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Kierkegaard and Danielson on Foreknowledge and Free Will

I’ve been working on a collection of short, short philosophical articles that I hope to publish under the title Flash Philosophy. I conceived the idea of the genre flash philosophy because I am very fortunate to be in a department of English and Philosophy that is home to a number of creative writers who exposed me to the genre of flash fiction. Flash fiction is basically very short short stories, often only a page or two and sometimes even shorter than that. 

Philosophical articles have increased in length over time. Quite a bit has been written about this, actually, including “A Plea for More Short Journal Publications,” “Are journal articles getting too long,” and my own article “Flash Philosophy,” which appeared in Philosophy Now. The problem is that as philosophical articles get longer, they take longer to write. It can take a year or more just to draft a decent philosophical article, and then, of course, even longer than that before it gets into print. Authors are increasingly asked to basically include surveys of all the literature relevant to their argument in any article they submit for publication, even if much of that literature isn’t actually directly relevant to their argument. Not only does that make the drafting of philosophical articles very tedious, it makes the reading of them very tedious. Quite simply, it is bad form. As I explain to my students over and over again, don’t put anything in your argument that you do not absolutely have.

Philosophical articles have not always been so long, however. It turns out that many of the most highly esteemed philosophical journals such as Mind, Thought, and Philosophical Review used to publish very short articles. So I got the idea to put together a collection of some of these articles and to publish it under the title Flash Philosophy. The purpose of the collection is to demonstrate just how short a really good philosophical article can be and hence to resurrect the art of writing such short articles. Short articles are both easier to write than longer ones and easier to read. Despite that the heyday short philosophical articles appears to have been around the middle of the last century, they are uniquely suited to the digital age in that they facilitate a far more rapid development of philosophical discourse than do longer articles. To resurrect the art of writing short philosophical articles would, I believe, go a long way toward  revitalizing the discipline of philosophy.  

I got a grant several years ago to hire one of my former students as a research assistant to help me track down short philosophical articles that we could then put together in this collection. My research assistant, Daniel Wiedinmyer, combed through hundreds of volumes of old journals and produced a list of more than one hundred articles that were five pages or less. Not did that take some time, after he’d found all those articles we had to read through them to see which would be suitable for the collection. Some were obviously going to be too technical for a general readership of the sort we hoped to have. The collection is actually intended for professional philosophers as well as philosophy students and grad students, but if you are working in ethics or the philosophy of religion, some of the more technical articles in epistemology, metaphysics, or the philosophy of language, for example, are going to be hard to process. We wanted articles that made important points and made them very persuasively, but we also wanted them to be easily digestible even for philosophers from other subfields. 

That reading process actually took more than a year. After that, I had to write a preface and an introduction. I got a decent start of both, but then got distracted with other projects, such as the Drexel-Yale conference on George MacDonald that took place last December, and a number of articles on Kierkegaard that I owed to the editors of various books. Fortunately, I’ve recently been able to return to the Flash Philosophy project. I’m working on the introduction now. Basically, I am going through the collection and drafting very short summaries of the articles. That has necessitated rereading them, of course, and while I was doing that, I came across an article that it seemed to me would be of interest to Kierkegaard scholars. 

The articles is “Timelessness, Foreknowledge, and Free Will,” by Dennis Danielson. It appeared in Mind, July., 1977). God’s purported foreknowledge is often used by philosophers to support arguments against free will. Dennis Danielson argues, however, that since God’s knowledge is timeless, God can be said to have foreknowledge, or knowledge of things that have not yet happened, only from the perspective of a temporal agent. This knowledge, Danielson points out, does not in itself entail any limits on human freedom. That is, what temporal agents can claim God foreknew is “unchangeable not because it is or was foreknown but quite simply because it is past. Yet no one,” he continues, “would want to say that the unchangeableness of the past dispenses with free will.”

