Saveguarding Free Will. William Ockham, Walter Chatton and Richard Kilvington on the Will

Safeguarding Free Will: William Ockham, Walter Chatton, and Richard Kilvington on the Will features an array of varied issues that made up the much debated will problem in late medieval philosophy and theology as well as in contemporary theories of action and free will. The book discusses concepts of the will produced in the first half of the 14th century, whereby its special focus is on the ideas that sprang up and evolved at Oxford in the 1330s. Although the literature on medieval concepts of the will and will-related issues is indeed extensive, this particular timeframe remains under-researched. There are several reasons for this neglect. Firstly, some important textual sourc es are still available solely in manuscripts. Secondly, some authors whose merits as ingenious philosophers and/or logicians have already been acknowledged did not pen texts explicitly or entirely devoted to the will and have thus been regarded as irrelevant to debates on the will. Consequently, their writings have not been studied from the will-perspective. Thirdly, the contemporary discourse on late medieval theories of the will developed by scholars working on ethics, the metaphysics of the will, and moral psychology has of late been dominated by a tendency to marginalize “minor authors” and those whose reputation lay elsewhere. We believe that this trend has particularly disadvantaged the Oxford Calculators, who have been recognized as experts in logic and mathematical physics, yet their writings on and concepts of the will have been grievously overlooked so far. Admittedly, there are signs that this trend is abating, and that a new group of scholars has arisen who probe beyond the surface and glean will issues from writings that less expressly engage with the problem. Nevertheless, this shift is only just starting to emerge. Therefore, this book seeks to shed some light on the concepts of the will hatched at Oxford in the 1330s by exploring the themes and approaches adopted by Walter Chatton (an opponent of William Ockham) and Richard Kilvington (one of the Oxford Calculators).