## 1. Life and Work



Robert Holkot was from the village of Holcot (or "cot in the
rock" as he glossed it) near Northampton, and apparently a
commoner: he spoke of how the most capable men seemed to come from
humbler backgrounds. He joined the Dominican order, and if he received
the usual training, obtained his initial education in arts, logic,
Aristotelian philosophy, and theology within the Dominican schools. He
studied at Oxford, commenting on Peter Lombard's
*Sentences* in the years 1331-1333. Once he obtained his
doctorate in theology, he served as Dominican regent master there.
Subsequently, Richard of Bury, the Bishop of Durham, chose Holkot as
one of his clerks to work with him in London. Tradition also places
Holkot at Cambridge, where he may have served as a Dominican lecturer
or regent master in theology prior to 1343, when he is known to have
returned to the Dominican priory of Northampton. He remained at
Northampton, teaching and writing, until his death of the plague in
1349, 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 at
Oxford, he lectured on Peter Lombard's *Sentences*, on
Matthew and the Book of the Twelve Prophets, and engaged in ordinary
and quodlibetal debates. He also engaged in a dispute with his fellow
students about epistemology, published as the *Sex articuli*,
and probably wrote another work, *De imputabilitate peccati* or
*On the imputability of sin*. A text, *De stellis*,
*On the stars*, a rough commentary on Aristotle's *De
caelo* was probably originally intended as part of his commentary
on the *Sentences*, but circulated as a separate tract. His
*Sermo finalis*, the final sermon given at the time of passing
on the lectureship on the *Sentences* to the next Dominican,
also survives (Wey 1949). While in London, Holkot helped Richard of
Bury with the book, the *Philobiblon*. Two works for preachers,
the *Moralitates* and the *Convertimini*, date from his
later years (Slotemaker and Witt 2015, 233-249). His most famous
Biblical lectures, on the book of Wisdom, are associated with
Cambridge, and survive as the *Postilla super librum
Sapientiae* (Slotemaker and Witt 2015, 162-214). Portions of
lectures on Ecclesiastes also survive, most likely from his time in
Northampton, and he was known to be giving lectures on Ecclesiasticus
when he died. A sermon collection, spanning his career, has also been
preserved (Slotemaker 2014; Slotemaker and Witt 2016). Most of these
texts exist (if they have come down to us) only in manuscript or early
sixteenth century editions. Modern editions are available, however, of
selected portions, sermons and questions, and of the *Sex
articuli*.


## 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 the
fourteenth century than to the thirteenth. William Ockham exercised
the most important influence. The hallmarks of Ockham's
philosophy are: his reduction of Aristotle's ten categories of
being to substance and quality; his analysis of the other eight
categories and many other terms of philosophical art as connotative
terms, best understood as exponible into more fundamental absolute
terms denoting substances and qualities; his rejection of
Aristotle's final, formal and material causes as properly
causal, keeping only efficient causality; his conception of mental
language as a logical thought structure existing independently of
spoken language; his reformulation of the prevailing views about
reference (supposition theory) to accommodate his spare metaphysics;
his rejection of species as necessary for knowledge in favor of
intuitive cognition or the direct intellectual cognition of objects;
and his view that the ethical precepts of the Ten Commandments are not
absolute but subject to divine will, such that God could, without
contradiction, have created a system in which moral good involves
obeying the opposite of each of the traditional commands. Holkot
assumed most of Ockham's philosophical positions as
foundational, taking them for granted in the development of his
theology.



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


### 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 of
human understanding. But Holkot's treatment of intuitive
cognition differed from Ockham's on the question of the
possibility of intuitive cognition of non-existents. For Ockham,
intuitive cognition was the direct intellectual cognition of the
presence and existence of an object. Holkot used Ockham's own
style of analysis to develop his critique. He noted that
"intuitive cognition" was a connotative term, connoting
both a kind of quality, which is cognition, and the cognized object as
it exists and is present in itself. The term stands for the
co-presence of cognition with its object. This led Holkot to argue
against Ockham's contention that God's omnipotent power to
cause directly whatever is ordinarily caused through secondary causes
would enable God to conserve the intuitive cognition of an object even
after the object has been destroyed. Holkot objected that given the
meaning of the term "intuitive cognition," if God were to
conserve cognition of an object after destroying it, that cognition by
definition could no longer be an intuitive cognition. It would be an
abstractive cognition, the kind of cognition present in the absence of
an object.



