Ockham's Modal Moves: Crossing the Threshold of Modernity

Abstract

The Blumenberg-Löwith debate over the secularization hypothesis has attracted the attention of scholars interested in the history of ideas. In this paper, Fernández draws from Hans Blumenberg’s The Legitimacy of the Modern Age in order to suggest how appeal to modality, in the form of William of Ockham’s notion that God’s absolute power entails the radical contingency of the universe, helped set the stage for the crossing of the epochal threshold of modernity. In the first section, Fernández gives a preliminary background to the famed dispute over the secularization hypothesis. In the second section, he argues that Blumenberg’s thesis of man’s self-assertion of reason trades on Ockham’s notion of radical contingency. And in the third section, Fernández suggests how notions of God’s absolute power helped to replace ideas of “providence” with “progress,” thus ushering in the Modern Age.