Robert Holkot, OP (d. 1349) belonged to the first generation ofscholars to absorb and develop the views of William Ockham. He isparticularly known for his “covenantal theology” and hisviews on human freedom within the framework of a divine commandethics. He developed an original theology grounded in Ockham’slogic and metaphysics, and his works were influential into thesixteenth century.

• 1. Life and Work
• 2. Relation to Ockham
  • 2.1 Ockham’s influence
  • 2.2 Differences with Ockham on epistemology
• 3. Natural Theology
  • 3.1 What reason cannot do
  • 3.2 What reason can do
• 4. Necessity and Contingency
  • 4.1 Historical context
  • 4.2 God’s absolute and ordained power
• 5. Divine Command Ethics
  • 5.1 Covenantal Theology
  • 5.2 The significance of intention
• 6. Divine Foreknowledge
  • 6.1 The “obligational” model
  • 6.2 The modal ground of experience
• Bibliography
  • Primary Literature
  • Translations
  • Secondary Literature
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. Life and Work

Robert Holkot was from the village of Holcot (or “cot in therock” as he glossed it) near Northampton, and apparently acommoner: he spoke of how the most capable men seemed to come fromhumbler backgrounds. He joined the Dominican order, and if he receivedthe usual training, obtained his initial education in arts, logic,Aristotelian philosophy, and theology within the Dominican schools. Hestudied at Oxford, commenting on Peter Lombard’sSentences in the years 1331–1333. Once he obtained hisdoctorate in theology, he served as Dominican regent master there.Subsequently, Richard of Bury, the Bishop of Durham, chose Holkot asone of his clerks to work with him in London. Tradition also placesHolkot at Cambridge, where he may have served as a Dominican lectureror regent master in theology prior to 1343, when he is known to havereturned to the Dominican priory of Northampton. He remained atNorthampton, teaching and writing, until his death of the plague in1349, acquired, as the story has it, while ministering to the sick(Slotemaker and Witt 2015, 1–4).

Holkot produced a number of works over his lifetime. While he was atOxford, he lectured on Peter Lombard’sSentences, onMatthew and the Book of the Twelve Prophets, and engaged in ordinaryand quodlibetal debates. He also engaged in a dispute with his fellowstudents about epistemology, published as theSex articuli,and probably wrote another work,De imputabilitate peccati orOn the imputability of sin. A text,De stellis,On the stars, a rough commentary on Aristotle’sDecaelo was probably originally intended as part of his commentaryon theSentences, but circulated as a separate tract. HisSermo finalis, the final sermon given at the time of passingon the lectureship on theSentences to the next Dominican,also survives (Wey 1949). While in London, Holkot helped Richard ofBury with the book, thePhilobiblon. Two works for preachers,theMoralitates and theConvertimini, date from hislater years (Slotemaker and Witt 2015, 233–249). His most famousBiblical lectures, on the book of Wisdom, are associated withCambridge, and survive as thePostilla super librumSapientiae (Slotemaker and Witt 2015, 162–214). Portions oflectures on Ecclesiastes also survive, most likely from his time inNorthampton, and he was known to be giving lectures on Ecclesiasticuswhen he died. A sermon collection, spanning his career, has also beenpreserved (Slotemaker 2014; Slotemaker and Witt 2016). Most of thesetexts exist (if they have come down to us) only in manuscript or earlysixteenth century editions. Modern editions are available, however, ofselected portions, sermons and questions, and of theSexarticuli.

2. Relation to Ockham

2.1 Ockham’s influence

Although Holkot was a Dominican, well versed in the texts of Aquinas,his philosophy and theology owe much more to the scholastics of thefourteenth century than to the thirteenth. William Ockham exercisedthe most important influence. The hallmarks of Ockham’sphilosophy are: his reduction of Aristotle’s ten categories ofbeing to substance and quality; his analysis of the other eightcategories and many other terms of philosophical art as connotativeterms, best understood as exponible into more fundamental absoluteterms denoting substances and qualities; his rejection ofAristotle’s final, formal and material causes as properlycausal, keeping only efficient causality; his conception of mentallanguage as a logical thought structure existing independently ofspoken language; his reformulation of the prevailing views aboutreference (supposition theory) to accommodate his spare metaphysics;his rejection of species as necessary for knowledge in favor ofintuitive cognition or the direct intellectual cognition of objects;and his view that the ethical precepts of the Ten Commandments are notabsolute but subject to divine will, such that God could, withoutcontradiction, have created a system in which moral good involvesobeying the opposite of each of the traditional commands. Holkotassumed most of Ockham’s philosophical positions asfoundational, taking them for granted in the development of histheology.

