽  
Attention To Detail

Chisholm was an important analytic philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century. His work in epistemology, metaphysics and ethics is characterized by scrupulous attention to detail, the use of a few basic, undefined or primitive terms, and extraordinary clarity. One of the first Anglo-American philosophers to make fruitful use of Brentano and Meinong, Chisholm translated many of Brentano’s philosophical writings. As one of the great teachers, Chisholm is widely known for the three editions of Theory of Knowledge, a short book and the standard text in US graduate epistemology courses. An ontological Platonist, Chisholm defends human free will and a strict sense of personal identity.

Divine Omniscience, Immutability, Aseity and Human Free Will

1991 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 285-295 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert F. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Philosophical Theology ◽  
Strict Sense ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Internal Factors ◽  
Classical Theism ◽  
Divine Omniscience ◽  
External Influences

If classical Western theism is correct that God's timeless omniscience is compatible with human free will, then it is incoherent to hold that this God can in any strict sense be immutable and a se as well as omniscient. That is my thesis. ‘Classical theism’ shall refer here to the tradition of philosophical theology centring on such mainstream authors as Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas. ‘Divine omniscience’ shall mean that the eternal God knows all events as a timeless observer of them. ‘Human free will’ shall mean that human beings are, at least sometimes, self-determining agents who make choices not decisively caused to be what they are by external or internal factors other than the free willing itself – choices that these agents have the capacity and the freedom to make differently than they do. Except where stipulated otherwise, ‘divine immutability’ shall ‘mean that God is neither subject to, nor capable of, change in being, knowing, or willing, since God is immune to external influences, and without internal needs, of the sorts that might give rise to such change. Finally, ‘aseity’ shall be used to underline the divine immunity to external influences, since a being that is wholly a se or self-caused (is ‘pure act’ in the Thomistic sense), cannot be open to such influences, cannot be made to be what or how it is by anything other than itself.

Blackness, Imperialism, and Nationalism in Dominican Children's Literature

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-61
Author(s):  
Stacy Ann Creech
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Young People ◽  
Educational Reform ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Specific Construction

From pre-Columbian times through to the twentieth century, Dominican children's literature has struggled to define itself due to pressures from outside forces such as imperialism and colonialism. This paper examines the socio-political contexts within Dominican history that determined the kind of literature available to children, which almost exclusively depicted a specific construction of indigeneity, European or Anglo-American characters and settings, in an effort to efface the country's African roots. After the Educational Reform of 1993 was instituted, however, there has been a promising change in the field, as Dominican writers are engaged in producing literature for young people that includes more accurate representations of Blackness and multiculturalism.

Modernism Under Review: Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era

2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-194
Author(s):  
Marjorie Perloff
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
First World

This essay offers a critical re-assessment of Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era. It argues that Kenner's magisterial survey remains important to our understanding of Modernism, despite its frankly partisan viewpoint. Kenner's is an insider's account of the Anglo-American Modernist writing that he takes to have been significant because it sought to invent a new language consonant with the ethos of the twentieth century. The essay suggests that Kenner's impeccable attention to the Modernist renovation of language goes beyond formalism, since, for him, its ‘patterned energies’ (a term derived from Buckminster Fuller's theory of knots) relate Modernism to the larger complex of artefacts within which it functions and, beyond these, to what he takes to be the great works of the past and to the scientific-technological inventions of the present. But the essay also points out that Kenner's is an eccentric canon, which makes no room for Forster, Frost, Lawrence, or Stevens. Furthermore, Kenner's emphasis on the First World War as a great cultural rupture, while plausible, works less well for Joyce and Williams than it does for Pound and Eliot.

Erasmus versus Luther: A Contemporary Analysis of the Debate on Free Will

2020 ◽  
Vol 62 (3) ◽  
pp. 311-335
Author(s):  
Aku Visala ◽  
Olli-Pekka Vainio
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Philosophical Theology ◽  
Contemporary Debate ◽  
Will And Grace ◽  
To Come

SummaryIn this article, we will use contemporary analytic tools to make sense of the main arguments in the classic debate on free will between Erasmus of Rotterdam and the Reformer Martin Luther. Instead of offering another exegesis of these texts, we put forward an analysis that links this historical debate with contemporary discussions on free will and grace in philosophical theology. We argue that the debate was ultimately about how three theological core claims are related to one another: the Anti-Pelagian Constraint (humans are incapable of willing any good, in order to come to faith), the Responsibility Principle (humans are morally responsible in the eyes of God) and human free will. Erasmus attacks Luther by arguing that the Responsibility Principle cannot be maintained without free will, while Luther responds by arguing that Erasmus must reject free will, because it is in conflict with the Anti-Pelagian Constraint. Luther is then left with the dilemma of justifying the Responsibility Principle without free will – a task, which in our estimation, fails. In the concluding section of the article, we point out some continuities and discontinuities between the contemporary debate and that of Luther and Erasmus.

