Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun Knowledge or awareness of something before its existence or occurrence; prescience.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Knowledge that precedes the existence of the thing or the happening of the event known; prescience.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun Knowledge of a thing before it happens, or of whatever is to happen; prescience.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun Knowing beforehand, prescience, foresight, precognition

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun knowledge of an event before it occurs

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

fore- +‎ knowledge

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Examples

  • And since predestination is comprised under foreknowledge, the gloss in the beginning of the Psalter assigns only two species to prophecy, namely of _foreknowledge, _ and of

    Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province Aquinas Thomas

  • God's foreknowledge is not the perception of any ground of action out of Himself; still in it liberty is comprehended, and all absolute constraint debarred [Anselm in Steiger].

    Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible 1871

  • Thus Luther calls the foreknowledge of God a thunderbolt to dash the doctrine of free-will into atoms.

    A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory Albert Taylor Bledsoe 1843

  • This sort of foreknowledge is in God, who at one commanding view sees all things that ever were, or are, or ever will be.

    Commentary on the Whole Bible Volume VI (Acts to Revelation) 1721

  • [Don't give me some flimsy "foreknowledge is not determinism" line, either.

    Your Right Hand Thief 2008

  • [Don't give me some flimsy "foreknowledge is not determinism" line, either.

    Archive 2008-10-01 2008

  • It is tempting to imagine that the elegy was written in some kind of foreknowledge of the untimely silencing of his own sweet blackbird song.

    Archive 2009-04-01 Rus Bowden 2009

  • But there is nothing problematic about that kind of foreknowledge because events could have proven me wrong even though as events actually turned out, they didn't prove me wrong.

    Foreknowledge and Free Will Zagzebski, Linda 2008

  • I guess what I am saying is, the "conspiraloons" are focusing too much on the Power/Visor Consulting simulation, and they need to focus on the Israeli foreknowledge which is there in print in the Bild am Sontag 10th or 11th July 2005 edition.

    If you are a conspiracy theorist.... Rachel 2006

  • Paul de Man, who introduced the deconstructionist theory of Jacques Derrida to American readers after the New Criticism had become a received orthodoxy, detected in the New Critics a "foreknowledge" of what he called, borrowing a phrase from the Swiss critic Georges Poulet, "hermeneutic circularity."

    The Decline and Fall of Literature Delbanco, Andrew 1999

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