Omniscient Research Articles

Freedom, Omniscience and the Contingent A Priori

Abstract One of the major challenges in the philosophy of religion is theological fatalism — roughly, the claim that divine omniscience is incompatible with free will. In this article, I present new reasons to be sceptical of what I consider to be the strongest argument for theological fatalism. First, I argue that divine foreknowledge is not necessary for an argument against free will if we take into account divine knowledge of contingent a priori truths. Second, I show that this argument can be generalized so that ordinary human knowledge of contingent a priori truths also leads to an argument against free will. This, I believe, results in an absurd conclusion that is unacceptable to both theists and non-theists. But if there is something wrong with this argument, there is something wrong, too, with the argument for theological fatalism. Although there is a range of possible responses, I suggest that the core issue in all cases is a closure principle — specifically, the principle that ‘no choice about’ is closed under entailment (or strict implication).

Divine foreknowledge, evidence and epistemic responsibility

AbstractIn several recent publications, John Martin Fischer proposed a new solution to the problem of divine foreknowledge, which he dubbed the bootstrapping view. On this view, God can have limited knowledge of contingent future based on a combination of (a) God's knowledge of inconclusive evidence about the contingent world available to humans and (b) divine self‐knowledge and more specifically God's knowledge of His essential infallibility. On the basis of the former, God obtains knowledge about contingent future, and by virtue of the latter, God bootstraps this knowledge to certainty. Fischer acknowledges that the mechanism of bootstrapping remains opaque to us, but maintains that his view offers a consistent model of God's limited foreknowledge of contingent future in an indeterministic world. The essay examines the bootstrapping view and some problems it gives rise to, as well as presents a related model of divine foreknowledge that is consistent and simpler and gives God comprehensive foreknowledge.

Tense-Logic and the Revival of Philosophical Theology

The article discusses Nicholas Wolterstorff’s explanations for the flourishing of philosophical theology in analytic philosophy by taking Arthur Norman Prior’s (1914–1969) development of tense-logic into account. Prior’s work challenged the prevailing anti-metaphysical norms in analytic philosophy and introduced an alternative understanding of the relationship between logic and metaphysics. Prior’s application of tense-logic to an analysis of the concept of existence in quantified tense-logic and his exploration of future contingency in branching time semantics provide a strong reason for why analytic philosophy naturally incorporates philosophical theology. These considerations lead us to modify Wolterstorff’s emphasis on the importance of meta-epistemology for the resurgence of philosophical theology. A development in logic was necessary. Furthermore, Prior’s importance questions the assumption that philosophical theology was a consequence of theistic philosophers seeking ways to defend theistic beliefs in analytic philosophy. This is not true for Prior. His invention of tense-logic and discussion of omniscience was driven by an existential interest in finding answers to philosophical problems concerning divine foreknowledge and human freedom which ultimately led him to reject his Christian beliefs.

인간의 ‘자유의지’에 대한 오리게네스의 견해

The purpose of this study is to examine Origen’s thoughts on the subject of human free will. Origen has described the topic of free will separately in his 『Peri Archon』, but it is not easy to systematically understand the theory because it contains a mixture of biblical commentary, theology, and philosophy. In addition, just as many church fathers of the 2nd and 3rd centuries focused on guarding against heresy and Gnosticism, Origen also wrote his works with the purpose of refuting them, and for this reason, it is difficult to independently understand his theory of free will. Accordingly, chapters 2 and 3 of this thesis compare the claims of the Gnostics identified by Origen with the author's own theory. Rejecting the fatalism and natural determinism of the ancients, Origen generally emphasized the importance of free will and also mentioned reason as the basis for free will and the ethical responsibility of action. Chapter 4 attempts to understand free will in its relationship with divine providence. Origen believed that free will and God's providence is not in conflict, but is compatible, and he further spoke of their dynamism, in which God's providence helps and embraces human will, allowing humans to use their free will better. Lastly, through Origen's insight into divine foreknowledge, we understand that free will does not conflict with foreknowledge and can be harmonized within providence.

Kompatybilizm teologiczny a problem Newcomba

The paper examines and defends theological compatibilism — according to which human freedom is compatible with the existence of essentially omniscient God — against the background of a thought experiment known as Newcomb’s problem. It is argued that if a predictor in Newcomb’s situation is just a supreme scientist, it is rational to choose two boxes, but if he is essentially omniscient God, then it is rational to take one box only. The rationality of the latter choice is grounded in the truth of the conditional, “If S were to choose otherwise than S will, God’s past belief about S’s choice would have been different”. The truth of that backtracker does not deprive S of her ability to choose otherwise. On the contrary, it implies that God’s past beliefs about future contingencies counterfactually depend on the future. But if some part of the past counterfactually depends on our future acts, then there is no reason to claim that we are necessarily unable to do anything in the future such that if we were to do it, then that part of the past would have been different than it was. This kind of ability to control the past does not contradict the principle of the fixity of the past properly interpreted.

