  William emphasizes that God does not will that the world exist without qualification, but rather that it exist with a given temporal structure, namely, a beginning (Switalski 1976, 67–68; Teske and Wade 1989, 107). This might suggest that he thinks God might in fact have created a world without a beginning, but chose not to do so, as Aquinas would hold. But in fact, William argues that this option was not open to God: a world without a beginning is simply not a creatable item. William attempts to establish this point by a host of arguments, many of which are found in his writings for the first time in the Latin West and repeated by later thinkers such as Bonaventure and Henry of Ghent. On the whole, these arguments either allege that the notion of a created thing itself entails that what is created has a temporal beginning or point to alleged paradoxes stemming from the supposition of an infinite past.