Pluralismo metodologico e compatibilismo nella concezione scotista dell'anima: conoscenza divina, volontà e intelletto nel commento giovanile alla Sentenza

Methodological pluralism and compatibilism in John Duns Scotus’conception of the soul: intelligence and will in the Commentary on the sentences (Lectura I, 39). This paper tackles the problems of contingency, free will, compatibilism and fatalism in John Duns Scotus’ Lectura I, 39. Fatalism is the thesis that human acts occur by necessity and hence are unfree. According to theological fatalism, the infallible foreknowledge of a human act makes this act necessary and hence unfree. If there is a being who knows the entire future infallibly, then no human act is free. This paper tries to argue on Scotus’ theory of human knowledge, divine knowledge of individuals and future contingents as a way out from theological fatalism or providential determinism (such as Thomas Aquinas’ theory of the action of the first cause). The paper begins by reviewing the concept of compatibilism and examines Scotus’ theory of modality and necessity, considering absolute (simpliciter) contingency, the concept of instant of nature, synchronic and counterfactual necessity for the present and the future. Then it explains the “co-working”, viewed in a synchronic way, between the so-called necessitas per accidens and the counterfactual necessity for the past. This analysis leads to establish the existence of an analogue relationship, for the present and the future, between a neutral and indeterminate divine foreknowledge of the propositions and the indeterminate, logical instant of choice of the acts of free will.