Пифагорейский аргумент разумного замысла Вселенной и его критика. Статья 4: Метафизика основоположников физики

In this, the penultimate article of our Pythagorean cycle, we turn to the metaphysical or natural-philosophical heritage of those great men who are referred to as founders or pioneers of physics. The choice of specific figures in this kind of research is surely arguable to some extent. Our choice is limited by the length of the paper, the availability of relevant texts, and yes, a certain subjectivity of our evaluations. After a brief Introduction, we give an overview of the tension between the paradigm of physical reductionism and the intuition of free will. We show how the author of the first universal physical theory, Isaac Newton, resolved this contradiction, and how he held the belief in the authenticity of free will while sacrificing not only mechanistic reductionism but also belief in the omniscience of God. These philosophical problems are then discussed in the light of the modifications to physical conceptions of the universe that twentieth-century physics has made. Turning to James Clerk Maxwell, the author of the equations of electrodynamics, we note his philosophical primacy in pointing out the important feature of physical laws that ensures their discoverability: the correlation of their mathematical complexity with the difficulty of observing the corresponding layer of reality. Speaking of Albert Einstein’s philosophical views, we note in them a combination of a deep understanding of the mystical basis of physics with the naivety of moral philosophy. Like Einstein, Max Planck was a deistic idealist who did not believe in a “personal God,” but, aware of the enormous moral significance of Christianity, only shortly before his death he publicly declared this unbelief as a long-held conviction. Reflections on Niels Bohr lead us to conclude that he was an apophatic mystic, combining the complementary qualities of a passionate desire for theoretical clarity and an anticipation of its impossibility. Erwin Schrödinger, to whose views we next draw attention, expressed them in terms of Vedanta idealism. It seems to us that the same views can be expressed within a European context, albeit unorthodox. Turning to Werner Heisenberg, who in his youth read Plato in the original, we show not only his Platonism, but also his understanding that the connection with God is the moral foundation, the loss of which is ruinous. The drama of being, according to the author of the uncertainty relation, has to do with the fact that the divine will is essentially embodied through human freedom, through the indeterminacy of conscious choice. In the section on Wolfgang Pauli, we note his amazement at the profound harmony of the mental and the material spheres, which reveals itself with particular power in the mathematical discoverability of the material world. Hence began his search for a possible reason for this agreement, the search accompanied by many years of conversations with Carl Gustav Jung. The concluding section of the article is devoted to Paul Dirac, who, unique among the great physicists, went from Marxist atheism to preaching about Godmathematics, and then to regular prayers in church.

All That Heaven Allows

Abstract In the last book of The Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius develops his solution to the problem of divine foreknowledge and free choice. Interpreters standardly hold that this problem and his solution to it presuppose causal indeterminism. In this paper, I argue that Boethius, following a Neoplatonist view found in Proclus, is a causal determinist and compatibilist and maintains that God’s providential knowledge ensures the occurrence of all the events he knows. This alternative interpretation offers a better fit with Boethius’s text and its historical antecedents and provides resources to address the main criticisms of his solution.

Free Will, Foreknowledge, and Creation: Further Explorations of Kant’s Molinism

AbstractWhile Kant’s position concerning human freedom and divine foreknowledge is perhaps the least Molinist element of his multifaceted take on free will, Kant’s Molinism (minimally defined) is undeniable when it comes to the threat ensuing from the idea of creation. In line with incompatibilism and with careful qualifications in place, he ultimately suggests regarding free agents as uncreated. Given the limitations of our rational insight, this assumption is indispensable for granting that finite free agents can acquire their intelligible characters by themselves. Nonetheless, Kant concedes that creation may, as a matter of fact, be compatible with what for Molina is the pre-volitionality of the counterfactuals of freedom.