Does that not ring a bell with those of you who are familiar with the “Interlude” section of Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Crumbs? Kierkegaard argues quite explicitly there that the unchangeableness of the past is not the same thing as necessity and that “knowledge of the past confers no necessity.” Kierkegaard was not speaking there of God’s knowledge, but of our own knowledge of the past. What he says about knowledge being unable to confer necessity because “knowledge has nothing to give” (p. 146) could arguably be extended to God’s knowledge in the way Danielson does and Danielsen and Kierkegaard are in perfect agreement concerning the significance of the unchangeableness of the past.  

One wonders if Danielson ever read Kierkegaard. 

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Ad Fontes: Kierkegaard and MacDonald on “Original Christianity”

This year is the bicentenary of the birth of George MacDonald. There were a number of conferences held to celebrate this auspicious event. I was fortunate to be able to attend two of them. I wrote earlier about the first conference that took place at Wheaton College last summer. This post is about a conference that took place at Yale University on the 13th and 14th of December. 

I discovered by accident that Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library has the largest collection of MacDonal materials of any library in the world. That knowledge encouraged in me the hope that Yale might be willing to host a conference on MacDonald, so I “cold-called” several members of the faculty at Yale to see if there was any possibility that my hope might be realized. I didn’t have to wait long, David Mahan, of Yale’s Institute of Sacred Music responded almost immediately that the ISM could provide us with a venu. He couldn’t promise any financial support, however, so I turned to Drexel in the hope that they might be willing to provide the money we needed. They did! 

Drexel, or more specifically, David Brown, dean of Drexel’s College of Arts and Sciences, and former Drexel President John Fry, very generously agreed to cover all the costs associated with the conference. That promise was absolutely crucial in making the conference the success that it was because quite a few of the speakers could not count on institutional support to cover their costs. I will forever be indebted to Drexel for their generosity in what are hard times for pretty much every institution of higher education.

The conference was absolutely wonderful. We were treated to a tour of some of the MacDonald materials in the library, and encouraged to apply for the numerous fellowships the library has to support scholars doing research on their collections. There was a truly impressive list of presenters, as well, including Malcolm Guite and Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson, president and co-chair respectively of the George MacDonald Society, Julie Canlis, Kerry Magrudder, Trevor Hart, and many more. A full list of speakers can be found on the program. 

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, there are lots of similarities between Kierkegaard’s and MacDonald’s thought. Mine was the only paper, however, comparing the two. There is talk of all the papers presented in celebration of MacDonald’s bicentenary being published, so I won’t give you the whole paper here. The paper, “Ad Fontes: Kierkegaard and MacDonald on ‘Original Christianity,’” argues that “Kierkegaard and MacDonald share a reverence for the original Christian texts and a healthy skepticism for the official Christian tradition and its tendency to lapse into dogmatism and authoritarianism, that was unusual both for their own time and for ours and that this reverence and skepticism reveals a deep affinity in their thought concerning the true message of Christianity and the nature of Christian life.” Both Kierkegaard and MacDonald, I observe in the paper, had extensive knowledge of ancient Greek and used this knowledge to correct what they felt to be errors in the interpretation of the Christian message. Again, I’m not going to present my entire argument here. I will, however, give you a little taste of the nature of my argument. The paper begins…

“Ad fontes, or “to the sources,” was one of the rallying cries of the Protestant Reformation. It appears in Psalm 41 of the Latin Vulgate (Psalm 42 in most other versions), which reads “As the hart panteth after the water brooks,(desiderat cervus ad fontes aquarum) so panteth my soul after thee, O God.” 

The sources, or fonts, as we say in English, of Christian faith are first and foremost the earliest Christian writings, and to access these requires considerable knowledge of ancient Greek. It is not merely the earliest manuscripts of the New Testament that were written in Greek, but also the works of the earliest of the Church Fathers.”

