The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 133 five of a broad interest in articulating the value of technology as a category of knowledge " (~47). Whitney is too disciplined a scholar to yield more than fleetingly to the temptation to assess the relative modernity of these two positions. Suffering no such restraint, I cannot help but note that technical and intellectual progress ultimately required the defeat of the Victorine insistence "that technology possesses a moral value" (126). Only today have we begun to come to terms with the implications of this "modern" program of driving morality from the field of technics. The author of Paradise Restored, however, has wisely and carefully delimited her subject matter to the place accorded the aries mechanicae in the medieval system of knowledge. This narrowing of focus gives the book its strength, but also calls attention to the tasks that remain unresolved. Whitney herself alludes to this in a closing reference to the fact that the classification of knowledge was essentially a theological problem , whose setting was "the university or school, not the artist's workshop or the monastery" (148). Almost no reference is made to the works of the "practical" authors, either of antiquity (Vitruvius, Frontinus, the Alexandrian mechanical school) or of the medieval era (the Benedictine tradition, Theophilus, Villard de Honnecourt). Nor is there any sustained consideration of the social and historical factors that contributed to the newly-enhanced status of technology in the Middle Ages. These exclusions in no way limit the exceptional value of this fine study. They suggest only that a new "medieval synthesis" may still be called for, one in which Paradise Restored will be seen to have played an indispensable role. BAaRY M. KATZ Stanford University Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski. The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Pp. viii + 215. Cloth, $29.95. To the recently burgeoning writings on the problem of reconciling God's (fore)knowledge with human freedom? Zagzebski contributes a competent, closely reasoned defense of the compatibilist position. She contends that while none of the traditional solutions to the problem is completely adequate, the very argument which purports to establish the incompatibility is flawed in several of its premises. The classical solution is proposed by Boethius" and repeated by Thomas and more recently by Stump and Kretzmann. Boethius argued that since God is timeless, his beliefs about the future are not accidentally necessary. Consequently, they entail no necessity with regard to human free actions. Zagzebski competently defends Boethius's contention that God is eternal. Against Plantinga she argues that events, not proposi- 'Jonathan L. Kvanvig, The Possibility of an AU-KnowingGod (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986); William Hasker, God, Time, and Knowledge(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989); John Martin Fischer, ed., GOd,Foreknowledge,and Freedom(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989); William Lane Craig, D/v/heForeknowledgeand Human Freedom(Leyden: E.J. Bril|, 199t). 9Boethius, The ConsolationofPhilosophy(Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969), Bk. 5- ~34 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 3 ~:a JANUARY 1993 tions, are accidentally necessary. To Craig she replies that God's timelessness does not necessarily invoke a B-theory of time which makes temporal becoming solely subjective . To the objection that a timeless God cannot know indexical propositions, she replies that there is no reason to think that God's knowledge is propositional. However, Zagzebski does not find the Boethian solution to the foreknowledge dilemma fully adequate, for since it is reasonable to think that God's eternal beliefs are necessary, one can generate a revised version, which she terms the Timeless Knowledge Dilemma. A second solution to the foreknowledge dilemma, embraced by a number of contemporary philosophers including Plantinga, can be traced to William of Ockham.3 The Ockhamist solution is to deny that all past events are accidentally necessary. Though hard facts about the past are necessary, soft facts are not. Zagzebski suggests that the difficulty of defining hard and soft facts, manifested by the ongoing parade of definitions and counterexamples, makes suspect both the distinction and the motivation behind it. If God is in time, it is intuitive to believe that his beliefs are accidentally necessary. But then, she holds, there is no such thing as counterfactual power...