Jules Lequier

Jules Lequier (or Lequyer, [ləkɥije]; 30 January 1814 – 11 February 1862) was a French philosopher from Brittany. Lequier came to death, presumably as a suicide, by swimming out into the ocean.

Lequier wrote in favour of dynamic divine omniscience, wherein God's knowledge of the future is one of possibilities rather than actualities. Omniscience, under this view, is the knowledge of necessary facts as necessary, and contingent facts as contingent. Since the future does not yet exist as anything more than a realm of abstract possibilities, it is no impugning of divine omniscience to claim that God does not know the future as a fixed and unalterable state of affairs: that he does not know what is not there to be known. Lequier's approach guarantees both divine and human freedom, and suggests a partial resolution of the apparent inconsistency of human-wrought evil and the perfect goodness, power and knowledge of God.

• Translation of Works of Jules Lequyer: The Hornbeam Leaf, The Dialogue of the Predestinate and the Reprobate, Eugene and Theophilus (Lewiston, New York, Edwin Mellen Press, 1998).
• Jules Lequyer’s "Abel and Abel" Followed by "Incidents in the Life and Death of Jules Lequyer" (Lewiston, New York, The Edwin Mellen Press, 1999).