Molinist Thomist Calvinism: A Synthesis

AbstractAbstract: In recent years, attempts to reconcile God's exhaustive providential control over the future and human freedom frequently appeal to Molinism. Through the theory of Middle Knowledge, it is claimed, God can exercise meticulous providence over free creatures while preserving the libertarian agency of those creatures. Historically, both Thomist and Reformed theologians have critiqued the theory of Middle Knowledge for effectively eliminating God's aseity, making God's knowledge in some sense dependent on some non‐God reality. In this paper, I aim to push the discussion forward by integrating Thomist, Molinist, and Reformed perspectives in the view I call Molinist Thomist Calvinism. By resourcing each of these views, I try to offer a coherent way to affirm God's meticulous providence, including God's unconditional election of some and not others, and morally significant human freedom.

Calvin, Rabelais, and the platonic tradition: cognition of god and the self in renaissance and modernity

In Sociology of Religion the massive shift towards secularisation, especially in historically Protestant countries of Europe, or these with Protestant influence, has been found to comprise two shifts: one towards the loss of religion, the other towards highly individualistic esoteric spirituality. The ‘individualisation of faith’, brought about by Protestantism, proclaimed especially by John Calvin, as ‘master theoretician’, is regarded to be a feature of both. Yet, presently, Protestantism and Western Esotericism, define themselves as opposites. At the beginning of this development, in the 16th century Renaissance culture, Platonism, (understood as spiritual philosophy) had a formative influence on both. In this essay, I will look at the origins of this development, at Calvin’s introduction to his theoretical exposition of Christian faith, the ‘Institutes’, and at Francois Rabelais’ references to ‘divination’ – the means of finding out the will of God – as a foremost literary representative of the spiritual tradition that was to become Western Esotericism. I will show, that both are close in their sharing of the Platonic motif that the knowledge of God and of the Self are interconnected – despite their differing reception of it. Thus, ‘common ground’ is identified, that may help to understand the present dynamics between both, in the context of Modernity.

Defending the Hypothesis of Indifference

The problem of evil is the philosophical question regarding how to reconcile the existence of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and omniscient God with the pain and suffering in the world. The Hypothesis of Indifference is Paul Draper’s proposal considering that question. His claim is that the pain and pleasure we experience in our lifetimes has nothing to do with God or some other supernatural force acting as an agent of good or evil. In this paper, I argue that Draper’s Hypothesis of Indifference is a better explanation for why we experience pain and pleasure than theism is and that it survives major contemporary criticisms posed by Peter van Inwagen and William Alston.

The Oxford Handbook of Elizabeth Anscombe edited by Roger Teichmann, (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2022); pp. 520, £ 97.00, hbk

The Oxford Handbook of Elizabeth Anscombe edited by Roger Teichmann, (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2022); pp. 520, £ 97.00, hbk

The Language of Propaganda in Governance: The Nigerian Situation

Language is a unique gift to humanity by the Omniscient God. By means of language, we build or end a relationship, forge alliance, build bridges of unity and cooperation among peoples and groups. By means of language, also, we find a viable instrument to achieve participation and exclusion in political and diplomatic maneuvering. Formal or informal discourse may be achieved through vocal utterance, written medium or even paralinguistic features. Language, in effect, plays inestimable role in all aspects of life. This paper, in a special way, examines the impact of language in governance. Since English is Nigeria’s official language, the essay has, by purposeful random sampling, chosen the meta language of English, of all the myriads of languages spoken in Nigeria, to engage our discourse and to ascertain the impact of language in governance. Again, since charity, they say, begins at home (but should not end there), the essay has chosen Nigeria to query the impact of the English language in (political) governance. The paper upholds the platitude which holds that much is expected from the one to whom much is given. In view of this, the study asserts that political governance in Nigeria is hard work for the fact that Nigeria is a conglomerate of peoples, national groups and tongues yoked together by the Lugardian amalgamation of January 1, 1914. The salient index that wields the fragile nation state together is diversity, amidst mutual suspicion among the diverse ethnic groups. The essay uses literary or library research to probe into the recesses of language and language theories for recommending to the political leaders in governance how they should manage language so that our beloved nation is not set ablaze as a result of language mismanagement.