Holkot also differed with Ockham about the nature of abstractive
cognition. He argued in favor of retaining species as part of natural
and cognitive processes. In *De stellis* he refers to the sun
propagating the natural species of light through the medium of the
air. He did not consider the species operative in cognition to be such
natural species, however. The term 'species' when used to
refer to the whiteness in one external object and to the whiteness in
another could be called univocal, having the same meaning in each
case, but the term 'species' used to refer to the
whiteness in an object as a quality and to the whiteness representing
the object in the intellect was equivocal. The intellectual species is
only a likeness of the thing in the sense of representing it (like a
statue of Hercules in relation to Hercules), and we experience it in
ourselves as it enables us to think about an external object in the
absence 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 things
or even "knowledge habits" and not as the natural
qualities that exist in extramental reality. Holkot's opponent
was not Ockham, here, however, but his Dominican contemporary William
Crathorn, who had argued for the view that natural and cognitive
species were the same in kind. Holkot ridiculed Crathorn's
position at length in the *Sex articuli*, on the grounds that
if Crathorn were right, our minds would become white or black, hot or
cold, depending on what we were thinking about. Crathorn was arguing
in line with a long tradition stretching back to Roger Bacon.
Holkot's sharp disjunction between natural and spiritual
"likenesses," natural and spiritual qualities, went beyond
the traditional distinction between sensible and intelligible species
and seems to show the effects of the Ockhamist critique, even while he
retained 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 to
establish the existence of God. While an argument for the existence of
God as "first conserver" of things could be made, Ockham
had argued against the ability of natural reason to prove there was
only one divine being. Holkot developed such strictures, arguing that
unaided human reason could not prove through a strict demonstration
that any incorporeal being like an angel or God existed. The
consequence for Holkot was that any reference to such incorporeal
beings found in the texts of ancient philosophers must have come down
to them from their predecessors passing on a vestige of knowledge
about God acquired ultimately from Adam and Eve. Holkot also contended
that some pagans, who lacked the law of Moses, still received faith
and grace from God outside the Mosaic Law because they did their best
to live according to the principles of natural law. Holkot's
sanguine view of pagan philosophers like Hermes Trismegistus and
Aristotle rested not on their ability to use natural reason to discern
theological truths, but on his confidence that God had accorded a
measure of revelation to more than those who had the texts of
scripture (Slotemaker and Witt 2015, 71-73).


### 3.2 What reason can do



If basic theological premises require revelation for human beings to
know them, then the arena of human reason in theology is restricted to
reasoning about what is revealed. Some of the tenets of Christian
doctrine, like the doctrines of the Trinity, Incarnation and
Eucharist, offer particular challenges to logic. There was a general
belief among medieval scholastics that Aristotelian logic exemplified
natural reason at its best and was universally applicable to all
domains because its rules held through formal relation to the
principle of non-contradiction. If key Christian doctrines were not
amenable to Aristotelian logical principles, however, it would seem to
imply that God is not subject to the principle of non-contradiction
and that Aristotelian logic is not universal. Holkot took up these
issues in his discussion of the doctrine of the Trinity.



Difficulty arises in the doctrine of the Trinity over doctrinally true
premises 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 modify
the identity relation of the copula in such premises and to block the
conclusion. But Holkot objected that the divine Essence was in no way
"really," "modally," "formally,"
"rationally," "convertibly," nor in any other
way distinguished from the divine Persons or the divine relations of
paternity, filiation and spiration. This put him back face to face
with the dilemma.



Holkot responded in a passage for which he is perhaps best known, that
there must be two systems of logic, a logic appropriate to the natural
order, exemplified in Aristotle's works, and a logic appropriate
to the supernatural order, a logic of faith, whose rules are
supplementary to those of Aristotle (Slotemaker and Witt 2015,
74-81, esp. 78). He concluded that Aristotelian logic did not
hold universally, but only for the natural order unless additions were
made to take into account theological cases. This did not mean that he
abandoned the principle of non-contradiction in matters of faith.
Rather the nature of the divine being meant that syllogisms involving
Trinitarian terms functioned like expository syllogisms about
particulars when unquantified universal terms are substituted for
particular 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 premise
might stand for different people, like Plato and Socrates.



