Kontingenz und Wissen. Die Lehre von den futura contingentia bei Johannes Duns Scotus by Joachim Roland Söder (review)

330BOOK REVIEWS Joachim Roland Söder. Kontingenz und Wissen. Die Lehre von den futura contingentia bei Johannes Duns Scotus. Münster, Aschendorff Verlag, 1999 [Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelalters, Neue Folge, 49], 305 pp., with a summary in English. Can there be a science of the contingent ? The question may seem vacuous not only to an Aristotelian mind for whom there can only be a science of the necessary, but also to a Cartesian or Hobbesian mind for whom the known is reduced to the limits of what can be explained by necessary reasons. In between lies the realm of medieval philosophy, which was much more interested in granting to contingency its own rights: contingency was the very mark of created being, and its strongest philosophical defense was to come from a Franciscan tradition culminating in the work of the Blessed John Duns Scotus. Drawn from a PhD thesis in philosophy submitted in 1997 at Bonn University under the supervision of Prof. Ludger Honnefelder, Joachim Roland Söder's book is not only a new study about the classical problem of future contingents, as announced by its title, but can be read as a general presentation of Scotus' reflection on contingency encompassing its logical, ontological and epistemológica! dimensions. Another major point of interest of this book, which should make it relevant even for those who do not read German, is Dr. Söder's critical edition of distinctions 38-40 and 43, q. 2 of the Reportatio (p. 217-270), Duns Scotus' lectures in Paris during the academic year 1302/1303, and which Fr. Allan Wolter considered as "his last extant word on the subject". This edition is most welcome since, in the historiographical debate that has been ongoing about the authenticity of both the Ordinatio and the Lectura (about which Dr. Söder sides with the common acceptance against Vladimir Richter's doubts), the Reportatio is clearly the only text with unquestioned authenticity. Dr. Söder invites us to read all three versions of Scotus' commentary on the Sentences "synoptically, since they complete each other" (p. 12); nevertheless he also admits that it is the Lectura which brings Scotus' idea to its clearest expression and should be the starting point of the discussion. Contrary to previous studies such as those of Schwamm (1934), Längsten (1986) or Craig BOOK REVIEWS331 (1988), this study is the first one to take into account everything Scotus had written on the subject, and offers therefore a good insight into the maturation of his thought. On the classical Aristotelian view, contingency was to be relegated either to the changing sublunary world, stemming from the radical indeterminacy of matter, or to the unknown realm of what is future to us. This model which pervaded the Arabic tradition and found in Thomas Aquinas probably its last Latin defender was completely overturned by the work of the Doctor Subtilis. In a classical way, Dr. Söder starts his investigation with the vexed passage in De Interpretatione 9, about which he endorses a little too rapidly the so-called "traditional" interpretation concluding on a "temporalization" of truth (p. 19), not taking into account enough the way medieval commentators had engaged the interpretation of the text itself, as Richard Gaskin has recently demonstrated in his book The Sea Battle and the Master Argument (Berlin, 1995). He then goes on to discuss Boethius and Arabian Aristotelianism up to the thirteenth century, and insists on the seminal role played by the condemnations of 1277 against any necessitarian view of the universe. We are by then at the eve of a new relationship between theology and philosophy, which was to find in the development of a new notion of freedom resting on a positive understanding of contingency its clearest expression. Dr. Söder makes an important point in reconstructing the debate that Scotus had engaged with his closest predecessors and their solutions to divine foreknowledge : either the Boethian-Thomistic solution of a real presence of all things to divine eternity, or the solution of a representative presence within divine ideas (Bonaventure, Henry of Ghent). Unfortunately, there is absolutely no reference to Robert Grosseteste, who played an...