Divine Foreknowledge and Freedom of the Will: Contemporary Work Revisits Calvinism

Books reviewed: Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, ‘Recent Work on Divine Foreknowledge and Free Will’ in Robert Kane (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Free Will Millard J. Erickson, What Does God Know and When Does He Know It?     

Free Will,Foreknowledge, and Future‐Dependent Beliefs

Recently, a time‐honored assumption has resurfaced in some parts of the free will debate: (A) if past divine beliefs or past truths about what we do depend on what we do, then these beliefs and truths are, in a sense, up to us; hence, we are able to act otherwise, despite the existence of past truths or past divine beliefs about our future actions. In this paper, I introduce and discuss a novel incompatibilist argument that rests on (A). This argument is interesting in itself, for it is independent of a number of assumptions about the nature of God that have played an essential role in the classical defense of incompatibilism about divine foreknowledge and human free will. Moreover, the argument enables us to identify a difficulty compatibilists encounter when employing (A) to block incompatibilism.     

Newtonian Idealism: Matter,Perception, and the Divine Will

This paper investigates Isaac Newton's rather unique account of God's relation to matter. According to this account, corpuscles depend on a substantially omnipresent God endowing quantities of objective space with the qualities of shape, solidity, the unfaltering tendency to move in accord with certain laws, and—significantly—the power to interact with created minds. I argue that there are important similarities and differences between Newton's account of matter and Berkeley's idealism. And while the role played by the divine will might at first appear to be a species of occasionalism, I conclude that there are, for Newton, genuine causal relations between minds and bodies. Ultimately, to fully appreciate this account of the creation and persistence of matter, we must consider not only Newton's metaphysical writings, but also his sensorium theory of mind‐body interaction, his heterodox theological commitments, and the influences of Descartes, More, and Locke.     

神意、理性与权利——一种关于洛克自然法理论的解读

洛克对自然法的性质进行了详细的阐述,得出了自然法具有神意法和理性法双重属性的结论.这种性质界定具有模糊性,而且神意法与理性法在一定程度上是互相冲突的,因此受到后来学者的诟病;但洛克自然法理论中的这种模糊性源自其对于由理性所开启的现代性进程之谨慎态度.尽管洛克在一定程度上似乎更重视理性的作用,但理性也存在诸多问题:自然法是人类理性无法独证的,对于理性的偏执会在认识论上因缺乏根基而显得武断,而且自然法在政治上的应用及其说服力,仅仅依靠理性推演也是不够的.这些考虑最终使洛克走向一种谨慎的平衡策略-自然法既是神意法,也是理性法.此外,洛克还从上帝存在这一基本背景出发,引申出了人类应当服从的三类自然法义务,并从这三类自然法义务中推导出了人类的三大基本权利:生命、财产与自由,近代权利思想实发轫于此.     

The Form of Reason: Participation in the Work of Richard Hooker, Benjamin Whichcote, Ralph Cudworth and Jeremy Taylor

The article traces the centrality of the patristic doctrine of theosis in the work of four significant figures in seventeenth century Anglican theology. Particular attention is paid to their understanding of reason as a participation in the incarnate Logos. Attention is drawn to their pedagogical method, which sees theology as 'rather a divine life than a divine knowledge' (Taylor), and to their reticence in defining too precisely the content of doctrine. Finally the Anglican via media is seen not as a political compromise, but as one way of fruitfully expressing the mediating grace between Creator and creation.     

The Form of Reason: Participation in the Work of Richard Hooker,Benjamin Whichcote,Ralph Cudworth and Jeremy Taylor

The article traces the centrality of the patristic doctrine of theosis in the work of four significant figures in seventeenth century Anglican theology. Particular attention is paid to their understanding of reason as a participation in the incarnate Logos. Attention is drawn to their pedagogical method, which sees theology as ‘rather a divine life than a divine knowledge’ (Taylor), and to their reticence in defining too precisely the content of doctrine. Finally the Anglican via media is seen not as a political compromise, but as one way of fruitfully expressing the mediating grace between Creator and creation.     

Malebranche and Descartes on Method: Psychologism,Free Will,and Doubt

The subject of this paper is Malebranche's relation to Descartes on the question of method. Using recent commentary as a springboard, it examines whether Malebranche advances a nonpsychologistic account of method, in contrast to the psychologism typically thought to characterize the Cartesian view. I explore this question with respect to two issues of central importance to method generally: doubt and free will. My argument is that, despite superficial differences of emphasis, Descartes and Malebranche adopt positions on doubt and free will that effectively ensure that their respective accounts of method are substantially the same.     

Parfit on Free Will,Desert, and the Fairness of Punishment

In his recent monumental book On What Matters, Derek Parfit argues for a hard determinist view that rejects free will-based moral responsibility and desert. This rejection of desert is necessary for his main aim in the book, the overall reconciliation of normative ethics. In Appendix E of his book, however, Parfit claims that it is possible to mete out fair punishment. Parfit’s position on punishment here seems to be inconsistent with his hard determinism. I argue that Parfit is mistaken here, in a way that leads him to unjustified optimism about the possibility of fair penalization. Insofar as we take the free will problem seriously, we cannot reconcile a belief in the absence of desert with a belief in the fairness of penalization.     

Consciousness,Free Will,and the Sciences of the Mind

In his review of the trio of philosopher-scientist dialogues on the nature and capacities of the human mind, Paul Thagard (2018) advocates clearly and forcefully for a fairly extreme position, which he advances as preferable to an equally extreme alternative. I will suggest a middle path that becomes attractive when one attends not just to the range of data now pouring forth from the sciences of mind but also to our own experience as minded individuals.     

Reason, Responsibility, and Free Will: Reply to My Critics

This paper highlights and discusses some key positions on free will and moral responsibility that I have defended. I begin with reflections on a Strawsonian analysis of moral responsibility. Then I take up objections to the view that there is an asymmetry in freedom requirements for moral responsibility and moral obligation: obligation but not responsibility requires that we could have done otherwise. I follow with some thoughts on the viability of different sorts of semi-compatibilism. Next, I turn to defending the ??luck objection?? to a popular libertarian account of the control that responsibility requires. This is, roughly, the objection that when our decisions are indeterministically caused, their occurrence is a matter of responsibility-undermining luck. Finally, I comment on Frankfurt examples.     

Free Will,Determinism, and the Possibility of Doing Otherwise

I argue that free will and determinism are compatible, even when we take free will to require the ability to do otherwise and even when we interpret that ability modally, as the possibility of doing otherwise, and not just conditionally or dispositionally. My argument draws on a distinction between physical and agential possibility. Although in a deterministic world only one future sequence of events is physically possible for each state of the world, the more coarsely defined state of an agent and his or her environment can be consistent with more than one such sequence, and thus different actions can be “agentially possible”. The agential perspective is supported by our best theories of human behaviour, and so we should take it at face value when we refer to what an agent can and cannot do. On the picture I defend, free will is not a physical phenomenon, but a higher‐level one on a par with other higher‐level phenomena such as agency and intentionality.