Medieval concept of contingency

Abstract

Contingency as philosophical concept has come to us since tradition though Aristotle, Boecio and Thomas de Aquinas and few others. Still is an interesting concept because yet in our days has tended to be center of many reflections, since acceptation of our human condition as contingent, finite, fragile and changeable until posture that relate contingency with possibility, liberty and human dignity in spite of this finitely, fragility and instability as we said before. I will try to show in this document that in medieval thought existed constant preoccupations about contingency of human condition and for its right resolution and this is one of the most important tasks of Classical and Hellenic philosophy. That’s why it is established a kind of thematically continuity, at the same time that a different treatment with a particular ontological conception of contingency of world and man also a particular return to Petrarca’s existential contingency notion that prefigures and shows a few characteristics of modem subjectivity.