11 - ROBERT HOLCOT Can God Know More than He Knows?

Summary

Introduction

The English theologian Robert Holcot (d.1349) lectured at Oxford in the early 1330s. Like Thomas Aquinas, he was a member of the Dominican order, but Holcot is by no means a Thomist. Though his work borrows eclectically from many different sources, Holcot always remained a critical and independent thinker.

The peculiar sounding topic of this quodlibetal question (debated circa 1333) was in fact a standard item of debate among fourteenth-century theologians. The issue is not God's perfection as an epistemic agent; all parties to the debate took for granted that God is omniscient. Given this, one might suppose that Holcot's question must be answered in the negative. How could an omniscient God know more than he knows? But what if, tomorrow, there are simply more things to be known? Then wouldn't God know more than he knows today?

The entire dispute circles around the difficult philosophical problem of what the objects of knowledge are. Article I considers the following alternatives:

• William Ockham's view that the object of knowledge is a mental construct or complex;

• Walter Chatton's view that the object of knowledge is the thing signified by the mental construct.

Holcot roughly agrees with Ockham, but extends Ockham's view to anything that has a truth value (linguistic utterances, etc.). Then, in Article II, Holcot takes up the question of God's knowledge. Here it emerges that Holcot takes the objects of knowledge to be individual tokenings of propositions: a particular written sentence, for example, or a particular thought. (He uses the term propositio to refer to these sorts of sentence tokens.