Programme
Mark Thakkar
University of St Andrews
Tensed Modals and the Necessity of the Past in the Damianic Tradition
In a pair of articles published in 1997, Richard Gaskin praised a handful of medieval thinkers from Peter Damian to Thomas Bradwardine for taking a “courageous stand” against the “mysterious doctrine” of the necessity of the past. Chris Schabel responded with scepticism, calling for “a long and careful treatment of the modal status of the past in medieval thought, to determine whether any thinker ever really thought the past could be changed.” Since then, Gaskin’s radicals have received occasional attention from scholars including Toivo Holopainen and Jon Bornholdt, but Schabel’s challenge has yet to be met. My paper focuses on an aspect of the Damianic tradition that has been downplayed or ignored, namely its concern with the tense of modal verbs. I argue that this concern is crucial to the tradition and that it is a grievous exegetical and philosophical mistake to airbrush it out. Peter Damian and his successors wanted to affirm God’s atemporal omnipotence without abandoning temporal modality, so they were bound to encounter substantial difficulties involving tense. I explain these difficulties in terms of the “standpoint” from which we arrive at a judgement of temporal modality. This non-technical framework allows a simple explanation of the various solutions within the tradition, including an ingenious innovation by Robert Grosseteste that deserves wider recognition. Collectively, these explanations serve to vindicate Schabel’s scepticism.