Holkot argued that since Aristotle could not have known about God as
three Persons and one divine Essence, he could not have foreseen the
need to adjust his logic for such cases, but with some supplementary
rules taken from religious authority, like: "every absolute is
predicated in the singular and not in the plural about the three
persons," and "unity holds its consequent where the
opposition of relation does not stand in the way"
(*Sent.* I, q. 5, f. f2ra), Holkot believed the Trinitarian
cases could be covered. The logic of faith does not have a large
number of additional principles, and it, like Aristotelian logic, is
rational because it is subject to the principle of
non-contradiction.



Holcot's view of the relation between faith and reason was very
much in the tradition of Anselm, of faith seeking understanding. His
adherence to the principle of non-contradiction was uncompromising:
"no intellect can assent to the opposite of the first principle
or believe that contradictories are true at the same time"
(*Quod.* I, q. 2, in *Exploring*, 38, ll.
165-166). Faith required that reason believe that all of the
truths of the faith are compatible, even when at times they could not
be 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 that
the world could be other than it is. The idea that God's
omnipotent power provides him with an infinity of choices out of which
he chooses to create only one set of possibilities became a governing
idea among subsequent English schoolmen. Scotus also argued forcefully
for the idea that each moment was open to contingent possibility, such
that for any time t, the events at t were possible not to be the
events at t. Contingency, traditionally assigned to the future, in
Scotus' view superseded or governed even the hypothetical
necessity of the present. Ockham retreated from Scotus' view,
reassigning contingency to future events and reasserting the full
force of hypothetical necessity for events in the present. However,
working out the implications for philosophy and theology of a
contingent world order was the central intellectual challenge for
Holkot's generation.


### 4.2 God's absolute and ordained power



Divine omnipotence involves the absolute power to enact anything that
does not involve a contradiction. But among the multitude of
possibilities open to divine enactment, God chooses or ordains a
subset of compatible possibilities that constitute the world and its
history as we know it. The relationship between God's absolute
power and the ordained system in place at any given time provided a
fault line for exploring questions of necessity and contingency.
Thirteenth century theologians formulated the relationship as one
between 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 the
pope to set aside "ordained" or enacted Church law through
the "plenitude" or "absolute" power of his
office. Because papal power transcended enacted law, and popes (and
monarchs) who enacted laws were in some sense not subject to those
laws, they could provide for exceptions or change enacted laws without
contradiction. Such application of the distinction between absolute
and ordained power raised the possibility that God might intervene in
the ordained system through his absolute power. Beginning with Scotus,
the formulation of the canonists began to enter into discussions of
God's exercise of absolute power. The appropriation of the legal
tradition did not lead to the conclusion (at least for Scotus, Ockham
and Holkot) that God uses his absolute power to act inordinately in
the ordained system, but rather it enables God (as it did in the
change from the Old to the New Law) to set aside one ordained system
and replace it with another. Several different and incompatible
systems of divine legislation have operated at different times during
human history. God's absolute capacity to transcend any given
ordained system and replace it with another has made such a switch
possible without involving God in a contradiction of his nature.
Holkot also invoked this dialectical relationship between God's
absolute and ordained power to explain how God provides for
dispensations from his laws in particular cases. God never acts
inordinately, but the system of divine ordinations is complex and
involves multiple incompatible subsets capable of being in place at
any given time (Slotemaker and Witt 2015, 32-37).



Holkot analyzed God's power in terms of sets of compatible
propositions.



