ERC-projet n° 771589 Redating Pierre d'Ailly's Early Writings and Revisiting His Position on the Necessity of the Past and the Future

Résumé En

Pierre d'Ailly concludes his questions on Boethius' De consolatione Philosophiae with a brief doubt on whether the past is able not to have been. Following the Augustinian Gregory of Rimini, Pierre lists names associated with the positive and negative responses, rightly remarks that Gregory left the issue undetermined, adds that the "Catholic doctors" appear to deny this possibility, and then posits two conclusions: "The first," Pierre says, "is that no past thing is able not to have been, and this I posit because it is commonly granted. The second conclusion, which I posit, is this: that it would be just as easy to maintain that some past thing is able not to have been as it would be to maintain that some future thing is able not to come about" 1. These conclusions succinctly encapsulate the difficulty of the conundrum for Pierre and its fascination for us. Pierre d'Ailly's position on the modal status of the past and future deserves our renewed attention. Although Pierre's main discussion, in his questions on the Sentences, survives in only four manuscripts, many fewer than listed in Stegmüller's Repertorium 2 ,