Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

550 Simo Knuuttila
physics. In arguing for the contingency of the created order Scotus writes:
I do not call something contingent because it is not always or necessarily
the case, but because the opposite of it could be actual at the
very moment when it occurs. 164
This is a denial of the traditional thesis of the necessity of the present and the
temporal frequency characterization of contingency. In the Scotist definition, the
meaning of the notion of contingency is spelt out by considering simultaneous
alternatives. What is actual is contingent only if, instead of being actual, it could
be not actual. This conception of simultaneous contingent alternatives is part of
an argument that the first cause does not act necessarily. According to Scotus, the
eternal creative act of divine will is free only if it is a choice between alternatives
and could be other than it is in a real sense. 165
That God acts by choice between alternatives had been a common theological
view since Augustine, but Scotus formulated its conceptual foundation in a new
way, which had consequences for how modal terms in general were understood.
In the Augustinian tradition, it was thought that metaphysical possibilities are
ultimately based on the divine essence and represent the ways in which it could be
imitated by created things. Scotus was the first to deviate from this metaphysical
tradition in which possibilities are founded on divine being. According to Scotus,
when God as an omniscient being knows all possibilities, he does not know them
by turning first to his essence. Possibilities can be known in themselves. 166 In
fact they would be what they are even if there were no God. Scotus states that
if it is assumed that, per impossibile, neither God nor the world exists and that
the proposition ’The world is possible’ then existed, this proposition would be
true. The actual world is possible as it is, and this possibility and the possibilities
of unrealized things are primary metaphysical facts which are not dependent on
anything else. 167
Scotus calls the propositional formulations of pure possibilities logical possibilities
(possibile logicum). These express things and states of affairs to which it is
not repugnant to be, which means that their descriptions do not involve a contradiction.
Possibilities as such have no kind of existence of their own, but are real
in the sense that they form the precondition for everything that is or can be. 168
A great deal of Scotus’s discussion of metaphysical themes concentrates on the
164 Ordinatio I.2.1.1-2, 86 (Opera omnia, vol. 2);De primo principio, ed. and translated by W.
Kluxen (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1974), IV.4.
165 Lectura I.39.1-5, 58; see also L. Honnefelder, Duns Scotus ((Munich: C.H. Beck, 2005), 85-6.
166 Ord. I.35, 32 (Opera omnia, vol. 6); Knuuttila 1993, 103-4; S. Knuuttila, ’Duns Scotus and
the Foundations of Logical Modalities’ in L. Honnefelder, R. Wood, M. Dreyer (eds.), John Duns
Scotus: Metaphysics and Ethics, Studien und Texte zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters 53
(Leiden: Brill, 1996), 135-36.
167 Ord. I.7.1, 27 (Opera omnia, vol. 4);;Lect.I.7, 32 (Opera omnia, vol. 16); Lect.; I.39.1-5,
49; Quaestiones super libros Metaphysicorum Aristotelis libri VI-IX, ed. R. Andrews et al. (St.
Bonaventure: The Franciscan Institute, St. Bonaventure University, 1997), 9.1-2, 18.
168 Knuuttila 1996, 137-41.