Abstract:

Richard Kilvington, one of the founders of the school of Oxford calculators, has in our time gained fame as a logician. Thanks to the critical edition and translation into English of his Sophismata, Barbara and Norman Kretzmann made him known to historians of medieval science and logic. In the 70s, Edith Sylla drew my attention to four questions about movement that can be found in San Marco Venice library. Annelise Maier attributed these questions to Richard Swineshead. Sylla’s analysis of the text, however, revealed that those questions were composed by Richard Kilvington. With Monika Michałowska I have been working on a critical edition of Kilvington’s theological question; Whether any in itself bad act of free will is itself a thing (Utrum quilibet actus voluntatis per se malus sit per se aliquid). In the above mentioned theological question and in his first question on the Physics (Whether everything what we know, we know thanks to causes), Kilvington discusses the problem of future contingents. The theological context of this problem is not surprising, since already in St. Augustine’s and Boethius’ works we find discussion about God’s foreknowledge which necessarily affect human actions, thus men’s free will can be questioned. Since then theologians have tried to overcome this difficulty and reconcile divine and human free will. In the fourteenth century, that is, in the period when Richard Kilvington and his older colleague Thomas Bradwardine, famous because of his treatise on proportions in motion and a great beneficiary of Kilvington’s theory, most of the discussions were influenced by John Duns Scotus’s and William of Ockham’s solutions to the problem of future contingents. As Sarah Hogarth Rossiter claims, Bradwardine was the first and only one to consider the problem in a context of absolute and ordained power of God. However, in Kilvington’s question there is a remark: omnia que eveniunt de necessitate eveniunt, ut arguat Bradvardinus, and a large part of Kilvington’s question deals with this problem in the same context. Therefore in my talk I will present Kilvington’s views and I will try to answer the question whether Kilvington understands Bradwardine well.