Alfred J. Freddoso

Alfred J. Freddoso is an American Catholic philosopher long associated with the University of Notre Dame, where he served for decades in the Department of Philosophy. Trained in the analytic tradition, he became one of the principal contemporary interpreters of late-scholastic metaphysics in the Anglophone world, especially through his English translations and commentaries on Luis de Molina's Concordia (On Divine Foreknowledge, Part IV) and Francisco Suárez's Disputationes Metaphysicae (notably the treatises on creation, conservation, and concurrence). These translations made central debates over middle knowledge, divine causation, and secondary causation accessible to analytic philosophers of religion. Freddoso has argued for a robust Thomistic account of divine concurrence against occasionalist and mere-conservationist alternatives, and has engaged sympathetically yet critically with Alvin Plantinga's free-will defense and Molinist treatment of counterfactuals of freedom. He coedited, with William Lane Craig, Theism and Atheism: Opposing Arguments in Philosophy, contributing to debates on natural theology, divine attributes, and the problem of evil. His later work emphasizes the contrast between modern analytic philosophy of religion and traditional Catholic philosophical theology, defending the latter's metaphysical realism, natural-law ethics, and integration with revealed theology. Critics from more deflationary or naturalist quarters challenge his confidence in scholastic causal categories, while some Reformed philosophers contest his Molinist sympathies.