Philosophy and Theology across Cultures: Gersonides and Auriol on Divine Foreknowledge

Abstract

Like biology, psychology, and anthropology, history as a discipline contributes to the discussion on-or debate over-human nature, to what degree humans are free to make of themselves what they will or are instead confined to certain lati tudes by creation or evolution. Specifically, studies of the Middle Ages provide data about behavior and ideas in a period that is noticeably different from our own. Medieval intellectual history focuses on how and what humans in the me dieval West and Mediterranean thought and on how human thinking changed. Within the broad nature-nurture framework, we argue about the extent to which differences between thinkers and changes in thought over time are attributable to the independence of the individual human mind or to the influences of society, the so-called internal/external dichotomy. When two people of very similar back grounds come up with radically differing theories about, say, the cause of projectile motion, it seems that internal factors are at play. When the scholars of two con temporary cultures are completely divided on party lines over intellectual issues, for example, medieval Greeks and Latins over the Filioque or the use of unleav ened bread in the sacrament of the Eucharist, it is clear that societal factors are overpowering. Where historians of thought cannot agree is when a shift seems to occur from one way of thinking to another, as in the case of the Scientific Rev olution: is it individual brilliance-for we are usually talking about ideas that won in the end-or general changes in society, or both, that resulted in a new world view? The present paper concerns another point of disagreement among intellectual historians: what if two individuals who come from different cultures, but share time and space, develop highly unusual but strangely similar theories? We seem to be faced with three possibilities, or a combination of them: First, the one thinker had a direct influence on the other; although for medieval authors who were loath to admit their positive sources this is notoriously difficult to demonstrate, this option satisfies the internalist approach. Second, it was a complete coincidence;