TY - JOUR
T1 - Why God's beliefs are not hard-type soft facts
AU - Widerker, David
PY - 2002
Y1 - 2002
N2 - John Fischer has attacked the Ockhamistic solution to the freedom-foreknowledge dilemma by arguing that: (1) God's prior beliefs about the future, though being soft facts about the past, are soft facts of a special sort, what he calls 'hard-type soft facts', i.e. soft facts, the constitutive properties of which are 'hard', or 'temporally non-relational properties'; (2) in this respect, such facts are like regular past facts which are subject to the fixity of the past. In this paper, I take issue with this argument by Fischer, claiming that it does not succeed for two reasons: (I) Fischer's account of the notion of a hard property Is unsatisfactory; (ii) his notion of a hard-type soft fact is incoherent. Despite this criticism, I agree with Fischer that there is a fundamental difference between God's beliefs about the future and regular soft facts with regard to their fixity-status, but I argue that the reason for this difference is that God's forebeliefs are plain hard facts about the past.
AB - John Fischer has attacked the Ockhamistic solution to the freedom-foreknowledge dilemma by arguing that: (1) God's prior beliefs about the future, though being soft facts about the past, are soft facts of a special sort, what he calls 'hard-type soft facts', i.e. soft facts, the constitutive properties of which are 'hard', or 'temporally non-relational properties'; (2) in this respect, such facts are like regular past facts which are subject to the fixity of the past. In this paper, I take issue with this argument by Fischer, claiming that it does not succeed for two reasons: (I) Fischer's account of the notion of a hard property Is unsatisfactory; (ii) his notion of a hard-type soft fact is incoherent. Despite this criticism, I agree with Fischer that there is a fundamental difference between God's beliefs about the future and regular soft facts with regard to their fixity-status, but I argue that the reason for this difference is that God's forebeliefs are plain hard facts about the past.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=61949276451&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1017/S0034412501005911
DO - 10.1017/S0034412501005911
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AN - SCOPUS:61949276451
SN - 0034-4125
VL - 38
SP - 77
EP - 88
JO - Religious Studies
JF - Religious Studies
IS - 1
ER -