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In this essay, my goal is, first, to describe the most important contemporary philosophical approaches to the nature of time, and then, secondly, to discuss the ways in which those different accounts bear upon the question of the possibility of divine foreknowledge. I shall argue that different accounts of the nature of time give rise to different objections to the idea of divine foreknowledge, but that, in addition, there is a general argument for the impossibility of divine foreknowledge that is independent of one's account of the nature of time.

The basic question discussed is whether abortion & infanticide are morally acceptable practices. The central issue involved is that of what properties an organism must possess in order to have a serious right to life. The answer proposed is that an organism cannot have a serious right to life unless it is capable of self-consciousness, & an organism is said to be self-conscious only if it regards itself as a continuing subject of experiences & other mental states. This answer is defended by arguing that there is a conceptual connection between rights & desires, so that an individual cannot have a given right unless it is capable of having the corresponding desire. It is then suggested that human fetuses & newborn infants do not, simply as a matter of empirical fact, possess self-consciousness, & hence do not have a serious right to life. Both abortion & infanticide are thus morally acceptable practices. A critical survey is included of alternative views on the morality of abortion & infanticide. Liberal positions are criticized for selecting cutoff points, past which the killing of a human organism is held to be seriously wrong, that do not rest upon any morally signif diff in the developing organism before & after the cutoff point. The extreme conservative position on abortion, according to which the killing of a human organism at any point in its development from a zygote on is always seriously wrong, is shown to be tenable only if what is referred to as the potentiality principle is sound: the potentiality principle states that an organism may have a serious right to life simply by virtue of certain properties that it will later come to have. An argument is presented which shows that the potentiality principle is unsound, & hence that the extreme conservative position on abortion must be rejected. Modified AA.