Subjunctive Conditionals

Author(s):  
Kai von Fintel
Author(s):  
Michael J. Zimmerman

This chapter focuses on two questions: How is omission related to action? Are our omissions within our control? Section 5.1 examines the question whether the control that we have over our actions and their consequences may be understood partly in terms of subjunctive conditionals. Section 5.2 examines the question whether the control that we have over our omissions and their consequences may be understood in the same way as the control that we have over our actions and their consequences is to be understood. Section 5.3 discusses the moral and legal significance of the conclusions reached in the preceding sections.


1991 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
David P. Hunt

According to the thesis of divine ‘middle knowledge’, first propounded by the Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina in the sixteenth century, subjunctive conditionals stating how free agents would freely respond under counter-factual conditions (call such expressions ‘counterfactuals of freedom’) may be straightforwardly true, and thus serve as the objects of divine knowledge. This thesis has provoked considerable controversy, and the recent revival of interest in middle knowledge, initiated by Anthony Kenny, Robert Adams and Alvin Plantinga in the 1970s, has led to two ongoing debates. One is a theoretical debate over the very intelligibility of middle knowledge;1 the other is a practical debate over its philosophical and theological utility.2


1979 ◽  
Vol 88 (4) ◽  
pp. 544 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wayne A. Davis

2003 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALEXANDER R. PRUSS

This paper argues that if creatures are to have significant free will, then God's essential omni-benevolence and essential omnipotence cannot logically preclude Him from creating a world containing a moral evil. The paper maintains that this traditional conclusion does not need to rest on reliance on subjunctive conditionals of free will. It can be grounded in several independent ways based on premises that many will accept.


2006 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 393-402 ◽  
Author(s):  
BRIAN LEFTOW

Richard Brian Davis offers several criticisms of a semantics I once proposed for subjunctive conditionals with impossible antecedents. I reply to these.


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