  What should one think of the necessity and impossibility which follow from any true singular statement? Does it follow that everything happens of necessity (so that not even God can do anything about it)? There was a disputed question in the dialectic of Damian’s time which dealt with these kinds of queries. The root of the question is Aristotle’s discussion of singular future statements in De interpretatione 9 which the eleventh-century dialecticians read in Boethius’s Latin translation. They also knew what Boethius said about the theme in his two commentaries to De interpretatione and in Philosophiae consolatio. These works provide the background for the question that Damian refers to, but the formulation which Damian knows appears to be of early medieval invention (see Holopainen 1999, 230–232; Holopainen 2006). Damian himself says that the question is an old question from the liberal arts which has newly been taken up again. However, the contemporary discussion is different from the ancient one in that the ancients discussed the question purely as a question of dialectic, whereas the contemporary writers have turned it into a quasi-theological question that has bearing on divine power (604A).