Fischer on Freedom and Foreknowledge

In an article recently published in The Philosophical Review entitled Freedom and Foreknowledge,' John Martin Fischer issues what he calls a general challenge to any sort of Ockhamist to explain the distinction between (so called) hard and soft facts and, thereby, to defeat the incompatibilist claim that if God exists, and is eternal as well as essentially omniscient, no human action is freely performed. As a point of departure, Fischer reviews with approval an argument that I offered some time ago in an article called Divine Omniscience and Voluntary Action2 defending the incompatibilist thesis just mentioned. The bulk of his paper then consists of an attempt to show that the reply to my argument made by Marilyn McCord Adams in Is the Existence of God a 'Hard' Fact?3 is not only deficient, but represents a kind of response to the incompatibilist position (Fischer calls it Ockhamism) that is unpromising in the extreme. As regards the merits of Fischer's paper, I think that it includes some things that contribute importantly to the literature on the foreknowledge problem. However, I also think that in the end, Fischer fails to make contact with the point of Adams's objection to my original incompatibilist argument and that the reason for this rests finally in the fact that in a very important way, Fischer fails to make contact with my original argument itself. In the next few pages following, it will be my purpose (1) to reestablish the importance of an element in my reasoning that Fischer deletes from his own formulation of my incompatibilist argument; and (2) to make clear how this omission blinds Fischer to the thrust of Adams's response to that argument and thus results in a gap of some consequence in his general challenge to the partisans of Ockham. I should add that my reflections are offered in the hope that they will have corrective as well as more broadly conceived clarificatory value in the ongoing discussion of the divine foreknowledge problem. I hope, too, that they will not detract from the things of merit in Fischer's ofttimes stimulating paper

Contemporary philosophy · Epistemology · Foreknowledge · Free Will and Agency · Philosophy · Theology and Philosophy of Evil · War, Ethics, and Justification

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