¹ Fischer, John Martin, ‘Freedom and Foreknowledge’, Philosophical Review, XCII (1983), 69–79;Google ScholarFischer, John Martin, ‘Ockhamism’, Philosophical Review, xciv (1985), 81–100;CrossRefGoogle ScholarFischer, John Martin, ‘Pike's Ockhamism’, Analysis, XLVI (1986), 57–63;CrossRefGoogle ScholarFischer, John Martin, ‘Hard-Type Soft Facts’, Philosophical Review, xcv (1986), 591–601;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Fischer, John Martin, ‘Snapshot Ockhamism’, Philosophical Perspectives, forthcoming 1991.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

² For a contemporary development of such an argument, see Pike, Nelson, ‘Divine Omniscience and Voluntary Action’, Philosophical Review, LXXIV (1965), 27–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar This paper is reprinted along with a selection of papers that discuss the argument and various strategies of response to it in God, Foreknowledge, and Freedom ed. By Fischer, John Martin (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989).Google Scholar

³ William Craig, Lane, ‘“Nice Soft Facts”: Fischer on Foreknowledge’, Religious Studies xxv (1989).Google Scholar

⁴ See William of Ockham, , Predesination, God's Foreknowledge and Future Contingents’, trans, by Adams, Marilyn McCord and Kretzmann, Norman (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1969), pp. 46–47. There is a good discussion of the relevant passage in Alvin Plantinga, ‘On Ockham's way out’, reprinted in Fischer, ed., pp. 178–215, esp. p. 190.Google Scholar

⁵ In a different paper from the one under consideration here, Craig says, ‘Recent translations of some of Ockham's works into English have stimulated a renewed interest in his thought, and one frequently finds his name bandied about — often with little understanding — in current discussions of theological fatalism’ (Craig, William Lane, ‘William Ockham On Divine Foreknowledge and Future Contingency’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly LXiX (1988), 117.) In the footnote which accompanies this remark, Craig proceeds to elaborate: ‘ Certainly the worst example I have found of contemporary misconstruals of Ockham emerges in the debate between Pike and Fischer over the viability of Ockhamism falsely socalled.’Google Scholar

⁶ Craig (1989), p. 235, note 2.Google Scholar

⁷ Ibid., p. 235.

⁸ In ‘Hard-Type Soft Facts’ I say, ‘Even if God's existence and God's belief are nice soft facts, they are soft facts with a residual hardness. These are the facts, hard as they may be to accept’ (p. 601). Note that my claim is not that even if the above-mentioned facts are soft, theological fatalism cannot be averted. Rather, my claim here is that Ockhamism is internally problematic; the claim is that even the Ockhamist's soft facts have aspects or components which are ‘hard’ — genuinely and solely about the past. If this is so, Ockhamism is unacceptable; but there may (obviously) be other ways of controverting incompatibilism.Google Scholar

⁹ Craig (1989), pp. 236–7.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Craig complains that the account I have given of fixity renders the notion ‘person-relative’. He says that this implies that ‘a past event may be fixed for some persons but not for other, more powerful persons, which seems not at all to capture our intuitions concerning the fixity of the past’ (Craig, p. 236, note 2). But to relativize fixity to persons need not entail that anyone can affect the past. The definition of fixity is supposed to apply quite generally, and not just to past facts, and thus it clearly ought to be person-relative. A constraint can then be applied to render it the case that all past facts are fixed for all persons.Google Scholar

¹¹ Craig (1989), pp. 236–7.Google Scholar

¹² Pike, Nelson, ‘Of God and Freedom: A Rejoinder’, Philosophical Review, LXXV (1966), 370.Google Scholar This paper is in response to Saunders, John Turk, ‘Of God and Freedom’, Philosophical Review, LXXV (1966), 219–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹³ Craig, pp. 237.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Ibid.

¹⁵ Ibid. pp. 237–8.

¹⁶ Ibid. pp. 236–7.

¹⁷ Ibid. p. 238. Craig makes a similar point in his article, ‘Tachyons, Time Travel, and Divine Omniscience’, Journal of Philosophy, LXXXV (1988), 135–6.Google Scholar

¹⁸ I introduced this constraint in Fischer (1983), pp. 76–79. I wish to clarify a point here. In ‘Freedom and Foreknowledge’, I employed the term ‘God’ as a title-term to specify a certain role. In contrast, in ‘Hard-Type Soft Facts’, I employed the term ‘God’ as a proper name which denotes the individual who possesses the Divine Attributes. This difference implies a difference in the status of the relevant facts. Thus, in ‘Freedom and Foreknowledge’ I argued that the facts about God's beliefs are plausibly taken to be hard facts, whereas in ‘Hard-Type Soft Facts‘ I argued that they are plausibly taken to be hardtype soft facts. In either case, however, the relevant facts have some ‘hard’ (temporally non-relational) feature, and thus it is equally plausible to take them to be fixed at later times. In the text of this paper, sometimes I employ the phrase ‘ hard feature of the past’ in a way which is neutral between ‘hard fact about the past’ and ‘hard-type soft fact about the past‘.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Ibid. pp. 239.

²⁰ Ibid.

²¹ See, again, note 18.Google Scholar

²² Craig (1989), p. 239.Google Scholar

²³ For developments of the above positions, see my ‘Hard-Type Soft Facts’.Google Scholar

²⁴ Craig (1989), p. 240.Google Scholar

²⁵ Freddoso, Alfred J., translation with an introduction and notes, de Molina, Luis, On Divine Fore knowledge:Part IV or the Concordia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 61.Google Scholar

²⁶ Ibid. pp. 240.

²⁷ Craig cites an article by Hoffman and Rosenkrantz: Hoffman, Joshua and Rosenkrantz, Gary, ‘On Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom’, Philosophical Studies, XXXVII (1980), 289–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar (It is useful also to see Rowe's response to Hoffman and Rosenkrantz: Rowe, William L., ‘ On Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom: A Reply’, Philosophical Studies XXXVII (1980), 429–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁸ I assume that talk about falsifying facts and falsifying propositions is interchangeable here.Google Scholar

²⁹ Clearly, these notions are intended to be quasi-technical notions. They play a certain role in the relevant arguments, but they are not intended to give an analysis of some pre-theoretic concept.Google Scholar

³⁰ Ibid. p. 240.

³¹ Note here that I did not make the claim which Craig ascribes to me. That is, I did not claim that there is no need to establish that no human can so act that some actual bearer of a hard property in the past wouldn't have had that property because the Ockhamist has not offered any non-question-begging examples of hard-type soft facts (relative to certain times) which are, intuitively, not fixed at later times. What I did say was something different. I said that one need not establish the claim in question in order to show that a certain Ockhamistic strategy fails.Google Scholar

³² Ibid.

³³ Ibid. p. 241.

³⁴ Ibid.

³⁵ Ibid. p. 242.

³⁶ Ibid.

³⁷ Ibid.

³⁸ Ibid. p. 244.

³⁹ Ibid. p. 244.

⁴⁰ Ibid. p. 245.

⁴¹ Ibid.

⁴² I have been helped by discussions with Alexander Rosenberg and Mark Ravizza. I have benefited from the support of the Center for Ideas and Society, University of California, Riverside.Google Scholar