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



He then argued that talk of God's absolute and ordained power
was not about a two-fold power, but two ways of modifying the
proposition: "God can produce A." The proposition
"God can produce A from his ordained power," means that it
is possible for God to produce A, and A will be compatible with his
existing statutes. The proposition "God can produce A from his
absolute power," means that it is possible for God to produce A
(because A in itself entails no contradictory propositions being
simultaneously true), and A is not compatible with his existing
statutes. God has only one power, which is God himself, and which
human beings can understand in two different ways: ordinately and
absolutely. (The stricture on propositional existence results from his
view, which he shared with Ockham and a number of his contemporaries,
that only propositional tokens counted as real propositions capable of
producing a logical contradiction.)



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



> 
> God can be obliged to no law but that without its observance he can be
> morally good, because otherwise the divine goodness would depend on
> creatures, and God would be less good than he is if he were to destroy
> every creature; and similarly God would begin to be better than he was
> before the observance of the law. Whence, just as a prince who is
> above the law can perform some act without sin or evil, which those
> existing under the law in no way can do without sin, so God in not
> fulfilling what he promised acts without the evil of falsity or
> perjury, which someone existing under the law could in no way do
> (*Quodl*. III, q. 8, in *Seeing the Future*, 103, ll.
> 537-546).
> 



Divine promises, revelations, and enactments were all in
Holkot's view ungrounded in divine goodness in the sense that
God was not under obligation because of his goodness to fulfill them
or keep them in being. The contingency of the ordained system was a
fact of the human condition. So what reassurance could human beings
have that keeping faith with God's precepts would result in
their salvation? What would happen if God were to set aside the
current law and enact some incompatible alternative, as it would
clearly seem to be in God's power to do? If God did not inform
people about such a change, then invincible ignorance would protect
them from being held accountable for not following the new laws.
Holkot did not believe that God could ask people to obey laws of which
they were ignorant because that would require them to do what is
impossible and contradictory. And if God did inform people of the new
laws, then these laws would supersede the incompatible old set, and
the faithful could obey God without being held to contradictory
commands.


## 5. Divine Command Ethics


### 5.1 Covenantal Theology



In a system of divine command ethics, human beings are obliged to do
what God asks them to do because God commands it, not because there is
some underlying system of absolute goodness that ethical precepts
should ideally mirror. William Ockham had subscribed to such a view.
He had argued that no contradiction would arise if God were to command
that the Ten Commandments, the precepts fundamental to both the Old
and New Laws, were no longer in effect and that from then on people
would be obliged to obey their opposites. Most of Ockham's
sympathizers backed away from the idea that God could command people
to hate him, on the grounds that that command, at least, would be
contradictory. But Holkot followed Ockham in subscribing to the
ultimate contingency of the decalogue.



With no act having intrinsic worth, the meritoriousness of human
behavior was grounded in a covenant between God and the human
faithful. Within the terms of the New Law, God would not deny
salvation to all those who did their best to obey his commands and
adhere to the Articles of the Faith. The causal effect of meritorious
acts in effecting salvation was a secondary form of causality,
functioning like money, as an agreed upon medium of exchange in the
economy of salvation. Because God's goodness was not a guarantee
of covenant, however, Holkot stressed that human adherence to the
terms of the covenant constituted an act of faith that God would
indeed uphold his promises, even knowing that nothing compels God to
do 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 is
commanded, human intention to obey has greater significance than the
substantive enactments of obedience. Holkot perceived the connection
between divine command and the human intention to obey as at the heart
of the relationship between human beings and God. For instance, Holkot
posed the case of a simple old woman, who in good faith comes to
church to hear a new church doctrine from her bishop. If the bishop
gets the doctrine backwards, explaining to his congregation that they
should believe just the opposite of what the new article of belief
contains, is the elderly laywoman required to accept the words of her
bishop as true? One of Holkot's fellow scholars had argued that
she 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 that
mattered, but her intention to do what was right and to obey God. Her
intention to do her best to conform her will to God would be
sufficient under the covenant to ensure her salvation if she were to
persevere in that intention. God would not deny her salvation because
those on whom she necessarily depended for knowledge about God's
will were misinformed or confused (Slotemaker and Witt 2015,
60-62).