Holkot was not much concerned with defending or exploring hisOckhamist philosophical presumptions. They appear as premises,scattered throughout his texts, rather than subjects of extendedanalysis.

2.2 Differences with Ockham on epistemology

Holkot did differ with Ockham in the details of his epistemology.Holkot, like Ockham, adopted the terms “intuitive” and“abstractive” cognition to designate the basic forms ofhuman understanding. But Holkot’s treatment of intuitivecognition differed from Ockham’s on the question of thepossibility of intuitive cognition of non-existents. For Ockham,intuitive cognition was the direct intellectual cognition of thepresence and existence of an object. Holkot used Ockham’s ownstyle of analysis to develop his critique. He noted that“intuitive cognition” was a connotative term, connotingboth a kind of quality, which is cognition, and the cognized object asit exists and is present in itself. The term stands for theco-presence of cognition with its object. This led Holkot to argueagainst Ockham’s contention that God’s omnipotent power tocause directly whatever is ordinarily caused through secondary causeswould enable God to conserve the intuitive cognition of an object evenafter the object has been destroyed. Holkot objected that given themeaning of the term “intuitive cognition,” if God were toconserve cognition of an object after destroying it, that cognition bydefinition could no longer be an intuitive cognition. It would be anabstractive cognition, the kind of cognition present in the absence ofan object.

Holkot also differed with Ockham about the nature of abstractivecognition. He argued in favor of retaining species as part of naturaland cognitive processes. InDe stellis he refers to the sunpropagating the natural species of light through the medium of theair. He did not consider the species operative in cognition to be suchnatural species, however. The term ‘species’ when used torefer to the whiteness in one external object and to the whiteness inanother could be called univocal, having the same meaning in eachcase, but the term ‘species’ used to refer to thewhiteness in an object as a quality and to the whiteness representingthe object in the intellect was equivocal. The intellectual species isonly a likeness of the thing in the sense of representing it (like astatue of Hercules in relation to Hercules), and we experience it inourselves as it enables us to think about an external object in theabsence of that object. Holkot was not much concerned whether such“spiritual qualities” were called “species,”“idols,” “images,” or “exemplars”as long as they were understood to serve as representatives of thingsor even “knowledge habits” and not as the naturalqualities that exist in extramental reality. Holkot’s opponentwas not Ockham, here, however, but his Dominican contemporary WilliamCrathorn, who had argued for the view that natural and cognitivespecies were the same in kind. Holkot ridiculed Crathorn’sposition at length in theSex articuli, on the grounds thatif Crathorn were right, our minds would become white or black, hot orcold, depending on what we were thinking about. Crathorn was arguingin line with a long tradition stretching back to Roger Bacon.Holkot’s sharp disjunction between natural and spiritual“likenesses,” natural and spiritual qualities, went beyondthe traditional distinction between sensible and intelligible speciesand seems to show the effects of the Ockhamist critique, even while heretained remnants of the Aristotelian vocabulary.

3. Natural Theology

3.1 What reason cannot do

Ockham had argued for stringent limits on the ability of reason toestablish the existence of God. While an argument for the existence ofGod as “first conserver” of things could be made, Ockhamhad argued against the ability of natural reason to prove there wasonly one divine being. Holkot developed such strictures, arguing thatunaided human reason could not prove through a strict demonstrationthat any incorporeal being like an angel or God existed. Theconsequence for Holkot was that any reference to such incorporealbeings found in the texts of ancient philosophers must have come downto them from their predecessors passing on a vestige of knowledgeabout God acquired ultimately from Adam and Eve. Holkot also contendedthat some pagans, who lacked the law of Moses, still received faithand grace from God outside the Mosaic Law because they did their bestto live according to the principles of natural law. Holkot’ssanguine view of pagan philosophers like Hermes Trismegistus andAristotle rested not on their ability to use natural reason to discerntheological truths, but on his confidence that God had accorded ameasure of revelation to more than those who had the texts ofscripture (Slotemaker and Witt 2015, 71–73).

