Professor Jari Kaukua's article awarded by internationally renowned philosophy journal
BSHP will award an annual prize of £1000 to the best article in the journal in the previous year. The selection is made by a panel of editors from the journal.
Kaukua is a Professor in the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy. His special field is the Arabic-language philosophical tradition of the Middle Ages. His research seeks to combine historical analysis with philosophical themes of our own time, particularly in the fields of epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy of mind.
Kaukua's research has focused on medieval theories of self-consciousness and intentional consciousness, as well as on questions of modal metaphysics. What kind of being is the conscious mind and how is its conscious experience constructed? Is the world necessarily as it is, or could things be different in some respect?
Is the sentence 'Saga Vanninen wins the Olympic gold medal in Cortina' true or false?
The award-winning article deals with the question of so-called future contingencies in the logic and metaphysics of Ibn Sina (lat. Avicenna, d. 1037). The question concerns the truth value of statements about individual states of affairs that refer to the future: for example, is the sentence 'Saga Vanninen wins the Olympic gold medal in Cortina' true or false now, in April 2025? If the sentence is true or false, it would seem to follow that the future is necessarily exactly as it will be and there is no alternative. If it is neither true nor false, sentences like the example would seem to violate the principle of the bivalence of truth
Kaukua's article links the question of future contingencies to the theological question of the omniscient God's knowledge of individual beings. Human subjects view temporal things from a temporal perspective, with the result that the causal relations between them appear to be open-ended. An omniscient subject like God, on the other hand, views temporal things from outside of time and perceives them as a network of causes and effects in which there is no room for open possibilities.
"From an atemporal perspective, it is eternally true that Vanninen will take the gold in Cortina 2026," Kaukua says.
Kaukua argues that the study of Islamic philosophy is important because it broadens the field of the history of philosophy into areas that have traditionally been considered marginal. This not only corrects misconceptions about the history of ideas but also lays the foundations for a more inclusive understanding of philosophy in our own time.
More information on the recognition:
The article is openly available here:
Kaukua, J. (2022). Future contingency and God’s knowledge of particulars in Avicenna. British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 32(4), 745–765.
