Jules Lequier

Jules Lequier (Quintin, 1814 – Plérin, 1862) was a French philosopher from Brittany and a proponent of French spiritualism. His work, small in quantity and little known during his lifetime, belongs to nineteenth-century continental philosophy and deserves attention for its reflection on freedom, chance and divine knowledge.

He lived and died in Brittany. According to the sources, his death was apparently a suicide, after he swam out to sea. Influenced by Fichte, he left fragmentary writings that did not reach a wide audience in his own day.

His most notable contribution is a view of dynamic divine omniscience: God knows the future as a field of possibilities rather than as fixed facts, since the future does not yet exist as anything more than abstract possibility. On this account, omniscience means knowing necessary facts as necessary and contingent facts as contingent. Lequier argued that this position guarantees both divine and human freedom and offers a partial way of reconciling human-caused evil with the perfect goodness, power and knowledge of God.

His work reached a wider readership mainly through English translations published in 1998 and 1999, which have made his thought accessible beyond France.