Pascal Massie

The master argument posits a metaphysical thesis: Diodorus does away with Aristotle’s dunamis understood as a power simultaneously oriented toward being and non-being and proclaims that possibilities that fail to actualize are simply nothing. My contention is that this claim is not a mere application of Diodorus’ contribution to modal logic. Rather, Diodorus creates an ontologico-temporal concept of possibility and impossibility. Diodorus envisions the future as the past that the future will become. Since what will have been can never be the accomplishment of a possibility that did not obtain, and since the future is destined to become past, any futural possibility that doesn’t actualize is neither futural nor even possible.

It is surprisingly difficult to justify private property. Two questions are at stake: (a) a metaphysical and juridical one concerning the nature of property and (b) an ethical one concerning our attitude toward wealth. This issue reached an unprecedented importance during the 12th and 13th centuries as a new moral ideal emerged. This essays analyses the controversy (with emphasis on Bonaventure’s Defense of the Mendicants) by first locating it in relation to the philosophical and theological authorities as well as the Roman law. It argues that the dispute between the defenders of paupertas altissima and their opponents concerns the limit of the law. Gerard of Abbeville and John XXII saw a contradiction in a right to use that would exclude ownership. Yet, what the Franciscans were seeking was use without right. To relate to the world as something that is essentially inappropriable is to seek a form of life (a rule) prior to the law. Centuries after, such a possibility remains to be discovered.

The conditions for an investigation of Achard of Saint Victor (who died in 1171) have only recently become available. Now the discovery of a very significant turn in the history of twelfth-century thought is open to examination. The author focuses on Achard’s claim concerning an ontologically primary plurality. In the very title of Achard’s main treatise, De unitate Dei et pluralitate creaturarum, it is the word ‘et’ that joins together unity and plurality, expressing the core of Achard’s ontological insight, whereby a plurality is said to be true if it is grounded in absolute unity. That is to say, this plurality is not derived from unity (as would be assumed in an emanative account of plurality) but rather “coheres” with unity. Unity, likeness, and equality are the three terms that dialectically constitute the primary plurality. In this sense, true plurality is plurality without difference, without alterity and is thus convertible with identity. The essay examines (a) Achard’s doctrine of true plurality as multiple unity, (b) its application to the question of the Trinity and (c) its application to the question of the plurality of creatures and the nature of individuation.

Bastit’s inquiry into the works of Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham is concerned with the ontological status of things. In the Scholastic vocabulary, res applies to any extramental entity, to the essence of quiddity which determines this external entity, or to one of the transcendentals convertible with Being. Things in their manifold constitute a necessary point of reference for any attempt to escape rationalism as well as voluntarism. Yet in order to understand the difficulty of any “return to the things themselves,” we need to consider the turn that occurred with the translation of the Aristotelian metaphysics into Scholasticism and the transformation of ontology from analogy to univocity.

Contingency is encountered in the world, but the nature of such an "encounter" is ontologically obscure. In particular, contingency seems to commit us to granting existence to "possibilities" in order to distinguish the sphere of mere non-being from the sphere of that which is not, but "could be." ;Through detailed analyses of Aristotle and Duns Scotus this dissertation departs from the dominant contemporary interpretation of modalities , according to which Scotus rejected the so-called "principle of plenitude" attributed to Aristotle and replaced the ancient "diachronic theory of possibilities with a "synchronic" one, thereby contributing to a "possible worlds semantics." The dissertation shows that the question of possibility, in its proper ontological import, concerns the "limit" between being and non-being in their essential separation. ;Contingency is thus explored in Aristotle with a particular attention to "time," " kairo&d12; v ," "disposition," and "matter." In the context of Scotus, the ontological status of possibilities is understood in terms of "will," "creation," "omnipotence," and "freedom." With Scotus, possibilities become the horizon of what is supremely actual . What appeared as a lesser or lower being becomes a sign of omnipotence. The dissertation attempts then: To account for this transformation by focusing on the difference between the Aristotelian concept of , a&d12;p3 iron and that Medieval idea of ens infinitum; and To trace the problem back to the question of the unity of being . ;Finally, the origin of the essential divide within being between du&d12;na miv and 3 ,n3&d12;r g3ia is discussed in terms of a confrontation with the impossible from which, the dissertation suggests, derives the modal ontological distinctions.