Jaarboek Thomas Instituut 1997 - Thomas Instituut te Utrecht

AQUINAS ON NECESSITY AND TIME
A Response 10 Antonie Vos
Harm Goris
In his detailed critical review of my Free creatures of an Eternal God
Antonie Vos focuses on the intricate historical and systematic
problems that arise in studying the medieval understanding of the
notions of necessity, possibility and contingency. Although I am not
sure whether I understand all of his critical questions and objections
correctly, I am very grateful to him for pointing out and analyzing in
detail a number of passages in my book that tum out to be ambiguous
and overstated. First, I shall address some of Dr. Vos's criticisms that
seem to be based on positions I did not intend to defend although my
formulations might have created the impression to the contrary.
Second, I shall try to put into different words the problem I labeled
'temporal fatalism'. It seems to me that Dr. Vos does not fully
acknowledge the range of the questions and difficulties involved in this
problem.
In the first section of chapter seven of Free creatures I intend
primarily to give a critical evaluation of certain elements of Simo
Knuuttila's view on medieval modal semantics, especially the contrast
he sets up between Scotus and Aquinas. And although I use historical
arguments in evaluating Knuuttila's position, my focus is on the
systematic import of the discussion. In doing so, I refer to the
contemporary semantics of Possible Worlds. This is neither meant to
suggest that Scotus or any other medieval Scholastic thinker had a
fully developed semantics of that kind, nor to imply any specific
ontological commitment as to if and how one may quantify about
possible worlds. I use the Possible Worlds semantics mainly for
elucidating systematically Scotus' idea of 'synchronic contingency',
that is of the compossibility of a factual, contingent event with the
possibility of its non-occurrence. However, in my text I also include
some systematic objections against contemporary standard versions of