Debates over the place of deception in terms of both the absolute and
ordained systems of possibility involved Holkot and a number of his
immediate contemporaries. If the world is a contingent place that can
be other than it is, then do God's revelations constrain the
scope of his possible future actions? If not, can what God says be
deceptive or false? Discussion took up scriptural instances in which
God 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 no
redeeming good apparent to human beings. If God's words to human
beings might be deceptive, such that it is not just the bishop who may
impart false information, but even God, then the human intention to
believe God's words as true and to obey them takes on even more
importance. Holkot did not believe that God was playing the role of
Descartes' deceiving demon, but Holkot also did not know how to
rule out the possibility that he might be deceived about any given
thing he believed (Slotemaker and Witt 2015, 94-99). The
important thing was that even if he were deceived, God had promised
that his intention to believe what was revealed and to do what he
understood God wanted him to do provided security under the covenant.
Faith in the covenant was the source of certainty, not rational
demonstration.



The place of intentionality in Holkot's theology and his
generous view of divine graciousness provide the context for his use
of a version of what has come to be called "Pascal's
wager." Holkot passed on a story about a learned heretic who was
converted to a belief in immortality by a challenge from a Dominican
lay brother: if you believe in immortality and it is true, you will
have gained a great deal, and if you believe in immortality and it is
not true, you will lose nothing. Forming an intention to believe could
constitute doing his best on the part of the heretic, and God would
reward such an intention with the grace necessary for conversion to
the belief.


## 6. Divine Foreknowledge



Discussions about the contingency of the created order and the various
ways necessity might impinge on that contingency tended to focus on
the challenge God's foreknowledge of future events posed to the
contingency of events.



In his commentary on Peter Lombard's *Sentences*, Holkot
put forward an elaborate argument:



> 
> If *a* is a sin that Socrates will freely commit tomorrow.
> 
> 
> Then it is argued: God knows that *a* will be, therefore from
> eternity He knew that *a* will be or he began to know that
> *a* will be.
> 
> 
> 
> It cannot be said that He began to know that *a* will be,
> because then He could know or foreknow something anew and as a result
> of time. . . .
> 
> 
> 
> If He knew *a* from eternity, I pose that "*a*
> will be" was written on a wall yesterday. Therefore, the
> proposition "that written on the wall was true" is true,
> and . . . consequently necessary because it is a true proposition
> about the past. Therefore, it is necessary that it be the case as the
> proposition denotes, i. e., it is necessary that Socrates sin.
> (*Sent*. II, q. 2, in *Seeing the* *Future*, 126,
> ll. 307-317)
> 
> 
> 



Holkot contended that the common response of his era to such an
argument, was to pose the possibility of a counterfactual past: to say
that the proposition "*a* will be" is true, yet
contingently true, and therefore, although it is true, it can never
have been true. Holkot argued, the possibility of a counterfactual
past differentiated propositions about the future on contingent
matters and their equivalents--whether set in the past or
present--from propositions about the past and present that are not
about such contingent matters. The propositions "*a* was
known by God," and "*a* is known by God,"
although set in the past and present, are true and yet can never have
been true, just like other propositions about the future, because they
are about *a*, and *a*, as a future contingent, may
still not happen. Holkot's response is recognizable as a version
of what in modern discussions is called the Ockhamist solution,
although the argument traces back at least to Bonaventure (Slotemaker
and Witt 2015, 87-94).


### 6.1 The "obligational" model



What Holkot added to the discussion was an elaborate analysis of such
puzzles using the rules and structure of obligational debates to
explore counterfactual possibility. Debates *de obligatione*
were a commonplace in the medieval university curriculum and involved
one person, the "opponent" posing a proposition to
another, the "respondent," that, if accepted, would form
the basis for a continuing exchange. The posed proposition was usually
a 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 the
first. The respondent was to take the first proposition as true for
the time of the debate (understood in Holkot's version to take
place in a single hypothetical instant of time), and to respond with
agreement or rejection depending on whether the succeeding
propositions followed from what had been agreed on before or
contradicted the preceding concessions. If a proposed proposition was
unconnected with any of the preceding propositions, the respondent
would respond with agreement, rejection or doubt depending on what he
understood the actual state of affairs in the world to be. The forms
and rules of obligational debate suggested a rigorous format for
exploring the contingent possibilities, which Holkot adopted (Gelber
2004, 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 knows *a* will be, where
> *a* 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 and
> possible not to be.
> 
> 
> 
> Respondent: I accept.
> 
> 
> 
> Opponent (from the Aristotelian rule that the impossible does not
> follow from the possible): Let it be the case that *a* will not
> be.
> 
> 
> 
> Respondent: I accept.
> 
> 
> 
> Opponent: Then God is deceived.
> 
> 
> 



