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Boethius And Free Will Essay

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There is much thought about whether or not we hold free will within us, but isn’t it true that we are freely questioning if we have free will at this very moment? If we have the ability to question free will, in which we are freely questioning, does that make us free? In Boethius’s, The Consolation of Philosophy, Book V presents the problem of freedom and God. Boethius refers to freedom as “freedom of the will” and God’s divine foreknowledge as “God’s Providence”. Boethius then presents a sequence of arguments that state that freedom of the will and divine Providence are incompatible.
Boethius’s first proposition is, “If God knows the future, then the future is determined,” (PHL 150 Discussion, September 16, 2015). Thus, anything God’s foresees happening, must happen. Boethius is also trying to explain that God essentially foreknows the future eternally. Thus, God knows all the actions, wishes, and desires of mankind. Then his second proposition is that, “If the future is determined, then we don’t have free …show more content…
Everything in this world is defined by nature and an aspect of God’s nature is that God is eternal. Boethius leads us to understand God’s eternal nature, and how our world is disconnected from God by being a world that is everlasting. Boethius describes a simple necessity as being a necessity that which a thing cannot be anything other than what it is. An example of a simple necessity according to Boethius would be that, “all men are mortal,” (Boethius 166). On the contrary, a conditional necessity would be a necessity that is what is knows to be the case is just simply the case. Boethius describes a condition necessity situation to be that, “if you know someone is walking, it is necessary that he is walking,” (Boethius

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