PETER AURIOL AND THE LOGIC OF THE FUTURE RESEARCH PROPOSAL

The status of statements about the future has been the subject of philosophical debate ever since Aristotles discussion in De Interpretatione, and the Middle Ages was a particularly prolific period for such debates. In my recent MA dissertation, Gregory of Rimini and the Logic of the Future, I scrutinized the arguments of Gregory of Rimini (c.1300-1358) for the position that statements about the future admit of truth and falsity. I found that his arguments rely crucially on the unargued-for assumption that such statements are factual, and I gave some considerations that militate against that assumption; for example, these statements do not have the entailments that one would expect of factual statements. Chris Schabel has pointed out that I might be open to accusations of anachronism: the naturalistic explanation I gave for our inability to express factual statements about the future might be utterly alien to the mediaeval outlook. It is therefore of great interest to me that there is a mediaeval thinker, Peter Auriol (c.12801322), who did reject the view that statements about the future have truth-values, thereby adopting a position which may have certain affinities with, or otherwise provide an interesting alternative to, my own. I thus propose to make a detailed study of the solution provided by Peter Auriol. The topic ranges over several main areas of philosophy, the overarching issue being that of the relationship between logic, grammar, metaphysics and epistemology. If our grammar does not allow for factual statements about the future and grammarians have been suggesting for some time now that it does not does it make sense to devise truth-tables for such statements, as has been done most recently in Bourne (2004)? How is the truth or otherwise of statements about the future related to the ontological status of the future? If we can know nothing about the future, does that mean that there is no future to be known? (The mediaeval perspective, which presupposes an omniscient god, serves to highlight this question.) Is our grammar delimited by what we can in principle know? If so, can empirical examination of our grammar tell us about our epistemological limitations, and perhaps lead to metaphysical conclusions? As part of my research, I intend to look into these and related questions, both from a modern point of view and as they were treated in Auriols time. The first stage of my project will be to translate the relevant section (distinctions 38-39, c. 30,000 words of Latin) of Auriols Scriptum super primum Sententiarum, using the critically edited text in Schabel (1995). This is not simply because there is no translation available, though as it happens this is the case, but because I have found this to be a natural way of letting the philosophical issues announce themselves. I intend to follow up these issues as far as seems appropriate, both historically and philosophically, in a process which will both benefit my translation and suggest avenues of research for the second stage. The work will be speeded up by the ongoing Electronic Scriptum project, which allows full-text searching of the new critical edition of Auriols Scriptum; furthermore, Schabel has kindly offered to send me preliminary editions of other versions of Auriols commentary on the Sentences. I propose to include my translation as an appendix to the thesis; it could subsequently be published with an introduction and philosophical notes, following the format used by Adams and Kretzmann (1983). In this way my thesis should prove a useful, accessible resource for other scholars. The second stage will be to make a detailed critical study of Auriols arguments, casting them (where possible and appropriate) in modern philosophical language for the sake of clarity. The spadework from the first stage will also enable me to situate Auriol in his intellectual context. He only had one outright follower on this issue, Peter de Rivo (1420-1499), though his position proved influential by provoking reactions from Francis of Marchia (c.1290-c.1345), Gregory of Rimini and others (Schabel 2000). A brief study of these thinkers arguments would be a useful addition both historically and philosophically, and in

the case of de Rivo would involve the first philosophical analysis based on a new and as yet untranslated critical edition (Schabel 1995-96). I should also emphasize that my analysis of these arguments has not been made redundant by Schabel (2000), because his approach is avowedly historical and not philosophical; indeed, towards the end of his introduction he explicitly invites specialized, analytical studies of his subject-matter, and I have developed this proposal in consultation with him. Finally, following on from these studies and drawing on them, I intend to develop my own philosophical position, to compare and contrast this position with Auriols, and to draw any relevant conclusions. The results of smaller-scale applications of this modus operandi can be seen in my MA dissertation on Gregory of Rimini (13,600 words plus 17,800 words of translation), which I hope to revise and expand for publication in the light of my work on Auriol, and in my earlier essay on Gregory, Infinity, Continuity and Quantification (5,000 words plus 6,400 words of translation). These studies made use of and extended the philosophy I had studied at Oxford, whilst benefiting from the close textual analysis and rigorous Latin translation that were central to the Warburg Institutes MA course. In the coming summer, as part of my MSc in the History of Science, I plan to write a dissertation on Francis of Marchia, who rejected as Galileo was later to do the Aristotelian distinction between the sublunary and superlunary realms. I expect my work on this dissertation to give me a more rounded picture of fourteenth-century philosophy. Oxford would provide ideal surroundings for a project of this kind. There I would stand to benefit from the rare and valuable expertise in mediaeval philosophy of Richard Cross and Cecilia Trifogli both of whom have told me that they would be happy to supervise my thesis and, more generally, from the rigorous analytic spirit that informs philosophy at Oxford. References Adams, Marilyn and Norman Kretzmann (1983) William of Ockham: Predestination, Gods Foreknowledge, and Future Contingents, 2nd edn, Indianapolis: Hackett. Bourne, Craig (2004) Future Contingents, Non-Contradiction, and the Law of Excluded Middle Muddle, Analysis 64:2, pp. 122-28. Schabel, Chris (1995) Peter Aureol on Divine Knowledge and Future Contingents: Scriptum in Primum Librum Sententiarum, distinctions 38-39, Cahiers de lInstitut du Moyen-ge Grec et Latin 65, pp. 63-212. Schabel, Chris (1995-96) Peter de Rivo and the Quarrel over Future Contingents at Louvain: New Evidence and New Perspectives, Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale VI (1995), pp. 363-473, and VII (1996), pp. 369-435. Schabel, Chris (2000) Theology at Paris, 1316-1345: Peter Auriol and the Problem of Divine Foreknowledge and Future Contingents, Aldershot: Ashgate. Thakkar, Mark (unpublished) Infinity, Continuity and Quantification: Gregory of Rimini on the Crest of the Fourteenth Century, available online at http://users.ox.ac.uk/~ball2227/files/continuity.pdf . Thakkar, Mark (unpublished) Gregory of Rimini and the Logic of the Future, available online at http://users.ox.ac.uk/~ball2227/files/rimini.pdf .