In the theological tradition, the notion of ‘acceptio personarum’ is opposed to that of merit: respect of persons is referred to when, in the conferring of a benefit, the beneficiary is singled out, not on the basis of any so to speak objective merits, but on the basis of the subjective disposition of the benefactor. The article considers the way in which the notion is used in the Scholastic debate over the relation between divine grace and human merit, focusing mainly on the different positions of Thomas Aquinas and Henry of Ghent. In order to preserve God from the allegation of ‘acceptio personarum’, while at the same time maintaining the principle of the absolute gratuity of grace, Thomas Aquinas and Henry of Ghent adopt different strategies. Aquinas, who seems to be more faithful to Augustine's mature position, affirms that, without causing offense to distributive justice, God can indeed treat individuals unequally when dispensing grace, since grace, being something that is not earned, has nothing whatever to do with distributive justice. Henry, on the other hand, proposes that even if there is no merit which as such could make a person worthy of receiving grace, and so bring grace within the bounds of distributive justice, human beings nevertheless have a certain ‘congruence’ that God cannot just set aside. Rather than acting arbitrarily, God takes into account (although without being obliged to do so) not just persons as such, but the particular conditions in which they find themselves (their congruence).

Abstract: According to Avicenna, while the action of causes is always necessary, the production of effects may be considered in different ways. With respect to its cause, each effect is necessary, but may be contingent due to the interference of prohibitive impediments. In itself, and in an absolute sense, each effect is contingento This article deals with the transformations of this model in the Latin Scholastic debate from the end of the 13th to the early decades of the 14th century, taking into consideration Thomas Aquinas, Siger of Brabant, John Duns Scotus and Francis of Marchia. The first defends a kind of 'providential' determinism, admitting only a relative, or secundum quid, contingency of sublunary effects with respect to the First Cause. The second, in explicit opposition to Aquinas, upholds the absolute contingency of the world in Avicenna's sense. Interestingly enough, Siger's position seems to be implicated in the condemnation of March 1277, not for being too deterministic but for rejecting an absolute 'providential' determinism. The last two both refuse to ground true contingency in impedible causes, appealing instead to freedom of will.

The official documents of the Parisian Faculty of Arts (starting from the Statute of March 1255) show a close identification between the philosophical sciences and the corresponding textbooks: to learn a particular science means essentially to read certain, prescribed books. The case of theology seems to be different, however. In spite of the fact that the Bible served as a paradigm for the ‘textualization’ of all kinds of knowledge, and even of the whole world, it did not fit perfectly the epistemological criteria which Aristotle’s Posterior analytics established as necessary for every science. Already in the second half of the 13th century, both Thomas Aquinas and Henry of Ghent tried to construct theology as a science, in the Aristotelean sense, by appealing respectively to the theory of the subalternation of the sciences and to the doctrine of the lumen medium. The different reactions to these two models by Godfrey of Fontaines, Durandus of Saint-Pourçain and Peter Auriol seem to indicate a process in which theology can constitute itself as a true science only through a broadening of its textual basis, outside the scope of Sacred Scripture.

The article aims at placing Dietrich of Freiberg’s De origine rerum praedicamentalium in its context, i.e. that of the discussions on the ‘deduction’ of categories and the ontological status of relative predicaments at the end of the 13th century, especially with respect to Henry of Ghent’s position. When Dietrich affirms that some things of first intention are constituted by the intellect, he refers only to the relative categories; as for the natural ‘absolute’ things (res naturae), Dietrich maintains on the contrary that the intellect produces only their quidditative being (i.e. the being they have insofar as they possess a definition). Dietrich’s De origine should therefore be likened more to a new, anti-realistic version of the Liber sex principiorum than to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

The article aims to reconsider, in a critical manner, two specific presuppositions of the Gilsonian interpretation of Thomas Aquinas: 1) the fact that in Aquinas’ metaphysics all beings different from God are marked by a «radical contingency»; 2) the idea that this contingency is based on the distinction between being and essence; and, more generally, 3) the conviction that Aquinas’ conception of providence represents a radical alternative to determinism and necessitarianism in the Graeco-Arabic tradition. To this end, we shall examine, in a sequence, the following points: the most common meanings that Aquinas confers upon the notions of necessity and contingency; the relationship between fortune, chance and providence; the conditioned rebuttal of astral determinism; the way in which Divine providence arranges necessary events as well as contingent ones; the contrasting reactions of Siger of Brabant and John Duns Scotus to the model with which Aquinas attempts to safeguard contingency in the providential order; Aquinas’ admission of the existence of formally necessary creatures. In conclusion, we suggest that Aquinas weakens certain fundamental presuppositions of the anti-deterministic strategy laid out by Aristotle in Book VI of Metaphysics, that the alternative between necessity and contingency does not represent for Aquinas the genuine point of discrimination between Creator and creature, and that, for this reason, the distinction between being and essence, according to Aquinas, does not, as its primary and principal objective, have to account for the contingency of all created beings.

O perfil aqui traçado procura restituir a Tomás de Aquino sua dimensão histórica, propondo tanto uma reconstrução de conjunto, em ordem cronológica, da estrutura e das circunstâncias de composição de suas obras, como a apresentação e a discussão dos temas filosóficos mais significativos presentes em cada uma delas, inclusive em relação às fontes com as quais o próprio Tomás de Aquino sempre dialogou no curso de sua carreira – de Aristóteles à tradição neoplatônica, de Agostinho e Boécio a Avicena e Averróis.

The transition between the ‘Convivio’ and the ‘Commedia’ represents the shift from a purely philosophical project to a different one. Dante’s Epistula to Cangrande identifies this new project with the “status animarum post mortem simpliciter sumptus.” To state that this shift is from philosophy to theology is to oversimplify things. Yet it is beyond doubt that when Dante interrupts the first project, he starts with a new one consisting of the attempt to redefine the boundaries between philosophy and theology and their respective tasks. The present study tackles this shift from the point of view of Dante’s understanding of the natural desire to know God and the separate substances – a desire which Dante denies in the  ‘Convivio’ and accepts in the ‘Commedia’ – and its background in late thirteenth–century and early fourteenth–century Scholastic debates. Particular attention is given to the different ways Henry of Ghent and Godfrey of Fontaines interpret Averroe's argument (In Metaph. II, 1, comm. 1) according to which, if our intellect were not able to grasp the knowledge of separate substances, it would have been formed for a goal which it could never grasp by nature. The context of Henry's and Godfrey's divergent interpretations, however, does not concern the relation between philosophy and theology, but rather between two different ways of understanding theology and above all the possibility of acquiring a scientific knowledge of divine things (a possibility conceded by Henry and denied by Godfrey). Philosophy enters this debate either in a negative role – in that, for Henry, it errs through excess (Averroes) or through defect (the other philosophers) – or only incidentally – in that, for Godfrey, its scientific status is left untouched, whereas it is the status of theology which is undermined.