Aquinas, Geach, and existence
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24204/ejpr.v11i3.2837Keywords:
Aquinas, existence, God's foreknowledge, future contingents, beingAbstract
Aquinas’ theory of being has received a growing amount of attention from contemporary scholars, both from a historic and a philosophical point of view. An important source of this attention is Geach’s seminal Form and Existence. In it, Geach argues that Aquinas subscribes to (i) a tensed notion of existence and (ii) a theory of time according to which past and future entities do not exist in act. Subsequent commentators, such as Kenny in his Aquinas on Being, have agreed with Geach on both points. In this paper, I argue that in several passages of his corpus, most notably those in which he is concerned with God’s knowledge of future contingents, Aquinas implicitly subscribes to a theory of being and time according to which: (i) past and future entities are attributed existence in act, (ii) there is theoretical need for introducing a tenseless notion of existence.
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