THE DE AUXILIIS CONTROVERSY: AROUND THE SEMANTICS OF THEORETICAL SENTENCES IN PHILOSOPHICAL AND THEOLOGICAL DISCOURSE AND THE NECESSITY OF A PROMORDIAL METAPHYSICS

Abstract

De Auxiliis designates a famous philosophical-theological controversy in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, which involved Spanish Dominicans and Jesuits theologians around the theme/problem of human free will under the influence of divine grace. Approaching it from a philosophical perspective, the core issue centers on the semantic determination of counterfactual statements, a problem already present in all compositional theoretical statements. Drawing from the historical and theological context of the controversy, along with the emergence of Molinism, we will present, with some contributions from the Structural-Sistematic Philosophy – as proposed by Lorenz Puntel – the philoso­phical problem of the semantic determination of theoretical sentences at large, alongside a novel approach to their semantic determination. This will enable the philosophical development of a new Theory of Being, wherein the profound question of “God” and his atributes will find its most suitable theoretical place in sistematic philosophical discourse.

Keywords: Thomism. Molinism. Systematic-Structural Philosophy. Sentential Semantics. Primordial Metaphysics.