3.2 What reason can do

If basic theological premises require revelation for human beings toknow them, then the arena of human reason in theology is restricted toreasoning about what is revealed. Some of the tenets of Christiandoctrine, like the doctrines of the Trinity, Incarnation andEucharist, offer particular challenges to logic. There was a generalbelief among medieval scholastics that Aristotelian logic exemplifiednatural reason at its best and was universally applicable to alldomains because its rules held through formal relation to theprinciple of non-contradiction. If key Christian doctrines were notamenable to Aristotelian logical principles, however, it would seem toimply that God is not subject to the principle of non-contradictionand that Aristotelian logic is not universal. Holkot took up theseissues in his discussion of the doctrine of the Trinity.

Difficulty arises in the doctrine of the Trinity over doctrinally truepremises that seem to give rise to doctrinally false conclusions:

The divine Essence is the Father,

The divine Essence is the Son,

Therefore, the Father is the Son.

Prior to Holkot, a variety of distinctions had been proposed to modifythe identity relation of the copula in such premises and to block theconclusion. But Holkot objected that the divine Essence was in no way“really,” “modally,” “formally,”“rationally,” “convertibly,” nor in any otherway distinguished from the divine Persons or the divine relations ofpaternity, filiation and spiration. This put him back face to facewith the dilemma.

Holkot responded in a passage for which he is perhaps best known, thatthere must be two systems of logic, a logic appropriate to the naturalorder, exemplified in Aristotle’s works, and a logic appropriateto the supernatural order, a logic of faith, whose rules aresupplementary to those of Aristotle (Slotemaker and Witt 2015,74–81, esp. 78). He concluded that Aristotelian logic did nothold universally, but only for the natural order unless additions weremade to take into account theological cases. This did not mean that heabandoned the principle of non-contradiction in matters of faith.Rather the nature of the divine being meant that syllogisms involvingTrinitarian terms functioned like expository syllogisms aboutparticulars when unquantified universal terms are substituted forparticular ones:

Human being is running,

Human being is bald.

Therefore, bald human being is running.

The conclusion is invalid because the subject term in each premisemight stand for different people, like Plato and Socrates.

Holkot argued that since Aristotle could not have known about God asthree Persons and one divine Essence, he could not have foreseen theneed to adjust his logic for such cases, but with some supplementaryrules taken from religious authority, like: “every absolute ispredicated in the singular and not in the plural about the threepersons,” and “unity holds its consequent where theopposition of relation does not stand in the way”(Sent. I, q. 5, f. f2ra), Holkot believed the Trinitariancases could be covered. The logic of faith does not have a largenumber of additional principles, and it, like Aristotelian logic, isrational because it is subject to the principle ofnon-contradiction.

Holcot’s view of the relation between faith and reason was verymuch in the tradition of Anselm, of faith seeking understanding. Hisadherence to the principle of non-contradiction was uncompromising:“no intellect can assent to the opposite of the first principleor believe that contradictories are true at the same time”(Quod. I, q. 2, inExploring, 38, ll.165–166). Faith required that reason believe that all of thetruths of the faith are compatible, even when at times they could notbe demonstrated or shown to be so.

4. Necessity and Contingency

4.1 Historical context

The Condemnations of 1277 and John Duns Scotus impelled the view thatthe world could be other than it is. The idea that God’somnipotent power provides him with an infinity of choices out of whichhe chooses to create only one set of possibilities became a governingidea among subsequent English schoolmen. Scotus also argued forcefullyfor the idea that each moment was open to contingent possibility, suchthat for any time t, the events at t were possible not to be theevents at t. Contingency, traditionally assigned to the future, inScotus’ view superseded or governed even the hypotheticalnecessity of the present. Ockham retreated from Scotus’ view,reassigning contingency to future events and reasserting the fullforce of hypothetical necessity for events in the present. However,working out the implications for philosophy and theology of acontingent world order was the central intellectual challenge forHolkot’s generation.

