Introduction

Western culture has been obsessed with foreknowledge since its beginnings. The problem of divine foreknowledge and future contingency was as philosophically fruitful as that of the Trinity, and of wider concern. The major Christian philosophers of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, such as Augustine, Boethius, and Anselm, had the added element of divine foreknowledge to contend with, and they usually reconciled foreknowledge and future contingency by making some use of the Neo-Platonic notion of God’s eternity. Specifically, historians have placed much more emphasis on the Oxford discussion of foreknowledge and future contingents than on the Parisian debate, so that in this context Auriol’s position has been distorted and his significance underestimated. This chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.