Philip the Chancellor was the first of a new generation of medieval theologians to engage the question of whether the world could have been infinite in past duration. This paper examines Philip’s Summa de bono in order to show, first, how Philip handles the Aristotelian material that seems to prove that past time is infinite in duration, a claim that placed Aristotle in direct conflict with the religious orthodoxy of his day. Second, though Philip himself believed that past time was necessarily finite in a created world, this paper will show how his arguments for this position have weaknesses that allowed later thinkers to build upon Philip’s distinctions between time and eternity to demonstrate the conceptual possibility of a created world infinite in past duration.
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Cf. S. MacDonald, ‘Goodness as Transcendental: The Early Thirteenth-Century Recovery of an Aristotelian Idea’, Topoi 11 (1992), 173-186, at 173: “In a now classic article, D. H. Pouillon established the seminal significance for the development of the medieval doctrine of the transcendentals of the opening questions of Philip the Chancellor’s Summa de bono.”
Noone, ‘The Originality of St. Thomas’ Position’, 276, has compiled a number of helpful contributions on Aquinas’ defense of the possibility of a created world infinite in past duration: I. Wilks, ‘Aquinas on the Past Possibility of the World’s Having Existed Forever’, The Review of Metaphysics 48 (1994), 299-329; J.J. MacIntosh, ‘St. Thomas and the Traversal of the Infinite’, The American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 68 (1994), 157-177; J.A. Aertsen, ‘The Eternity of the World: The Believing and the Philosophical Thomas, Some Comments’, in The Eternity of the World: In the Thought of Thomas Aquinas and His Contemporaries, ed. J.B.M. Wissink (Leiden, 1990), 9-19; P. van Velhuijsen, ‘The Question on the Possibility of an Eternally Created World: Bonaventura and Thomas Aquinas’, The Eternity of the World, ed. Wissink, 20-38. Cf. also the earlier J.F. Wippel, ‘Did Thomas Aquinas Defend the Possibility of an Eternally Created World? (The De aeternitate mundi Revisited)’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 19 (1981), 21-37 and idem, ‘Chapter viii: Thomas Aquinas on the Possibility of Eternal Creation’, in Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas (Washington, dc, 1984), 191-214.
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Philip the Chancellor was the first of a new generation of medieval theologians to engage the question of whether the world could have been infinite in past duration. This paper examines Philip’s Summa de bono in order to show, first, how Philip handles the Aristotelian material that seems to prove that past time is infinite in duration, a claim that placed Aristotle in direct conflict with the religious orthodoxy of his day. Second, though Philip himself believed that past time was necessarily finite in a created world, this paper will show how his arguments for this position have weaknesses that allowed later thinkers to build upon Philip’s distinctions between time and eternity to demonstrate the conceptual possibility of a created world infinite in past duration.
All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 330 | 65 | 8 |
Full Text Views | 200 | 3 | 0 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 55 | 9 | 0 |