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Guilherme de ockham1/19/2024 ![]() Specifically, we shall focus on Peter Auriol’s and William of Ockham’s theories : although they lead to different solutions, these theories are grounded on a common linguistic approach to the topic. Perceptual Space and Semantical Space in Peter Auriol’s and William of Ockham’s Theories on Prophecy In this article we intend to explore the use of the prophetic statements in some epistemic models of XIVth-century theology. This leads to understand, both historically and theorically, and describe in a coherent way Ockham’s theory of contingency and shed a light over a new, pragmatist interpretation of his thought. This book offers to the reader not only the first Italian translation of the Tractatus (with a conspicous introductory essay and a rich apparatus of explanatory footnotes), but also enriches it within a textual context (distinctiones 38, 39 e 40 of Ordinatio, chapters 7 and 27 of Summa Logicae, quaestio IV.4 of Quodlibeta, Quaestiones in Libros Physicorum 41 e 44, the “Prologus” of Expositio in libros Physicorum and a relevant translation of Expositio in Librum Perihermeneias Aristotelis). ![]() The key issue concerns the fatalistic implications that derive from propositions whose truth-value is guaranteed by their being objects of divine revelation but which, as far as their content is concerned, are still about indeterminate and ‘open’ states of affairs. Ockham asks whether prophetic revelations ‘necessarily happen in the way they were revealed, or not’. Ockham tackles the problem at the level of the logic of propositional rules: a prophecy is understood as a statement about future contingent events, whose truth-value is determined by revelation. The inquiry, thus, shifts onto a different ground that is not tied to the causal nexus proper to temporal inference causally rooted in the past and transferred to the future in a deterministic way (necessitas per accidens). The case of the apprehension of future contingents and prophecies, which are founded on and verified by the assumptions of the logica fidei (called suppositiones in the Tractatus de praedestinatione et de prescientia dei respectu futurorum contingentium), presents a sort of mental experiment in which a correct judgement attributes a quality to an object that is not ‘yet’ real. In this way, he entrusts to logical arguments and semantic search the rule to resolve the theological implications of the problem, for building a theory capable of guaranteeing, at the same time, divine foreknowledge and human will’s freedom. Starting from different kind of sources – first of all, Robert Grosseteste and Peter Lombard – the Venerabilis Inceptor chooses to discuss epistemologically and linguistically the question, through a propositional analysis of the statements regarding future contingents. The Tractatus de praedestinatione et de praescientia Dei respectu futurorum contingentium, composed by William of Ockham between 13, represents a crucial pivot in medieval discussions about theological fatalism and other questions involved, as the foreknowledge of future contingents and the compatibilism between God’s foreknowledge and human free will.
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