The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge

By Linda T. Zagzebski

Book Overview

This original analysis examines the three leading traditional solutions to the dilemma of divine foreknowledge and human free will--those arising from Boethius, from Ockham, and from Molina. Though all three solutions are rejected in their best-known forms, three new solutions are proposed, and Zagzebski concludes that divine foreknowledge is compatible with human freedom. The discussion includes the relation between the foreknowledge dilemma and problems about the nature of time and the causal relation; the logic of counterfactual conditionals; and the differences between divine and human knowing states. An appendix introduces a new foreknowledge dilemma that purports to show that omniscient foreknowledge conflicts with deep intuitions about temporal asymmetry, quite apart from considerations of free will. Zagzebski shows that only a narrow range of solutions can handle this new dilemma. A compelling contribution to the field, The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge will appeal to students and scholars of theistic philosophy and the philosophy of religion.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195107632
• ISBN13: 9780195107630
• Release Date: April 1996
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 2.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.5" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Excellent review of the foreknowledge/freedom problem.

This book is not necessarily the best place to begin an investigation of the problem of divine foreknowledge vs. human freedom. Linda Zagzebski definitely writes for an audience of folks who actually argue about this stuff for a living. But it is a book that you will eventually have to read if you want to investigate this problem in any depth. Zagzebski offers the best summary of the historically proposed solutions to this problem (and the problems they themselves engender) of which I am aware. She makes a proposal of her own to this problem and then, in the practice of the best philosophers, leaves the reader with even more severe freedom/foreknowledge problems in need of solution.