The paper gives a number of example where both Kierkegaard and MacDonald use their knowledge of ancient Greek to defend their own interpretations of the true message of Christianity. The paper, as a whole, is yet another argument in support of the view that Kierkegaard, like MacDonald, was a universalist, and while I didn’t have the space to develop the argument in the detail I would like, I think I made a fairly convincing case, drawing not merely on texts from the works of both thinkers but also on the impressive scholarship of Ilaria Ramelli and David Konstan, whose co-authored book Terms for Eternity: Aiônios and Aïdios in Classical and Christian Texts makes a very compelling argument that there are few if any references to eternal damnation anywhere in the New Testament. This fact has been obscured by church history which, from the period of at least Augustine onward, has arguably systematically misinterpreted the meanings of these terms. Scholars well-versed in ancient Greek, however, as both Kierkegaard and MacDonald were, would certainly have been aware of the paucity of references to eternal damnation in the New Testament as well as of the fact that the church appears to have labored mightily to obscure this. This fact could actually be one of the reasons that both thinkers exhibit such a healthy skepticism for the authority of various thinkers throughout church history. Interesting, eh?

The Yale MacDonald conference was such a success, that we are hoping to be able to make it a regular event every two, or perhaps three years. So there is time for you Kierkegaard scholars to familiarize yourself with MacDonald’s thought before the next conference!

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End-of-Year Bits and Pieces

The last few months have been packed with Kierkegaard-related activities. There were not the standard two Kierkegaard sessions at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in San Diego in November, but actually five! You can find a list of the sessions as well as the presenters here.

The papers were of varying quality, but none stood out as particularly bad. I realize that that observation is sort of damning with faint praise. Sadly, however, faint praise is often all that is appropriate with respect to contemporary Kierkegaard scholarship. The problem isn’t just that a decent command of Danish is all too rare among Kierkegaard scholars, it’s also that far too many are not familiar with the breadth of Kierkegaard’s writings. Many scholars continue, for example, to view Kierkegaard as sexist simply because they are unfamiliar with the material from Kierkegaard’s journals and papers that I presented in my paper “Kierkegaard on the Paradox of Feminist Progress” as part of a session of the Nineteenth Century Theology Unit and that I have presented here on this blog. 

There are several difficulties here. First, Kierkegaard’s unpublished material collected first in Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, and then again in the new Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, while not complete is still very extensive, so it takes some time to get through it all.

Second is the fact that the short cut of searching for relevant material in the online edition of Kierkegaard’s works is unavailable for scholars who don’t have a very good knowledge of Danish. A little knowledge just isn’t enough because in many instances, there will be literally thousands of hits on a search for a particular term such as Evighed (i.e., “eternity”). There are 149 pages of hits for that term and each page has what appears to be a minimum of ten hits, but which can be greater because each hit will give a number of appearances of the term in question for a particular text. So that’s over a thousand hits for a single term, each of which must be read for its relevance to the topic being researched. One has to be able to scan these hits very quickly to see if they are indeed relevant, and most scholars simply can’t do that. 

Third, as I mentioned above, and have mentioned before, even the new Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter (and the new Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, which is based on the Skrifter) while purporting to be complete, is not actually complete. Some very important material is missing. That material can be accessed only in the old Søren Kierkegaards Papirer. Very few people have a set of the Papirer, though. I did a search just now for a set and couldn’t find a complete one, though I did find this set that has 19 volumes. The listing says that the complete set is actually 20 volumes. My own hard-cover set actually has 25 volumes, though. Three of those volumes are indexes, but that means that a complete set, sans the indexes would be 22 volumes and not 20. 

But enough of the problems with contemporary Kierkegaard scholarship. There is other news, both good and bad, to report. The good news first: The Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College is doing its best to improve the quality of Kierkegaard studies. First, they offer courses in Danish during the summer for visiting scholars and will be offering one on translation as well in the summer of 2026. Second, they have launched a new journal dedicated to Kierkegaard scholarship.

Finally, the bad news. Robert Alastair Hannay passed away on the eighth of December. Hannay was an outstanding Kierkegaard scholar, though perhaps not always so sensitive to the depth and influence of Kierkegaard’s religious convictions on his thought more generally. He was rare among Kierkegaard scholars in having had a rigorous analytical training in philosophy and he put that training to good use in his scholarship. He was also an outstanding translator. His translations of Kierkegaard’s works for Penguin are unsurpassed in both their accuracy and readability. Hannay will be sorely missed.