4.2 God’s absolute and ordained power

Divine omnipotence involves the absolute power to enact anything thatdoes not involve a contradiction. But among the multitude ofpossibilities open to divine enactment, God chooses or ordains asubset of compatible possibilities that constitute the world and itshistory as we know it. The relationship between God’s absolutepower and the ordained system in place at any given time provided afault line for exploring questions of necessity and contingency.Thirteenth century theologians formulated the relationship as onebetween what God has done and what he could have done otherwise,safely relegating contingency to a now foreclosed past. Canon lawyers,however, appropriated the distinction to describe the powers of thepope to set aside “ordained” or enacted Church law throughthe “plenitude” or “absolute” power of hisoffice. Because papal power transcended enacted law, and popes (andmonarchs) who enacted laws were in some sense not subject to thoselaws, they could provide for exceptions or change enacted laws withoutcontradiction. Such application of the distinction between absoluteand ordained power raised the possibility that God might intervene inthe ordained system through his absolute power. Beginning with Scotus,the formulation of the canonists began to enter into discussions ofGod’s exercise of absolute power. The appropriation of the legaltradition did not lead to the conclusion (at least for Scotus, Ockhamand Holkot) that God uses his absolute power to act inordinately inthe ordained system, but rather it enables God (as it did in thechange from the Old to the New Law) to set aside one ordained systemand replace it with another. Several different and incompatiblesystems of divine legislation have operated at different times duringhuman history. God’s absolute capacity to transcend any givenordained system and replace it with another has made such a switchpossible without involving God in a contradiction of his nature.Holkot also invoked this dialectical relationship between God’sabsolute and ordained power to explain how God provides fordispensations from his laws in particular cases. God never actsinordinately, but the system of divine ordinations is complex andinvolves multiple incompatible subsets capable of being in place atany given time (Slotemaker and Witt 2015, 32–37).

Holkot analyzed God’s power in terms of sets of compatiblepropositions.

If all the propositions that can exist, were to exist, God cannot dowhat would entail contradictory propositions being true at the sametime, and He can do all those things that, having posed them perfectlyinstantiated in being, entail no contradictory propositions being trueat the same time. (Sent. II, q. 2, art. 6, f. i4va)

He then argued that talk of God’s absolute and ordained powerwas not about a two-fold power, but two ways of modifying theproposition: “God can produce A.” The proposition“God can produce A from his ordained power,” means that itis possible for God to produce A, and A will be compatible with hisexisting statutes. The proposition “God can produce A from hisabsolute power,” means that it is possible for God to produce A(because A in itself entails no contradictory propositions beingsimultaneously true), and A is not compatible with his existingstatutes. God has only one power, which is God himself, and whichhuman beings can understand in two different ways: ordinately andabsolutely. (The stricture on propositional existence results from hisview, which he shared with Ockham and a number of his contemporaries,that only propositional tokens counted as real propositions capable ofproducing a logical contradiction.)

The principle of non-contradiction served as the ultimate safeguard ofrationality and certainty in Holkot’s system. The role of theprinciple was particularly important because Holkot, more than perhapsany other late medieval theologian, underscored God’s freedom toset aside ordained laws without incurring any fault or obstacle.

God can be obliged to no law but that without its observance he can bemorally good, because otherwise the divine goodness would depend oncreatures, and God would be less good than he is if he were to destroyevery creature; and similarly God would begin to be better than he wasbefore the observance of the law. Whence, just as a prince who isabove the law can perform some act without sin or evil, which thoseexisting under the law in no way can do without sin, so God in notfulfilling what he promised acts without the evil of falsity orperjury, which someone existing under the law could in no way do(Quodl. III, q. 8, inSeeing the Future, 103, ll.537–546).

Divine promises, revelations, and enactments were all inHolkot’s view ungrounded in divine goodness in the sense thatGod was not under obligation because of his goodness to fulfill themor keep them in being. The contingency of the ordained system was afact of the human condition. So what reassurance could human beingshave that keeping faith with God’s precepts would result intheir salvation? What would happen if God were to set aside thecurrent law and enact some incompatible alternative, as it wouldclearly seem to be in God’s power to do? If God did not informpeople about such a change, then invincible ignorance would protectthem from being held accountable for not following the new laws.Holkot did not believe that God could ask people to obey laws of whichthey were ignorant because that would require them to do what isimpossible and contradictory. And if God did inform people of the newlaws, then these laws would supersede the incompatible old set, andthe faithful could obey God without being held to contradictorycommands.