Cicero: On Fate

1992 ◽  
Author(s):  
R.W. Sharples
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Free Will ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Clear Understanding ◽  
Latin Text ◽  
Greek Philosophy ◽  
Philosophical Issue ◽  
Latin Culture ◽  
Consolation Of Philosophy

Cicero and Boethius did more than anyone else to transmit the insights of Greek philosophy to the Latin culture of Western Europe, which has played so influential a part in our civilisation to this day. Cicero's treatise On Fate (De Fato), though surviving only in a fragmentary and mutilated state, records contributions to the discussion of a central philosophical issue, that of free will and determinism, which are comparable in importance to those of twentieth-century philosophers and indeed sometimes anticipate them. Study of the treatise has been hindered by the lack of a combined Latin text and English translation based on a clear understanding of the arguments; this edition is intended to meet this need. The last book of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy (Philosophiae Consolationis) is linked with Cicero's treatise by its theme, the relation of divine foreknowledge to human freedom. The book presents Latin text with facing-page English translation, introduction and commentary.

scholarly journals R. Jakobson as Mediator of Cultural Transfer between Linguistics and Literary Experiments

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 309-317
Author(s):  
Vladimir Feshchenko
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Russian Science ◽  
Cultural Transfer ◽  
Parallel Processes ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
And Linguistics ◽  
Literary Experience ◽  
Special Language ◽  
Cultural Transfers

The article analyzes one of the forms of nomadism in the intellectual world, which is called cultural transfers. One of the directions in the study of cultural transfers is the migration of concepts and notions between scientific knowledge (in this case linguistic) and literary experience (mainly experimental). The article is devoted to one of such migration trajectory from the perspective of interdiscourse methodology. We discuss the works of one of the agents of cultural transfer in the field of linguistics – R. Jakobson. The task of the article is to draw a trajectory according to which the linguistic concepts of Jakobson intertwine with parallel processes in literary (mainly poetic) experiments. The analysis concludes that precisely in connection with close contexts and transfers between poetry and linguistics, the Russian science of language represented by Jakobson develops a view of literature as a special language and a special communicative system. This trend is not typical for the Anglo-American linguistic tradition of the twentieth century, the quintessence of which in the middle of the century was represented in the theories of N. Chomsky and his circle.

scholarly journals Edwards on the Incompatibility of Divine Foreknowledge and Human Free Will

Sententiae ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 29-45
Author(s):  
Oleh Bondar ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Divine Foreknowledge ◽  
The Past ◽  
Freedom Of The Will ◽  
The Will ◽  
Theological Fatalism ◽  
Nelson Pike ◽  
Necessity Of The Past

In the book “Freedom of the Will”, Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) put forward a strong ar-gument for theological fatalism. This argument, I suppose, can be considered as the universal basis for discussion between Fatalists and Anti-Fatalists in the 20th century, especially in the context of the most powerful argument for fatalism, introduced by Nelson Pike. The argument of Edwards rests upon the following principles: (a) if something has been the case in the past, it has been the case necessarily (Necessity of the past); (b) if God knows something (say A), it is not the case that ~A is possible (Infallibility of God`s knowledge). Hence, Edwards infers that if God had foreknowledge that A, then A is necessary, and it is not the case that someone could voluntarily choose ~A. The article argues that (i) the Edwards` inference Kgp → □p rests upon the modal fallacy; (ii) the inference „God had a knowledge that p will happen, therefore „God had a knowledge that p will happen” is the proposition about the past, and hence, the necessarily true proposition“ is ambiguous; thus, it is not the case that this proposition necessarily entails the impossibility of ~p; (iii) it is not the case that p, being known by God, turns out to be necessary. Thus, we can avoid the inference of Edwards that if Kgp is a fact of the past, then we cannot freely choose ~p. It has also been shown that the main provisions of the argument of Edwards remain significant in the context of contemporary debates about free will and foreknowledge (Theories of soft facts, Anti-Ockhamism, theories of temporal modal asymmetry, „Timeless solution”). Additionally, I introduce a new challenge for fatalism – argument from Brouwerian axiom.

Rewriting the Captivity Narrative for Contemporary Children: Speare, Bruchac, and the French and Indian War

2011 ◽  
Vol 84 (2) ◽  
pp. 318-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara L. Schwebel
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Captivity Narratives ◽  
French And Indian War ◽  
Captivity Narrative ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Indian War ◽  
War Stories

Juxtaposing the French and Indian War stories of Elizabeth George Speare, a mid-twentieth- century Anglo-American children's author, against those of Joseph Bruchac, a twenty-first- century Abenaki children's author, reveals how flexible and powerful captivity narratives have been in shaping arguments about gender, nationhood, citizenship, and land in the postwar United States.

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