TITLE: ‘Bradwardinian modal contextualism to the rescue: reconciling divine determinism with creaturely freedom by distinguishing sorts of contingency’.

ABSTRACT:

Is man free in a world created by God and over which God exercises providence? The fourteenth-century logician-mathematician-theologian Thomas Bradwardine has, for seven centuries, been accused of having sacrificed human freedom on the altar of divine providence. He argued that every event occurs, by unstoppable divine will, of necessity. Yet he is committed to non-divine moral agents contingently determining their actions. His divine determinism needs a complementarily credible account of contingent action. 

The main aim of this paper is to expound Bradwardine’s account of (the modal notion) contingency and trace its consequences for understanding freedom of action. I first set up the reconciliation problem and show three claims: that Bradwardine

(1)  was, like David Lewis, a modal contextualist, taking the meaning of everyday modal terms to depends on an implicit context (relevant causal facts, including facts about causal preconditions).

(2)  defines contingency as a causal concept. Calling an action contingent relates it to its causal circumstances: E is contingent iff given the obtaining of E’s causal preconditions, E is evitable.

(3)  distinguishes between two (simpliciter/unrestricted and secundum-quid/restricted) types of contingency. E is contingent simpliciter iff all of E’s causal preconditions obtain and E is evitable. E is contingent secundum-quid iff some of E’s causal preconditions obtain and E is evitable.

I argue he solves the reconciliation problem through his insight that when our actions are considered to be up to us, we don’t consider God as their causal agent (even though He is). Accordingly, our everyday moral-responsibility-relevant use of modal terms is implicitly indexicalised to a domain of causal facts restricted to exclude the causal fact of God’s unstoppable causation of all events. Assume that a free action won’t inevitably occur given the obtainment of its non-divine causal preconditions. It follows, by Bradwardine’s definition of restricted contingency, that free action is contingent secundum-quid.

A significant upshot is that the seven-century-old accusation that Bradwardine’s commitment to theological fatalism entails an error-theoretic account of creaturely freedom is unfounded. His deterministic worldview does not entail holding a proto-Hobbesian/Calvinist/Frankfurtian view of freedom. The future is (metaphysically, not merely phenomenologically) open, because our fellow creatures cannot compel us to freely act.