Divine foreknowledge and human freedom: exploring a gap-theoretic account

The recent work of logician Jc Beall marks a paradigm shift within the fields of analytic theology and philosophy of religion. Thanks to Beall’s work, the long held (and generally unquestioned) assumption that theology is governed by (or closed under) the classical account of logic, is no longer free for the assumption. More importantly, by dropping this unquestioned commitment to the classical account, Beall’s work has uncovered natural and well-motivated solutions to some of monotheistic theologies’ most difficult and longstanding problems. That said, much of Beall’s work (and the work of others who have followed his lead) has been paraconsistent, utilizing glut-theoretic (contradictory) models to solve theologies problems. In this essay, my plan is to go paracomplete, with the aim of exploring a yet to be explored solution to the infamous foreknowledge and freedom problem. My solution finds its roots in the recent work Jc Beall and Aaron Cotnoir (‘God of the Gaps’, Analysis, 2017). Specifically, in this essay I will explore a gap-theoretic solution to the foreknowledge and freedom problem; one in which it is neither true nor false that God has foreknowledge. By utilizing Beall’s and Cotnoir’s model — which sees limit claims on God’s omni-properties as either just false or gappy — a natural and well-motivated solution to the foreknowledge and freedom problem emerges. Moreover, by utilizing the Beall-Cotnoir gap-theoretic model, not only is the foreknowledge and freedom problem circumvented, but an interesting and novel account of divine omniscience emerges.

Problems with Molina’s Account of the Scientia Media

The Medieval problem of the compatibility of divine foreknowledge and contingent truths about the future can be expressed by posing two closely intertwined questions: (1) how can God infallibly know causally indeterminate future events? (2) how is divine foreknowledge, which is fixed and infallible, to be reconciled with the contingency of future events? Molina’s doctrine of scientia media (middle knowledge) is an attempt to provide a substantive and plausible answer to these questions. I briefly sketch Molina’s theory of the scientia media and then go on to assess the extent to which his approach satisfactorily answers the two questions about divine foreknowledge.

A Long Way to God's Mutability: A Response to Ebrahim Azadegan

A Long Way to God's Mutability:A Response to Ebrahim Azadegan Amirhossein Zadyousefi (bio) I. Introduction In his "On the Incompatibility of God's Knowledge of Particulars and the Doctrine of Divine Immutability: Towards a Reform in Islamic Theology" (2020, 2022) Ebrahim Azadegan tries to make room for what he calls a reform in Islamic theology. Affirming that God's knowledge of particulars is inconsistent with God's immutability, Azadegan puts forward a theory of God's knowledge of particulars, inspired from Sadrā's philosophy, which allows one to (1) explain God's knowledge of particulars and (2) hold that God is mutable. That is, Azadegan, accusing Avicenna of having the dogma of God's immutability, abandons God's immutability in favor of God's knowledge of particulars and thinks that a God who knows particulars but is mutable is more perfect than a God who does not know particulars but is immutable. In the present response, I shall show that Azadegan's project is not as easy as he thinks, and I will criticize it. Let us have a short look at Azadegan's project. II. Azadegan's Project Azadegan's 2020 essay consists of three parts. In the following, I will present a brief summary of each. In the first part, Azadegan tries to delineate the main contours of a debate in Islamic intellectual tradition over God's knowledge of particulars—a debate chiefly between Ghazālī and Avicenna—and shows how God's knowledge of particulars is in tension with God's immutability. He summarizes this debate in the following argument: 1. God is omniscient. 2. Every omniscient being knows all past, present, and future particular states of the world and of individuals. 3. Particular states of the world and of individuals change. 4. Every sort of knowledge will change with the change of its object. 5. [Therefore] God's knowledge of occurrent particulars changes. [End Page 166] 6. Knowledge is an intrinsic property of every individual, including God. 7. [Therefore] God's intrinsic property regarding His knowledge of particulars changes. 8. God's intrinsic properties are His essential properties. 9. [Therefore] God's essential properties change. 10. [Therefore] God is not immutable.1 Then he states that God's knowledge of particulars, in both Avicenna's and Ghazālī's views, is inconsistent with God's immutability.2 That is, if one holds that God knows particulars (premise 2), according to the argument above, one has to accept that God is not immutable (premise 10). According to Azadegan, Avicenna denies God's knowledge of particulars, that is, premise 2 of the argument above, in order to avoid its conclusion (premise 10).3 But, Azadegan is well aware that only temporal knowledge of changing particulars entails a change in God's essence. So, he mentions that by introducing knowledge in a universal way Avicenna tries to save premise 2 of the preceding argument while denying its fifth premise.4 But Azadegan thinks that Avicenna's appeal to knowing in a universal way does not help him, and this way of knowing particulars "cannot in the end accommodate God's knowledge of occurrent particulars and the phenomenal states of other minds"5 and "the contents of our senses and particular mental states."6 "God does not" even "know what time it is"7 and "what particular qualitative or phenomenal properties any particular individual has been experiencing when he or she has felt a pain or some other sensation."8 Azadegan states that Avicenna warmly welcomes such a result because Avicenna thinks that God's lack of knowledge of changing particulars partly constitutes God's perfectness.9 But he disagrees with Avicenna and, following Ghazālī, holds that such a God is perfect only in name. Following Ghazālī, Azadegan makes a connection between God's perfectness, God's immutability, and God's knowledge of particulars and holds that a God who knows particulars but is mutable is more perfect than a God who does not know particulars but is immutable.10 He believes that the conception of God introduced by Avicenna (a God who lacks knowledge of changing particulars) does not correspond to the God introduced by...

