Hurtado de Mendoza on the “moral” modality. Part 1: Hurtado’s writings prior to 1630

0554855 - FLÚ 2022 RIV CZ eng J - Journal Article
Hanke, Miroslav
Hurtado de Mendoza on the “moral” modality. Part 1: Hurtado’s writings prior to 1630.
Studia Neoaristotelica. Roč. 18, č. 1 (2021), s. 65-93. ISSN 1214-8407. E-ISSN 1804-6843
R&D Projects: GA ČR(CZ) GA17-12408S
Institutional support: RVO:67985955
Keywords : Puente Hurtado de Mendoza * Baroque scholasticism * probability * moral necessity * evidence * certainty * social ontology
OECD category: Philosophy, History and Philosophy of science and technology
Method of publishing: Limited access
https://doi.org/10.5840/studneoar20211813

One of the prominent debates of post-Tridentine scholasticism addressed probability, often expressed by the term “moral” (or adverbially, “morally”), originally motivated by the epistemology of decision-making and the debates on predestination and “middle knowledge”. Puente (or Pedro) Hurtado de Mendoza (1578–1641), an Iberian Jesuit and the author of one of the earliest Jesuit philosophy courses, entered this debate in the early-seventeenth century. This paper presents his 1610s and 1620s analyses of different forms or degrees of evidence, certainty, and necessity or impossibility, addressing the commonly-used trichotomy of the “metaphysical”, “physical”, and “moral”, in which “moral” is the weakest form of a modality, together with the paradigmatic examples and interesting applications of the framework.
Permanent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11104/0329482