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The Formalities of Omniscience

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

A. N. Prior
A. N. Prior
Affiliation:
Manchester University
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Extract

WHAT do we mean by saying that a being, God for example, is omniscient? One way of answering this question is to translate ‘God is omniscient’ into some slightly more formalised language than colloquial English, e.g. one with variables of a number of different types, including variables replaceable by statements, and quantifiers binding thes.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 37 , Issue 140 , April 1962 , pp. 114 - 129
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1962

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References

page 116 note 1 See, e.g., Ockham, , Tractatus de Praedestinatione, etc., ed. Boehner, P. (Franciscan Institute, 1954), pp. 56, 101B.Google Scholar

page 116 note 2 Prior, A. N., “Thank Goodness that's Over”, Philosophy, 01 1959, p. 17. Cf. C. D. Broad, Examination of McTaggart's Philosophy, Vol. 2, Part 1, pp. 266–7.Google Scholar

page 118 note 1 Directly on the maxim that id quod est verum in praesenti, semper fuit verum esse futurum, it is worth also glancing at Summa Theologica, Part I, Question 16, Article 7, Obj. 3 and answer.

page 118 note 2 Stock sources for this law in Aristotle are An. Pr. I, Gh. 15, 34a, 23, and An. Post. I, ch. 6, 75a, 1–11.

page 119 note 1 The main stock source for this is the Nicomachean Ethics, VI, 1139 b. See also De Caelo I, 283 b 13.

page 120 note 1 See Baudry's, L. excellent collection of texts, La Querelle des Futurs Contingents (Louvain 1465–1475), Vrin, 1950; e.g. p. 70.Google Scholar

page 120 note 2 Cicero, De Fato, vii, 14.Google Scholar

page 121 note 1 On these two very different ways in which a proposition may be compounded out of past-tense and future-tense elements, see Peter de, Rivo in Baudry, op. cit., p. 339.Google Scholar

page 121 note 2 See Ockham himself on this, op. cit., pp. 5–6, C, and Ferdinand of Cordova in Baudry, op. cit., p. 159. For what seems to be a very similar view, see Ryle's Dilemmas, ‘It Was to Be’.

page 122 note 1 I owe much in this paragraph to Professor J. M. Shorter. Cf. also, on the negative point, Jonathan Edwards on the Will, Part II, Sect. XII, Observation II. But this is a frequently repeated Thomist point too–that there can logically be no knowledge of the future, for one who is still awaiting its actualisation, but what he can gather from its already present causes. (See, e.g., De Malo, xvi, 7.)

page 122 note 2 Ockham, , op. cit., p. 15.Google Scholar

page 123 note 1 Edwards, op. cit., Observation III, Corollary I, discussion of Whitby. My attention was first drawn to this Section in Edwards, and the resemblances between its opening argument and Thomas's Objection 7, by Mr J. C. Thornton.

page 124 note 1 See, especially, the latter part of Part I, Lectio 13, in his Peri Hermeneias commentary.

page 125 note 1 At least the theory of future contingencies provides no exceptions to this. For the possibility of other exceptions, see Summa Theologica, Part I, Question 16, Article 7, Objection 4 and answer; and my own Time and Modality, Ch. 4, and ‘Identifiable Individuals’, Review of Metaphysics, June 1960, pp. 692, 695–6.

page 125 note 2 For the difficulty here, see my Time and Modality, p. 97.

page 125 note 3 Collected Papers of C. S. Peirce, 5, 459.

page 128 note 1 Cf. Scotus, as given in Ockham, op. cit., p. 53 and n.

page 128 note 2 Cf. McTaggart, The Nature of Existence, Ch. XXXIII, Sects. 305, 330; and my own ‘Time after Time’, Mind, April 1958, pp. 244–6.

page 129 note 1 Peirce, C. S., op. cit., 4, 67.Google Scholar

page 129 note 2 De Veritate, Question 2, Article 13, Objection 1 and answer.