Hylomorphism, Change, and God's Mutability: A Rejoinder to Ebrahim Azadegan

Hylomorphism, Change, and God's Mutability:A Rejoinder to Ebrahim Azadegan Amirhossein Zadyousefi (bio) In "A Long Way to God's Mutability: A Response to Ebrahim Azadegan"1 I tried to challenge what Azadegan says in his "On the Incompatibility of God's Knowledge of Particulars and the Doctrine of Divine Immutability: Towards a Reform in Islamic Theology."2 Then, in his "Necessary Existence, Immutability, and God's Knowledge of Particulars: A Reply to Amirhossein Zadyousefi,"3 Azadegan replies to my response. In my response to Azadegan, I discussed many points, and Azadegan did not deal with all of them in his reply. So, in this short rejoinder, I will deal with what Azadegan has said about some of my criticisms. Before proceeding, I should say that in my response to Azadegan I remained neutral on whether God is mutable or not. All I have done there is to show that Azadegan's path to God's mutability by adopting Sadra's knowledge-by-presence theory is not as easy as it initially seems. Also, I have tried to show that Avicenna does not adopt the dogma of God's immutability. Rather, he has some reasons for adopting this view. I understand that one might challenge Avicenna's reasons for God's immutability. But, as I insisted in my first response to Azadegan, we should be careful not to conflate having a dogma with having a bad reason. In his reply to my response, Azadegan states that "according to Zadyousefi, Avicenna believes in an incompatibility between God's necessary existence and the denial of divine immutability." Then, he presents the following argument that he calls "Argument from God's Necessary Existence to His Immutability": [End Page 196] A1: 1. God is a necessary existent. 2. A necessary being possesses his attributes necessarily (the principle of 'Necessity of a necessary Being's Attributes'). 3. If God has a certain knowledge-set, then He has it necessarily. 4. A necessary existent exists in all possible worlds and at all times. 5. In all possible worlds God has a certain fixed knowledge-set. 6. So what God knows at w1 (in a possible world w1 or in time t1 in the actual world) is the same as what God knows at w2 (or t2). 7. Therefore, God is immutable."4 But I have not argued by virtue of the above argument that according to Avicenna God's being a necessary existent is inconsistent with God's mutability. Instead, I have presented the following argument to show that: A2: Avicenna, following Aristotle, explains change via matter. That is, if something undergoes change or can undergo change, then it is composed of matter and form and hence it is material. Now, since every material being is constituted by a matter-form compound, every material being is dependent on its constituents (matter and form) and therefore is a contingent being. For a contingent being, according to Avicenna, is a being that is dependent on something else. So, every material being would be contingent. Therefore, God's mutability entails God's being material, which in turn entails God's being contingent. So, God's being a necessary existent is incompatible with God's mutability. As we can see, this argument is completely different from A1. I suspect Azadegan's A1 is a misinterpretation of an objection that I raised against him. In his initial paper, following Ghazālī, Azadegan states that, according to Avicenna, God's knowledge of particulars is in tension with God's eternality. In my response, I argued that this is not the case. According to Avicenna, God's knowledge of changing particulars, based on some certain mechanism for knowing the occurrence of a change among particulars (i.e., knowledge of change through indexical propositions), is in tension with God's being a necessary existent. I stated this inconsistency as follows: A3: 8. God is omniscient. 9. Therefore, for any change C among particulars, God knows the occurrence of C. 10. For any knower S, if S knows the occurrence of C, then S's set of knowledge changes (based on indexical propositions). [End Page 197] 11. If S's set of knowledge changes...

