What do we really mean when we say we “know” something, and why does that confidence fall apart the moment we try to explain it?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Linda Zagzebski is the Emerita George Lynn Cross Research Professor, as well as Emerita Kingfisher College Chair of the Philosophy of Religion and Ethics, at the University of Oklahoma. Her work has focused on epistemology, philosophy of religion, and virtue theory.
2. Interview Summary
Zagzebski develops the idea of ‘omnisubjectivity’ as a divine attribute: God’s perfectly accurate, complete grasp of every creature’s conscious states “from that creature’s own perspective,” including what those states are like. She argues that omniscience requires more than knowing all true propositions—it requires knowing subjective experience itself—and that traditional accounts of omnipresence (“present in everything that exists” in a non-spatial way) naturally extend to the non-spatial aspects of reality, like pain, joy, and anxiety. This is also tied to prayer and divine justice: if judgment depends in part on the fine-grained character of our conscious lives, God must be able to grasp those lives fully. She then presses a core explanatory challenge: if omnipresence means God is “in” your anxiety the way you are, that seems to require perfect first-person grasp rather than mere observation at a distance—but it’s hard to explain how that can be true without collapsing the distinction between God and the creature.
On free will and foreknowledge, she diagnoses the fatalist pressure as driven by the ‘necessity of the past’ plus some ‘transfer of necessity’ principle: if a past fact is fixed and entails a future fact, the future looks fixed too. She suggests that progress requires getting clearer on what we really mean by “we can’t do anything about the past,” proposing that what’s at issue may be causal reach (or “causal closure”) rather than a transferable modality—and that this reframes divine-foreknowledge worries as one instance of a more general causal structure. She also highlights that theological fatalism and logical fatalism share the same argumentative shape, and that our different reactions to them should make us suspicious that something subtle is being smuggled in. In exploring responses, she discusses a line associated with William of Ockham (treating relevant truths/beliefs as not straightforwardly “in the past”) and offers her own “Thomistic optimism”: drawing on Thomas Aquinas and divine simplicity, God’s knowing could be one undivided, continuous state spanning past, present, and future, so it doesn’t sit in the past in the way the fatalist argument requires. She adds that merely appealing to timelessness doesn’t automatically help, since it can generate an analogous “necessity” problem for eternity.
A later theme is her book The Two Greatest Ideas and a proposed “third” breakthrough: intersubjectivity—genuinely sharing perspectives and “seeing through other people’s eyes” in a way that becomes culturally transformative. She points out that the pieces already exist across fields (mirror-neuron research, empathy in psychology, applications in education, phenomenology), but they haven’t been integrated into a society-wide vision that changes how people actually think and live. Morally, she contrasts an older harmony-centered ideal (flourishing as living in harmony with the universe, in Aristotle’s sense of eudaimonia) with the modern elevation of autonomy (often traced in the culture to Immanuel Kant), and suggests many polarized disputes replay that deeper conflict. She’s skeptical that purely academic progress will reduce real-world rancor unless these insights are “imbibed” as ordinary habits of mind. She closes by defending philosophy’s value in broadly Socrates-style terms: it forces deeper reflection on what seems obvious, exposes the assumptions we live by, and cultivates intellectual humility.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
01:02 - Omnisubjectivity
04:52 - Omnipresence and omnisubjectivity
09:06 - Omniscience and omnisubjectivity
13:49 - Knowing that vs. knowing what it’s like
16:51 - Immoral states
25:11 - Knowing his creation
26:22 - Free will and alternative possibilities
30:00 - Is it libertarian free will?
30:53 - Foreknowledge and free will
38:00 - Necessity of the past
40:05 - Backward causation
42:30 - Theological and logical fatalism
45:37 - God’s infallibility
48:47 - God and time
52:15 - The Two Greatest Ideas
58:01 - Progress on intersubjectivity
1:02:55 - Philosophy of mind
1:04:25 - Identity over time
1:07:35 - Do souls solve the problem?
1:11:03 - Continuity of forms
1:13:33 - Value of philosophy
1:16:04 - Conclusion