In resolving such puzzles, Holkot invoked a series of rules, one of
which has significance for his moral philosophy, as well. Holkot
argued that when the opponent proposed the initial proposition, he was
also implicitly posing the rejection of its contradictory. The
Aristotelian rule that the impossible does not follow from the
possible, seems to allow the contradictory of the initial proposition
to enter the debate. But Holkot argued that such a move in effect
amounted to starting the debate all over again with a new starting
point, a proposition contradictory to the first. The respondent would
now be obliged, if he continued with the debate, to answer in
accordance with the new contradictory proposition, and would refuse to
concede that "God is deceived."



Holkot viewed the human relationship to divine revelation as
equivalent to engaging in an obligational debate. The faithful
obligated themselves to accept divine revelations as true for the time
of this life (even though as contingents it was possible that they
might not be true), and if God commanded them to act in a way contrary
to previous commands, the new commandment would supersede the old,
just as if a new obligational debate had begun. Those who accepted the
obligation to obey, would also be obligated to live in a way that was
consistent with the obligations incurred, even if God did not reveal
the details. Human reason was required to discern how to act in
uncertain cases.


### 6.2 The modal ground of experience



In dealing with the problem of God's knowledge of future
contingents, Ockham had proposed thinking about time as the modal
feature of language. Propositions in the past tense are necessary
*per accidens*: they refer to events that could have been
otherwise before they happened, but that now could not have been other
than they were because of the necessity of the past. Propositions in
the present tense are hypothetically necessary: they refer to events
that could be otherwise, but given that they are what they are, if
they are, cannot not be what they are. Propositions in the future
tense are contingent: they refer to events that are possible to be and
also possible not to be. Ockham argued that God's knowledge of
events tracked this modal arrow just as human knowledge of events
does, reintroducing an arrow of "time" for God as well as
human beings.



In the ensuing years, Ockham's modal view of "time"
was joined to a way of speaking about truth traceable to Richard of
Campsall, an Oxford master of arts and theology teaching in the years
just before Ockham. Holkot exemplifies this way of thinking.



In *De Interpretatione*, chapter 9, Aristotle had bequeathed a
difficult problem to the medieval debate about divine foreknowledge.
His contention that in order to avoid attaching necessity to all
events, propositions about future events were not yet true or false
seemed either to deny to God the possibility of knowing the future or
to rule out the contingency of events. Boethius had provided a
response that held until the fourteenth century, but after Scotus
subjected his response to a severe critique, new discussion of the
Aristotelian three-valued logic appeared. Campsall distinguished
between propositions about the past and present that were
"determinately true or false" and propositions about the
future that were "indeterminately true or false." Holkot
adopted this way of modally dividing up determinations of truth and
falsity:



> 
> . . . future contingents are said to be propositions about the future
> of which there is no determinate truth or falsity, because although
> they are true or false, yet those which are true can never have been
> true and those which are false can never have been false.
> (*Quod*. III, q. 1, in *Seeing the Future*, 63, ll.
> 93-96)
> 



By the time of Holcot, the analysis of future contingency in terms of
a possible counterfactual past, and the identification of such an
analysis with a multi-valued logic, had attained the status of an
identifiable tradition. Ockham had not adopted the terminology of
"indeterminately true or false" and "contingently
true or false" to speak of the truth status of future contingent
propositions. He had insisted on a two-valued system in which all
propositions are determinately true or false. But Holkot departed from
him in this. Holkot's position reflects a view of modality as
primary. Necessity and contingency are fundamental, and judgments of
truth mean something different in each modal context, rather than
truth being primary, and necessity and contingency providing a
different valence to otherwise true propositions. The efforts to
grapple with the implications of contingency had come a long way
(Slotemaker and Witt 2015, 87-94).