Anna Karczewska

The paper is concerned with John Martin Fischer’s Bootstrapping View of God’s foreknowledge, which is intended to reconcile God’s foreknowledge with genuine contingency of the future. We argue that this view has two major faults. Firstly, its main theses are incoherent and lack a proper justification. Secondly, the Bootstrapping View doesn’t address the problem of future contingents it was designed to solve. ---------------------------------------- Zgłoszono: 23/07/2025. Zrecenzowano: 3/10/2025. Zaakceptowano do publikacji: 14/11/2025.

In 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.

In 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.

This article traces the discursive representation of cultural trauma and social exclusion of the inhabitants of low-income neighborhoods of Medellín in the reportage written by Colombian journalists. The three books written by Ricardo Aricapa, Alonso Salazar and Juan Camilo Castañeda Arboleda cover the period from the 1980s, years of extreme violence, to the first decades of the new millennium, representing marginalized people dragged into the narco business, youth gangs and armed conflict. The article’s aim is to examine how violent urban life is represented in the aforementioned reportage and how these books function as secondary witnesses to cultural trauma. By including the voices of the marginalized groups and incorporating them to the national discourse, these books demand emotional, institutional and symbolic reparation and reconstruction.