Necessary Existence, Immutability, and God's Knowledge of Particulars: A Reply to Amirhossein Zadyousefi

Necessary Existence, Immutability, and God's Knowledge of Particulars:A Reply to Amirhossein Zadyousefi Ebrahim Azadegan (bio) From the Qur'an, Surah Maryam: (21) So she conceived him, and went in seclusion with him to a remote place. (22) And the pains of childbirth drove her to the trunk of a palm tree: she cried (in her anguish): "Ah! would that I had died before this! Would that I had been a thing forgotten and out of sight!" (23) But (a voice) cried to her from beneath the (palm tree): "Grieve not! for thy Lord hath provided a rivulet beneath thee;" (24) "And shake towards thyself the trunk of the palm tree: it will let fall fresh ripe dates upon thee." (25) "So eat and drink and cool (thine) eye. And if thou dost see any man say 'I have vowed a fast to (Allah) Most Gracious, and this day will I enter into no talk with any human being.'" This Surah depicts a human being in unbearable pain. What makes the pain tolerable is the sympathy that God shows for Mary. Hearing her inner voice, understanding her suffering and her grief, God is moved to provide her with practical and substantive support to help her bear her agony. For me this story portrays a God who is active in the world, hears the supplications of humanity, and has empathy with the needy, the oppressed, and those who are suffering. Yet I am concerned that our theological traditions in the Islamic world (as also in Christendom) have developed through the centuries such that God is now seen, by overwhelming theological consensus, as an immutable being, a being outside time who has determined our providence from the standpoint of eternity, who has foreknowledge of every free action of his creations and has designed all according to His plan for past and future events; who knows in advance even the timings and contents of our petitionary prayers and has decided already whether to answer them. Aloof [End Page 188] from the mundane world, He has predetermined when and where he will act or intervene in our world; and since He is perfect, the world He has created is the most perfect that could have been actualized. Everything that happened in the world is according to God's predetermined plan, and even our supplications are in His plan and so every event has a role and special place in the jigsaw puzzle of the best-designed world. God, in this picture, is transcendent from our dirty and intractable material world. But when we read the text of the Qur'an free from such philosophical and theological doctrine, we are confronted with a God who is close to us, who has on occasion changed His verdicts (Q 2:106), who asks us to aid Him in order that He may aid us as well (Q 47:7), and who clearly and firmly introduces Himself as being close to us: "When My servants ask thee concerning Me, I am indeed close (to them); I listen to the prayer of every suppliant when he calls on Me" (Q 2:186). Nevertheless, theology matters. Theology is not merely a system of beliefs about a transcendental world or our personal relationship with the sacred. As Carol Christ explains, theology matters since our ideas about divinity play an essential role in the way we make sense of our religious experiences, our personal experiences, and even our experience of the world.1 The ethical implications of our theological views can and must be taken into consideration, because our understanding of divinity shapes our understanding of what is right, just, and wrong in the world. Theology matters because religious symbols not only articulate meaning, but also provide the grounds for our ethical decision-making, which in turn shapes our social-political order. Our understanding of the role of the state, the relation between I and Thou, family law, the constitutions of our societies—all of these depend to some extent on our theological backgrounds and views. Indeed, it is upon God that we would model our lives. As John Sanders writes: "The way God treats us is the way we should...

God in Motion: A Critical Exploration of the Open Theism Debate, ManuelSchmid, Baylor University Press, 2021 (ISBN 978‐1‐4813‐1408‐4), viii + 208 pp., hb $24.99

God in Motion: A Critical Exploration of the Open Theism Debate, ManuelSchmid, Baylor University Press, 2021 (ISBN 978‐1‐4813‐1408‐4), viii + 208 pp., hb $24.99

Social freedom and dignity of the human person according to Nikolai Berdyaev

Contemporary European democracies, and liberalism in particular, are established upon the foundations of humanism. Humanism, as its name entails, denotes the elevation of the human being and setting up of the person to the centre of the universe. Humanism was a reaction against the mediaeval view of the omnipotent and omniscient God, and seeks an understanding of the human being that would fulfil his/her intuitive desire for genuine human dignity. What kind of freedom would be sufficient and adequate for true human dignity? Faced with this radical understanding of freedom, which originates from, and is dictated by, the deepest realms of the human being, most humanist thinkers chose to reject both God and the idea of the divine icon. Humanism denied man?s divine sonship and proclaimed that man is the son of nature. Hence, Humanism not only declared man?s self-confidence, but it also debased him, by defining him as a product of natural necessity. Liberalism, argues the Russian philosopher Berdyaev, has created a ?single-plane? being, it has separated the citizen from the integral personality, by refusing to admit the spiritual dimension of the human being. Berdyaev stresses that true freedom cannot be simply a formal self-defence, but that it must rather lead to creative activity. This is why the transition is inevitable from formal liberty, which protects us and defends us, to true freedom capable not only of creatively transforming the human society but also of creating a new world.