Future contingents

doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521226059.021

18 - Future contingents

from V - Logic in the high middle ages: propositions and modalities

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008

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Jan Pinborg and

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Summary

Three problems involving future contingents

There is more than one problem of future contingents. There is first the problem raised by Aristotle – that of reconciling the principle of bivalence (the principle that for any sentence P either P is true or not-P is true) with the view that some claims about the future are contingent, are such that neither the claim nor its denial is necessarily true. Medieval discussions of this problem often rely on our intuitions that the past and the present are ‘fixed’ in some way in which the future is not, and so these discussions often illuminate medieval views on tense and modality.

A second problem has to do with the possibility of foreknowledge. Can one hold both that some future event is contingent and that it is foreknown?

A third problem is specifically theological. Can complete knowledge of the future by an immutable, infallible, impassible God be reconciled with the contingency of some aspects of the future?

These are distinct problems. Theories which solve the problem of contingent truth may fail to account for foreknowledge, and theories which account for both future contingent truth and foreknowledge may yet fail to explain how contingent future events, e.g. sins, can be known by a knower who cannot be causally acted upon.

Yet all three problems are variations on a single theme. We are inclined to think that there is an objective difference between the past and the future.

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy
From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Disintegration of Scholasticism, 1100–1600
, pp. 358 - 382

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521226059.021 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 1982

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