Online research in philosophy

If God is omniscient then he knows contingent facts. If he exists a se, then his knowledge of facts must not depend on them. How then does he know them? I take seriously Aquinas’ view that God’s knowledge is the cause of things. I argue that “things” includes both entities and situations, that God’s knowledge of them is his knowledge of his unimpedable will, and that the view does not threaten human freedom. God’s knowledge is thus like my knowledge of my linguistic stipulations, except that whereas my knowledge is dedicta, his is de reo.

I once came across a Mark Twain story in which a character said something to the effect that the one thing God didn’t know was that he was not all-knowing. As an argument against omniscience, Twain’s one-liner doesn’t amount to much. Thinking about it, however, led to the kind of puzzles I explore here. Some puzzles about omniscience are connected to other issues, such as whether all claims about the future presently have truth-values. Those in turn are connected to deep issues in the metaphysics of time. (Is the future real, and, if so, in what sense?) Others are connected to questions about knowledge by acquaintance1—such as whether God must, in order to be omniscient, know what it is like, say, to be guilty or to have a limited perspective, and whether God can know such things without actually being guilty or having a limited perspective.

My concern is with a different kind of puzzle, having to do with propositional knowledge, knowledge of facts that can be represented by that-clauses in sentences such as ‘John knows that the world is round.’ I shall focus upon questions about a supposedly omniscient being who propositionally knows the truth about all current states of affairs. I shall argue that there is no such being.

In "The Self-Defeating Character of Skepticism," Douglas C. Long presents a transcendental argument against epistemological skepticism.' The argument has a distinctively Kantian flavor (though Long does not highlight this connection), in that it proceeds from the premise that I have self-knowledge and ends with the conclusion that I have perceptual knowledge of an objective, material subject of mental states. If the skeptic wishes to accept the transcendental argument's premise (as he seems to do), then he must reject his claim that I lack knowledge of all propositions concerning my physical nature, history and environment. The falsity of this skeptical claim is a condition for the possibility of self-knowledge, according to Long's transcendental argument. In this paper, I would like to see whether the argument is really work-able.

According to the knowledge argument, physicalism fails because when physically omniscient Mary first sees red, her gain in phenomenal knowledge involves a gain in factual knowledge. Thus not all facts are physical facts. According to the ability hypothesis, the knowledge argument fails because Mary only acquires abilities to imagine, remember and recognise redness, and not new factual knowledge. I argue that reducing Mary’s new knowledge to abilities does not affect the issue of whether she also learns factually: I show that gaining specific new phenomenal knowledge is required for acquiring abilities of the relevant kind. Phenomenal knowledge being basic to abilities, and not vice versa, it is left an open question whether someone who acquires such abilities also learns something factual. The answer depends on whether the new phenomenal knowledge involved is factual. But this is the same question we wanted to settle when first considering the knowledge argument. The ability hypothesis, therefore, has offered us no dialectical progress with the knowledge argument, and is best forgotten.

In his Knowledge and its Limits (2000) Timothy Williamson argues that knowledge can be causally efficacious and as such figure in psychological explanation. His argument for this claim figures as a response to a key objection to his overall thesis that knowing is a mental state. In this paper I argue that although Williamson succeeds in establishing that knowledge in some cases is essential to the power of certain causal explanations of actions, he fails to do this in a way that establishes knowledge itself as a causal factor. The argument thus fails to support his overall claim that knowledge should be conceived as a state of mind.

Patrick Grim argues that God cannot beomniscient because no one other than me canacquire knowledge de se of myself. Inparticular, according to Grim, God cannot knowwhat I know in knowing that I am making amess. I argue, however, that given twoplausible principles regarding divineattributes there is no reason to accept Grim'sconclusion that God cannot be omniscient. Inthis paper I focus on the relationship betweendivine omniscience and necessaryimpossibilities, in contrast to the generaltrend of research since Aquinas, which hasconcentrated on the relationship between divineomnipotence and necessary impossibilities.

In this paper, I argue that Stanley and Williamson’s 2001 account of knowledge-how as a species of knowledge-that is wrong. They argue that a claim such as “Hannah knows how to ride a bicycle” is true if and only if Hannah has some relevant knowledge-that. I challenge their claim by considering the case of a famous amnesic patient named Henry M. who is capable of acquiring and retaining new knowledge-how but who is incapable of acquiring and retaining new knowledge-that. In the first two sections of the paper, I introduce the topic of knowledge-how and give a brief overview of Stanley and Williamson’s position. In the third and fourth sections, I discuss the case of Henry M. and explain why it is plausible to describe him as someone who can retain new knowledge-how but not new knowledge-that. In the final sections of the paper, I argue that Henry M.’s case does indeed provide a counterexample to Stanley and Williamson’s analysis of knowing-how as a species of knowing-that, and I consider and respond to possible objections to my argument.

In this paper I present two new arguments against the possibility of an omniscient being. My new arguments invoke considerations of cardinality and resemble several arguments originally presented by Patrick Grim. Like Grim, I give reasons to believe that there must be more objects in the universe than there are beliefs. However, my arguments will rely on certain mereological claims, namely that Classical Extensional Mereology is necessarily true of the part-whole relation. My first argument is an instance of a problem first noted by Gideon Rosen and requires an additional assumption about the mereological structure of certain beliefs. That assumption is that an omniscient being’s beliefs are mereological simples. However, this assumption is dropped when I present my second argument. Thus, I hope to show that if Classical Extensional Mereology is true of the part-whole relation, there cannot be an omniscient being.

I’m going to argue that omniscience is impossible and therefore that there is no God. The argument turns on the notion of grounding. After illustrating and clarifying that notion, I’ll start the argument in earnest. The first step will be to lay out five claims, one of which is the claim that there is an omniscient being, and the other four of which are claims about grounding. I’ll prove that these five claims are jointly inconsistent. Then I’ll argue for the truth of each of them except the claim that there is an omniscient being. From these arguments it follows that there are no omniscient beings and thus that there is no God.

In Atheism: A Philosophical Justification, Michael Martin argues that to posit a God that is both omnipotent and omniscient is philosophically incoherent. I challenge this argument by proposing that a God who is necessarily omniscient is more powerful than a God who is contingently omniscient. I then argue that being omnipotent entails being omniscient by showing that for an all-powerful being to be all-powerful in any meaningful way, it must possess complete knowledge about all states of affairs and thus must be understood to be omniscient.