5. Divine Command Ethics

5.1 Covenantal Theology

In a system of divine command ethics, human beings are obliged to dowhat God asks them to do because God commands it, not because there issome underlying system of absolute goodness that ethical preceptsshould ideally mirror. William Ockham had subscribed to such a view.He had argued that no contradiction would arise if God were to commandthat the Ten Commandments, the precepts fundamental to both the Oldand New Laws, were no longer in effect and that from then on peoplewould be obliged to obey their opposites. Most of Ockham’ssympathizers backed away from the idea that God could command peopleto hate him, on the grounds that that command, at least, would becontradictory. But Holkot followed Ockham in subscribing to theultimate contingency of the decalogue.

With no act having intrinsic worth, the meritoriousness of humanbehavior was grounded in a covenant between God and the humanfaithful. Within the terms of the New Law, God would not denysalvation to all those who did their best to obey his commands andadhere to the Articles of the Faith. The causal effect of meritoriousacts in effecting salvation was a secondary form of causality,functioning like money, as an agreed upon medium of exchange in theeconomy of salvation. Because God’s goodness was not a guaranteeof covenant, however, Holkot stressed that human adherence to theterms of the covenant constituted an act of faith that God wouldindeed uphold his promises, even knowing that nothing compels God todo so (Slotemaker and Witt 2015, 30–32).

5.2 The significance of intention

Where the fact of command matters more than the substance of what iscommanded, human intention to obey has greater significance than thesubstantive enactments of obedience. Holkot perceived the connectionbetween divine command and the human intention to obey as at the heartof the relationship between human beings and God. For instance, Holkotposed the case of a simple old woman, who in good faith comes tochurch to hear a new church doctrine from her bishop. If the bishopgets the doctrine backwards, explaining to his congregation that theyshould believe just the opposite of what the new article of beliefcontains, is the elderly laywoman required to accept the words of herbishop as true? One of Holkot’s fellow scholars had argued thatshe would only be in this position if she were being punished for sin,but Holkot responded that it was not the substance of her belief thatmattered, but her intention to do what was right and to obey God. Herintention to do her best to conform her will to God would besufficient under the covenant to ensure her salvation if she were topersevere in that intention. God would not deny her salvation becausethose on whom she necessarily depended for knowledge about God’swill were misinformed or confused (Slotemaker and Witt 2015,60–62).

Debates over the place of deception in terms of both the absolute andordained systems of possibility involved Holkot and a number of hisimmediate contemporaries. If the world is a contingent place that canbe other than it is, then do God’s revelations constrain thescope of his possible future actions? If not, can what God says bedeceptive or false? Discussion took up scriptural instances in whichGod seemed to deceive. Holkot, against a number of his contemporaries,argued that God can deceive human beings even in the ordained system,has deceived them as shown in scripture, and has deceived them for noredeeming good apparent to human beings. If God’s words to humanbeings might be deceptive, such that it is not just the bishop who mayimpart false information, but even God, then the human intention tobelieve God’s words as true and to obey them takes on even moreimportance. Holkot did not believe that God was playing the role ofDescartes’ deceiving demon, but Holkot also did not know how torule out the possibility that he might be deceived about any giventhing he believed (Slotemaker and Witt 2015, 94–99). Theimportant thing was that even if he were deceived, God had promisedthat his intention to believe what was revealed and to do what heunderstood God wanted him to do provided security under the covenant.Faith in the covenant was the source of certainty, not rationaldemonstration.

The place of intentionality in Holkot’s theology and hisgenerous view of divine graciousness provide the context for his useof a version of what has come to be called “Pascal’swager.” Holkot passed on a story about a learned heretic who wasconverted to a belief in immortality by a challenge from a Dominicanlay brother: if you believe in immortality and it is true, you willhave gained a great deal, and if you believe in immortality and it isnot true, you will lose nothing. Forming an intention to believe couldconstitute doing his best on the part of the heretic, and God wouldreward such an intention with the grace necessary for conversion tothe belief.

6. Divine Foreknowledge

Discussions about the contingency of the created order and the variousways necessity might impinge on that contingency tended to focus onthe challenge God’s foreknowledge of future events posed to thecontingency of events.

In his commentary on Peter Lombard’sSentences, Holkotput forward an elaborate argument:

Ifa is a sin that Socrates will freely commit tomorrow.

Then it is argued: God knows thata will be, therefore frometernity He knew thata will be or he began to know thata will be.

