Great and Thomas Aquinas but was intent less on constructing a system than on pursuing,
often relentlessly, solutions to philosophical and theological problems that he considered
to blemish the systems of his predecessors, such as the issues of contingency,
individuation, distinctions and univocity of being, the primary object of the intellect, and
the relation of love and will to intellect. He took immense pains to distinguish and then
properly to reconnect the tasks and provinces of “philosophy” and “theology.” He reacted
to the efforts of Henry of Ghent and others to reestablish Augustinianism at the
University of Paris. Although influenced by Avicenna, he rejected both Augustinian and
Aristotelian epistemologies and argued that being, not God or material things or their
essences, is the primary object of knowledge. He saw theology as a science whose
knowledge provides the “practical” means to reach the soul’s supernatural end. He
emphasized the special uniqueness, or haecceitas, of the individual, because each is the
product of God’s thoroughly free creative and loving election. He distinguished between
nature and will and argued that the will alone possesses fundamental freedom and is the
primary rational power. He analyzed the human capacity to love and to experience God.
He distinguished the will’s inclination to choose what is advantageous from its
“affection” toward justice for its own sake, which enables the will to love God for God’s
sake and not for the soul’s advantage alone. Scotus’s concept of intellectual intuition
explained the capacity of beatific and unique temporal visions of God in contrast with the
ordinary process of knowledge through sensory experience. He promoted the doctrine of
the Immaculate Conception and maintained that the Incarnation would have occurred
regardless of the Fall.
Duns Scotus’s principal composition was his commentary on the Sententiae. The two
chief extant versions are included in the collections Opus Oxoniense, especially the
Ordinatio, and in the Opus Parisiense, also known as the Reporta Parisiensia, containing
notes from students and scribes. The Tractatus de Primo Principio and the quodlibetal
questions represent his mature theological constructions. He also composed a series of
logical commentaries, in the genre of “questions,” on Porphyry’s Isogoge and Aristotle’s
Categories. Especially interesting are his Collationes, composed of disputations held at
Oxford and Paris. His writings not only influenced later Franciscan theologians, known
as the Scotists, but also such diverse figures as Galileo, C.S.Peirce, and Gerard Manley
Hopkins.
H.Lawrence Bond
[See also: ALBERT THE GREAT; AQUINAS, THOMAS; PETER LOMBARD;
PHILOSOPHY; SCHOLASTICISM; THEOLOGY; UNIVERSITIES]
Duns Scotus, John. Opera omnia, ed. Luke Wadding. Lyon: Sumptibus Laurentii Durand, 1639.
——. Opera omnia. Vatican City: Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis, 1950–.
——. Philosophical Writings, trans. Allan B.Wolter. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962.
——. A Treatise on God as First Principle: A Latin Text and English Translation of the De Primo
Principio, ed. and trans. Allan B.Wolter. 2nd ed. Chicago: Franciscan Herald, 1983.
——. Duns Scotus on the Will and Morality, ed. and trans. Allan B.Wolter. Washington, D.C.:
Catholic University of America Press, 1986.
——. God and Creatures: The Quodlibetal Questions, ed. and trans. Allan B.Wolter and Felix
Alluntis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975.
Schäfer, Odulfus. Bibliographia de vita, operibus et doctrina I. D.Scoti saecula XIX–XX. Rome:
Orbis Catholicus, 1955.
Wolter, Allan B. The Transcendentals and Their Function in the Metaphysics of Duns Scotus. St.
Bonaventure: Franciscan Institute, 1946.
The Encyclopedia 589