Abstract

Philip the Chancellor was the first of a new generation of medieval theologians to engage the question of whether the world could have been infinite in past duration. This paper examines Philip’s Summa de bono in order to show, first, how Philip handles the Aristotelian material that seems to prove that past time is infinite in duration, a claim that placed Aristotle in direct conflict with the religious orthodoxy of his day. Second, though Philip himself believed that past time was necessarily finite in a created world, this paper will show how his arguments for this position have weaknesses that allowed later thinkers to build upon Philip’s distinctions between time and eternity to demonstrate the conceptual possibility of a created world infinite in past duration.