Secundum Quid and Contingentia: Scholastic Reminiscences in Early Modern Mechanics

Abstract

According to medieval theocentric worldviews, the concept of Nature as God’s Creation implied the contingency of its very existence. However, Scholastic thinkers did not limit their discussion of contingency to the onto-theological dimension, that is, the foundation of reality upon God’s will. Rather, contingency also implied a certain mental model for physical causality, regarded as a not-necessary but determined concatenation of natural events. Heated debates were raised in the framework of medieval philosophy concerning divine prescience and human freedom, God’s omnipotence and natural order, the distinction between logical and ontological necessity, as well as determinism and indeterminism in natural chains of events. All these issues gravitated around the problematic of contingency. The investigation of the Scholastic model of contingent causality is a prerequisite for understanding long-lived explanations of natural phenomena produced within the conceptual framework of Scholasticism, and within those of later natural philosophies that more or less overtly stemmed from it. My present undertaking is to briefly assess in what form a ‘principle of contingency’ entered the science of weights and mechanics between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period.