It cannot be said that He began to know thata will be,because then He could know or foreknow something anew and as a resultof time. . . .

If He knewa from eternity, I pose that “awill be” was written on a wall yesterday. Therefore, theproposition “that written on the wall was true” is true,and . . . consequently necessary because it is a true propositionabout the past. Therefore, it is necessary that it be the case as theproposition denotes, i. e., it is necessary that Socrates sin.(Sent. II, q. 2, inSeeing theFuture, 126,ll. 307–317)

Holkot contended that the common response of his era to such anargument, was to pose the possibility of a counterfactual past: to saythat the proposition “a will be” is true, yetcontingently true, and therefore, although it is true, it can neverhave been true. Holkot argued, the possibility of a counterfactualpast differentiated propositions about the future on contingentmatters and their equivalents--whether set in the past orpresent--from propositions about the past and present that are notabout such contingent matters. The propositions “a wasknown by God,” and “a is known by God,”although set in the past and present, are true and yet can never havebeen true, just like other propositions about the future, because theyare abouta, anda, as a future contingent, maystill not happen. Holkot’s response is recognizable as a versionof what in modern discussions is called the Ockhamist solution,although the argument traces back at least to Bonaventure (Slotemakerand Witt 2015, 87–94).

6.1 The “obligational” model

What Holkot added to the discussion was an elaborate analysis of suchpuzzles using the rules and structure of obligational debates toexplore counterfactual possibility. Debatesde obligationewere a commonplace in the medieval university curriculum and involvedone person, the “opponent” posing a proposition toanother, the “respondent,” that, if accepted, would formthe basis for a continuing exchange. The posed proposition was usuallya counterfactual or a proposition whose truth status was uncertain.The opponent then proposed further propositions to the respondent,each of which might follow from, contradict or be irrelevant to thefirst. The respondent was to take the first proposition as true forthe time of the debate (understood in Holkot’s version to takeplace in a single hypothetical instant of time), and to respond withagreement or rejection depending on whether the succeedingpropositions followed from what had been agreed on before orcontradicted the preceding concessions. If a proposed proposition wasunconnected with any of the preceding propositions, the respondentwould respond with agreement, rejection or doubt depending on what heunderstood the actual state of affairs in the world to be. The formsand rules of obligational debate suggested a rigorous format forexploring the contingent possibilities, which Holkot adopted (Gelber2004, 171–189; Slotemaker and Witt 2015, 26–30).

A simple form of the puzzle might proceed as follows:

Opponent: Let it be the case that God knowsa will be, wherea is a future contingent.

Respondent: I accept.

Opponent: Everything that is possible to be is also possible not to be(by the definition of contingency).

Respondent: I accept.

Opponent: As a future contingent,a is possible to be andpossible not to be.

Respondent: I accept.

Opponent (from the Aristotelian rule that the impossible does notfollow from the possible): Let it be the case thata will notbe.

Respondent: I accept.

Opponent: Then God is deceived.

In resolving such puzzles, Holkot invoked a series of rules, one ofwhich has significance for his moral philosophy, as well. Holkotargued that when the opponent proposed the initial proposition, he wasalso implicitly posing the rejection of its contradictory. TheAristotelian rule that the impossible does not follow from thepossible, seems to allow the contradictory of the initial propositionto enter the debate. But Holkot argued that such a move in effectamounted to starting the debate all over again with a new startingpoint, a proposition contradictory to the first. The respondent wouldnow be obliged, if he continued with the debate, to answer inaccordance with the new contradictory proposition, and would refuse toconcede that “God is deceived.”

Holkot viewed the human relationship to divine revelation asequivalent to engaging in an obligational debate. The faithfulobligated themselves to accept divine revelations as true for the timeof this life (even though as contingents it was possible that theymight not be true), and if God commanded them to act in a way contraryto previous commands, the new commandment would supersede the old,just as if a new obligational debate had begun. Those who accepted theobligation to obey, would also be obligated to live in a way that wasconsistent with the obligations incurred, even if God did not revealthe details. Human reason was required to discern how to act inuncertain cases.

