Causality, contingency and science in Robert Kilwardby

This paper examines Robert Kilwardby's (ca. 1215-1279) treatment of causal necessity and contingency. In his Commentary on Aristotle's Posterior Analytics and in his De ortu scientiarum, Kilwardby seems to be particularly concerned with the precarious epistemological status of ethics and physics insofar as these disciplines deal with contingent events. In order to reconcile strictly scientific knowledge with conjectural forms of knowledge, Kilwardby sets the problem of contingency in a genuinely gnoseological rather than metaphysical context, arriving at a highly original account of contingency.