The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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Hartshorne commonly speaks of God as "sole adequate knower" and can say that "what it means to be a fact" is "to have a certain relation to omniscience" (AD: 285, 276).

Therefore, it is all the more interesting that he can sometimes say simply that God "adequately possesses any world whatever." Of course, too much can be made of this difference, since he almost certainly uses "to possess" as, for all practical purposes, equivalent to "to know," or, at least, "to experience," "to be aware of," "to feel." But there is a difference, and I can certainly say much more readily that God possesses all things than that God knows all things. God possesses all things in the way in which the subject term of any real, internal relation possesses the relation as well as object thereof. But God so possesses all things "adequately," which is to say, God is not only really, internally related to all things, but also really, internally related to everything in all things.

3 May 2009

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