Walter Chatton on Future Contingents

Download or read book Walter Chatton on Future Contingents written by Jon Bornholdt and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-02-06 with total page 550 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Walter Chatton on Future Contingents, Jon Bornholdt presents the first full-length translation, commentary, and analysis of the various attempts by Chatton (14th century C.E.) to solve the ancient problem of the status and significance of statements about the future. At issue is the danger of so-called logical determinism: if it is true now that a human will perform a given action tomorrow, is that human truly free to perform or refrain from performing that action? Bornholdt shows that Chatton constructed an original (though problematic) formal analysis that enabled him to canvass various approaches to the problem at different stages of his career, at all times showing an unusual sensitivity to the tension between formalist and metaphysical types of solution.