Recent Objections to Perfect Knowledge and Classical Approaches to Omniscience

Patrick Grim and Einar Duenger Bohn have recently argued that there can be no perfectly knowing Being. In particular, they urge that the object of omniscience is logically absurd or requires an impossible maximal point of all knowledge. I argue that, given a more classical notion of omniscience found in Aquinas and Augustine, we can shift the focus of perfect knowledge from what that being must know to the mode of that being’s understanding. Since Grim and Bohn focus on the object rather than mode of God’s knowledge, this classical approach to omniscience undermines their objections.