‘Very Truly,I Tell You,Before Abraham was,I am’: A Theological Treatise on the Concept of Time in John’s Gospel

This essay analyses temporal peculiarity in John’s Gospel, identified as eschatological and narratological in nature. Part one employs historical‐critical and literary‐critical exegesis to explain the interrelation and function of these peculiarities, while part two derives a temporal metaphysic from the exegesis to explain the concept of time in the Gospel. This exposition is used to make sense of the Gospel’s claim that the one who possesses eternal life will never die. The essay concludes that the Gospel’s future and realised eschatology act as reflections of one another, and argues that the future eschatological scheme functions as a distension of the realised scheme.     

Two Kinds of Logical Impossibility

In this paper, we argue that a distinction ought to be drawn between two ways in which a given world might be logically impossible. First, a world w might be impossible because the laws that hold at w are different from those that hold at some other world (say the actual world). Second, a world w might be impossible because the laws of logic that hold in some world (say the actual world) are violated at w. We develop a novel way of modelling logical possibility that makes room for both kinds of logical impossibility. Doing so has interesting implications for the relationship between logical possibility and other kinds of possibility (for example, metaphysical possibility) and implications for the necessity or contingency of the laws of logic.