Adrian Buck’s Reviews > The Consolation of Philosophy > Status Update

A great necessity is laid upon you, if you will be honest with yourself, a great necessity to be good, since you live in the sight of a judge who sees all things.

Why, then, do you insist that all that is scanned by the sight of God becomes necessary?

"Let us, them, if we can, raise ourselves up to the heights of that supreme intelligence. There reason will be able ... to see how that which has no certain occurrence may be seen by a certain and fixed foreknowledge, a knowledge that is not opinion, but the boundless immediacy of the highest form of knowing" - Boethius anticipates the epistemological problems of quantum mechanics?

"human reason refuses to believe that divine intelligence can see the future in any other way except that in which human reason has knowledge" - cf Kant's universal reason

"Everything that is known is comprehended not according to its own nature, but according to the ability to know of those who do the knowing" - so much for Kant's Copernican revolution.

"So that those creatures who have an innate power of reason also have the freedom to will or not to will"

"Whenever something is done for some purpose, and for certain reasons something or the other than what was intended, it is called chance" - hmm, this is very different to something happening without any intention being formed.

we should draw closer to everyday language to avoid the appearence of having moved too far from common usage? - appearence?

All fortune whether pleasant or adverse is meant either to reward or discipline the good or to punish or correct the bad. - isn't this when the argument falls down?

But if you could see the plan of Providence, you would not think there was evil anywhere. - how are the Historians doing on this?