“The Void and the Chimera: Late Medieval Semantics of Imaginable Impossibility and the Limits of Divine Power”

Guest Speaker: Graziana Ciola, Radboud University, The Netherlands

Location: Eddy Hall, Room 200

Can we imagine something impossible? How do we reason from and about impossibilities? These philosophical worries have an illustrious tradition with crucial ramifications in the history of logic and science. In this talk, I explore some of this tradition’s late medieval developments. I focus especially on the innovative account of imaginable impossibilities (imaginabilia) articulated by Marsilius of Inghen in the second half of the 14th century and further developed by his followers. On the one hand, I argue that the Marsilian view of imaginabilia in natural philosophy is proposed as a more general explanatory model than the traditional appeals to God’s absolute power. On the other hand, I show that Marsilius’ modal semantics can treat even the traditionally problematic absolute impossibilities as properly signifiable, understandable, and imaginable.

Event contact: kenneth.shockley@colostate.edu