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Omniscience could be better understood by appealing to forms of knowledge beyond propositional knowledge, such as knowing other people in personal relationships, the centrality of care, and the role of emotion in leading to knowledge.

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1 reason for

2 reasons against

Reasons For

1 perspective

Reason for

1.Propositional ideals of human knowledge exclude marginalized and maligned forms of knowledge.
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2.There are other forms of knowledge, such as knowing other people in personal relationships, the centrality of care which leads to acknowledgement of the otherness of the object of knowledge, and the role of emotion in leading to knowledge.
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Reasons Against

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Reason against 1 of 2

1.Classical theism, from Aquinas to Maimonides, grounds divine omniscience in God's self-knowledge as pure actuality, not relational or emotional cognition.
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2.Introducing emotion and care into divine cognition risks attributing passivity and dependence to God, contradicting divine aseity and impassibility.
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3.A being whose knowledge is partially constituted by relational response cannot be the unmoved ground of all being that classical omniscience requires.
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Reason against 2 of 2

1.Feminist standpoint epistemology, from which this claim draws, is designed to critique human epistemic practices, not to provide an ontological account of infinite divine cognition.
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2.Applying frameworks built on embodied, situated knowers to a necessarily non-situated divine being commits a category error identified by thinkers like Herbert McCabe and Brian Davies.
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Topics

Divine Attributes

Key Terms

epistemology(Contrasted with purely descriptive scientific inquiry): A normative enterprise that tells us how we ought to reason from evidence and how we ought to justify our beliefs, as distinct from merely describing how we do reason or justify beliefs
knowledge(Distinguished from mere true belief, which may be the product of indoctrination and need not exercise deliberative capacities.): Justified true belief — true belief that has been arrived at through the exercise of deliberative capacities, including comparison of and deliberation among alternatives.
omniscience(The passage tests omniscience against mathematical undecidability): The property of knowing everything; used here to probe whether divine knowledge extends to undecided mathematical propositions.
propositional knowledge(Used to argue that even first-person experiential knowledge involves fallible classification): Knowledge expressed as a proposition, which requires classifying the subject matter together with other things of the same type

A being whose knowledge is partially constituted by relational response cannot b...Applying frameworks built on embodied, situated knowers to a necessarily non-sit...Classical theism, from Aquinas to Maimonides, grounds divine omniscience in God'...Feminist standpoint epistemology, from which this claim draws, is designed to cr...

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Introducing emotion and care into divine cognition risks attributing passivity a...Propositional ideals of human knowledge exclude marginalized and maligned forms ...

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AI-extracted2/3 agreementValid

SEP: omniscience

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Several recent discussions of omniscience have attempted to defend a more restricted account than offered by the preceding definitions. For example, Langtry (2008: 39) suggests that God is omniscient just in case, for every true proposition p, “either God knows that p, or else he does not but his knowing that p is not precluded by any defect or limitation in his intrinsic cognitive capacities.” Nagasawa (2017) claims that a stronger version of perfect being theology would hold that God has a “maximally consistent set” of the divine attributes of knowledge, power, and benevolence. This would al...

Extraction notes

Validity: The passage explicitly presents Farmer's argument that because propositional ideals exclude marginalized forms of knowledge (premise 1), and because there exist alternative forms of knowledge such as personal relationships, care, and emotion (premise 2), omniscience could be better understood by appealing to these non-propositional forms of knowledge (conclusion).

Confidence: Clearly presented argument from Farmer drawing on feminist epistemology.

Details

Type: claim
Perspectives: 3 (1 for, 2 against)
Edits: 1 edit

Omniscience could be better understood by appealing to forms of knowledge beyond propositional knowledge, such as knowing other people in personal relationships, the centrality of care, and the role of emotion in leading to knowledge.

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Reasons Against

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