6.2 The modal ground of experience

In dealing with the problem of God’s knowledge of futurecontingents, Ockham had proposed thinking about time as the modalfeature of language. Propositions in the past tense are necessaryper accidens: they refer to events that could have beenotherwise before they happened, but that now could not have been otherthan they were because of the necessity of the past. Propositions inthe present tense are hypothetically necessary: they refer to eventsthat could be otherwise, but given that they are what they are, ifthey are, cannot not be what they are. Propositions in the futuretense are contingent: they refer to events that are possible to be andalso possible not to be. Ockham argued that God’s knowledge ofevents tracked this modal arrow just as human knowledge of eventsdoes, reintroducing an arrow of “time” for God as well ashuman beings.

In the ensuing years, Ockham’s modal view of “time”was joined to a way of speaking about truth traceable to Richard ofCampsall, an Oxford master of arts and theology teaching in the yearsjust before Ockham. Holkot exemplifies this way of thinking.

InDe Interpretatione, chapter 9, Aristotle had bequeathed adifficult problem to the medieval debate about divine foreknowledge.His contention that in order to avoid attaching necessity to allevents, propositions about future events were not yet true or falseseemed either to deny to God the possibility of knowing the future orto rule out the contingency of events. Boethius had provided aresponse that held until the fourteenth century, but after Scotussubjected his response to a severe critique, new discussion of theAristotelian three-valued logic appeared. Campsall distinguishedbetween propositions about the past and present that were“determinately true or false” and propositions about thefuture that were “indeterminately true or false.” Holkotadopted this way of modally dividing up determinations of truth andfalsity:

. . . future contingents are said to be propositions about the futureof which there is no determinate truth or falsity, because althoughthey are true or false, yet those which are true can never have beentrue and those which are false can never have been false.(Quod. III, q. 1, inSeeing the Future, 63, ll.93–96)

By the time of Holcot, the analysis of future contingency in terms ofa possible counterfactual past, and the identification of such ananalysis with a multi-valued logic, had attained the status of anidentifiable tradition. Ockham had not adopted the terminology of“indeterminately true or false” and “contingentlytrue or false” to speak of the truth status of future contingentpropositions. He had insisted on a two-valued system in which allpropositions are determinately true or false. But Holkot departed fromhim in this. Holkot’s position reflects a view of modality asprimary. Necessity and contingency are fundamental, and judgments oftruth mean something different in each modal context, rather thantruth being primary, and necessity and contingency providing adifferent valence to otherwise true propositions. The efforts tograpple with the implications of contingency had come a long way(Slotemaker and Witt 2015, 87–94).

Bibliography

Primary Literature

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• Quaestiones quodlibetales. In William J. Courtenay,“A Revised Text of Robert Holcot’s Quodlibetal Dispute onWhether God is Able to Know More Than He Knows,”Archivfür Geschichte der Philosophie, 53 (1971): 1–21. [Arevision of Moody’s edition.]
• Quaestiones quodlibetales. In Kurt Villads Jensen,“Robert Holkot’s Questio on Killing Infidels: AReevaluation and an Edition,”Archivum FratrumPraedicatorum, 63 (1993): 207–228.
• Sermo finalis. In J. C. Wey, “TheSermofinalis of Robert Holcot,”Mediaeval Studies, 11(1949): 219–224.
• Sex articuli. InDie “Conferentiae” desRobert Holcot O.P. und die akademischen Auseinandersetzungen an derUniversität Oxford 1330–1332, ed. Fritz Hoffmann,65–127. Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie undTheologie Mittelalters, n. s. no. 36. Münster, 1993.
• Tractatus de stellis. In Lynn Thorndike, “A NewWork by Robert Holcot (Corpus Christi College, Oxford, MS 138),”Archives internationales d’histoire des sciences, 10(1957): 227–235.
• Super libros Sapientiae, Hagenau, 1494; reprintedFrankfurt: Minerva G.M.B.H., 1974.

Translations

• Super libros Sapientiae, chap. 3, lects. 35 and 52; chap.12, lect. 145. InForerunners of the Reformation: The Shape ofLate Medieval Thought Illustrated by Key Documents, Heiko Oberman(ed. and trans.), Philadelphia: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981,142–150.
• Quodlibet I, ques. 6 (Utrum Deus possit scire pluraquam scit), inThe Cambridge Translations of MedievalPhilosophical Texts (Volume 3:Mind and Knowledge),Robert Pasnau (ed. and trans.), Cambridge and New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2002, 302–317.

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Acknowledgments

All translations are by the authors.