Time, Tense, and Modality

This volume gathers twelve papers exploring how medieval thinkers conceptualized time, examined the linguistic expression of temporality, and addressed the impact of time’s passage on the scope of possibility and necessity. Drawing on the XXIII European Symposium on Medieval Logic and Semantics, these essays also venture into natural philosophy, metaphysics, and theology, uncovering fresh arguments and revisiting pivotal debates from Avicenna through the fourteenth century.

Contributors are Fabrizio Amerini, Allan Bäck, Magdalena Bieniak, Jon Bornholdt, Enrico Donato, Davide Falessi, Heine Hansen, Elżbieta Jung, Martyna Koszkało, John Marenbon, Costantino Marmo, Stephen Read, Paul Thom, Luisa Valente, and Wojciech Wciórka.

Author Biography

Wojciech Wciórka is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Warsaw. He received his PhD in philosophy for a dissertation on Peter Abelard’s semantic notions associated with alethic modality (2012). His research focuses on twelfth-century logic, its philosophical aspects, and its interplay with theology. Apart from several papers on modality, supposition theory, mereology, and the nominales, his publications include a critical edition of two volumes of Stephen Langton’s Quaestiones theologiae, III.1–2.

Magdalena Bieniak is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Warsaw. She read for her PhD in Philosophy at the University of Padua and at the Université de Sorbonne – Paris IV (co-tutelle) in 2008 and obtained habilitation in Philosophy in 2019. She has worked on a number of early scholastic authors, such as Stephen Langton, Gilbert of Poitiers, and Hugh of St-Cher, as well as on Socinians. Her major publications include studies on Stephen Langton and a critical edition of his Quaestiones theologiae (Oxford 2014–2024, together with Wojciech Wciórka, Riccardo Quinto, and others), and The Soul-Body Problem at Paris ca. 1200-1250 (Leuven 2010).