ABSTRACT
Peter Auriol was a highly original thinker, and he showed his innovative skills in articles one and two of distinction 38, where he largely invented a new solution to the problem of how God knows future contingents. Moreover, Thomas Wylton’s opinion, although not expressed with great clarity, approaches Auriol’s own and probably influenced it. Nevertheless, it is with Auriol that we have the first definitive Christian defense of neutral propositions in a theological context, and it is beautifully constructed. Auriol’s purely philosophical argument is rather convincing, yet he now gives some purely philosophical objections to his stance. Auriol has revived, adopted, and further articulated what he took to be Aristotle’s non-bivalent logic for singular propositions about future contingents, for since the nature of contingents is indeterminate, propositions about them are not determinately true or false. Boethius defends Aristotle’s position in his commentaries on Peri Hermeneias, and in the second commentary Boethius discusses some of the theological implications of the view.
