ABSTRACT
Thomas Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, and John Duns Scotus were the primary figures in the debate over divine foreknowledge and future contingents in the half century before Peter Auriol completed his giant Scriptum in Primum Librum Sententiarum in 1316. Aside from Aquinas’s distinction between proximate and first causes, in the 1250s Franciscans and Dominicans had been in basic agreement with the theory whose most famous adherent was also Aquinas, that God’s knowledge of future contingents somehow involved their presence to God’s eternity and divine Ideas. In order to understand Auriol’s position, it will be necessary to describe his immediate context at the University of Paris in the 1310s. Auriol was aware of this debate, especially as presented in the Sentences commentary of Durand of St. Pourcain, arguably the most important Dominican theologian of the fourteenth century.
