Background

John Duns Scotus was born around 1266 in Duns, Scotland, an area strongly influenced by the social, political, and religious institutions of England into a leading family of the region. His father was Ninian Duns of Littledean and was a wealthy landowner, who held an estate near Maxton in Roxburghshire.

Education

When John Duns Scotus was a boy he joined the Franciscans, who sent him to study at Merton College, Oxford, probably in 1288. He was still at Oxford in 1300, for he took part in a disputation there at some point in 1300 or 1301, once he had finished lecturing on the Sentences. Moreover, when the English provincial presented 22 names to Bishop Dalderby on 26 July 1300 for licenses to hear confessions at Oxford, Scotus was among them. He probably completed his Oxford studies in 1301. He was not, however, incepted as a master at Oxford, for his provincial sent him to the more prestigious University of Paris, where he would lecture on the Sentences a second time. Probably in 1304 he went to Paris, in 1307 he received his doctor's degree from the university, and in the same year was appointed regent of the theological school.

Career

John Duns was ordained a priest on 17 March 1291. The longstanding rift between Pope Boniface VIII and King Philip the Fair of France would soon shake the University of Paris and interrupt Scotus’s studies. In June 1301, Philip’s emissaries examined each Franciscan at the Parisian convent, separating the royalists from the papists. Supporters of the Pope, a slight majority that included Scotus, were given three days to leave France. Scotus returned to Paris by the fall of 1304, after Boniface had died and the new Pope, Benedict XI, had made his peace with Philip. We are not sure where Scotus spent his exile, but it seems probable that he returned to work at Oxford. Scotus also lectured at Cambridge some time after he completed his studies at Oxford, but scholars are uncertain about exactly when. His order transferred him to the Franciscan house of studies at Cologne, where we know he served as lector in 1307.

Scholars have made considerable progress in determining which of the works attributed to Scotus are genuine. Moreover, many key texts now exist in critical editions: the philosophical works in the St. Bonaventure edition, and the theological works in the Vatican edition. However, others have not yet been edited critically. The Wadding Opera omnia is not a critical edition, and the reliability of the texts varies considerably. Despite its title, Wadding’s Opera omnia does not contain quite all of Scotus’s works. Most importantly, what Wadding includes as the Paris Reportatio on Book 1 of the Sentences is actually Book 1 of the Additiones magnae, William of Alnwick’s compilation of Scotus’s thought based largely but not exclusively on his Parisian teaching. The Parisian Reportatio exists in several versions, but most of it only in manuscript. Scholars are still uncertain about the exact chronology of the works.

Early in his career, Scotus wrote a number of logical works: questions on Porphyry’s Isagoge and on Aristotle’s Categories, On Interpretation, and Sophistical Refutations. His Oxford lectures on the Sentences are recorded in his Lectura, and his disputations at Oxford are recorded in the first set of his Collations. Scotus probably began his Questions on the Metaphysics in the early stages of his career as well, but recent scholarship suggests that Scotus composed parts of this work, in particular on Books VII-IX, after he left England for Paris, and perhaps late in his career. Scotus also wrote an Expositio on Aristotle’s Metaphysics and a set of questions on Aristotle’s On the Soul, but more study is needed to determine their relationship with the rest of Scotus’s corpus.

While still at Oxford, Scotus began reworking the Lectura into his Ordinatio, a fuller, more sophisticated commentary on the Sentences. At some point, probably after writing Book 1 d.5, Scotus departed for Paris, where he continued his work on the Ordinatio, incorporating into later sections material from his Parisian lectures on the Sentences. These Parisian lectures exist only in various versions of student reports, and so are called the Reportatio Parisiensis. Scotus’s early disputations at Paris are recorded in the second set of his Collations. After his inception as master, he held one set of Quodlibetal Questions. Scotus’s Logica, which Wadding’s edition mistakenly includes as Question 1 of Quaestiones miscellaneae de formalitatibus (although Scotus wrote no such work), is a brief but important investigation of what follows from the claim that a and b are not formally identical, and supplements discussions of the formal distinction in the Reportatio and the Ordinatio. Scotus composed his famous treatise De primo principio late in his career. While it cannibalizes large chunks of the Ordinatio, it is nevertheless Scotus’s most mature treatment of the central claims of natural theology. Scholars are still uncertain whether one further work, the Theoremata, is genuine.

Achievements

• Scotus died just a few years after his inception, leaving behind a mass of works he had intended to complete or polish for publication. Nevertheless, he soon exercised as great an influence as any other thinker from the High Scholastic Period, including Bonaventure and Aquinas. Despite fierce opposition from many quarters, and in particular from Scotus’s admiring confrère William Ockham, the Scotist school flourished well into the seventeenth century, where his influence can be seen in such writers as Descartes and Bramhall. Interest in Scotus’s philosophy dwindled in the eighteenth century, and when nineteenth-century philosophers and theologians again grew interested in scholastic thought, they generally turned to Aquinas and his followers, not to Scotus. However, the Franciscans continuously attested to Scotus’s importance, and in the twentieth century their efforts sparked a revival of interest in Scotus, which has engendered many studies of high quality as well as a critical edition of Scotus’s writing, eleven volumes of which are now in print. It remains to be seen whether Scotus’s thought will have as great an impact on contemporary philosophy as Aquinas’s or Anselm’s. Pope John Paul II proclaimed his beatification in 1993.

Works

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  • Duns Scotus on Divine Love: Texts and Commentary on Goodness and Freedom, God and Humans

    (The texts presented in this new commentary show that Scot...)

    2017
  • Philosophical Writings: A Selection

    (The philosophical writings of Duns Scotus, one of the mos...)

    1987
  • Early Oxford Lecture on Individuation

    (The problem on individuation, because of its theological ...)

    2005
  • Duns Scotus on the Will and Morality

    (This new edition of the book retains the introduction and...)

    1986
  • John Duns Scotus: Four Questions on Mary

    (This small book offers, in a Latin/English edition, a con...)

    2000
  • God and Creatures: The Quodlibetal Questions

    (This is the first major work of the famous medieval schol...)

    1987
  • John Duns Scotus: Selected Writings on Ethics

    (Thomas Williams presents the most extensive collection of...)

    2017
  • Contingency and Freedom: Lectura I 39

    (This book is the outcome of several years of scholarship ...)

    1994
  • First Principle

    (First Principle Among living things, what has understandi...)

    2008
  • A Treatise on God as First Principle

    (Scotus has had considerable influence on Catholic thought...)

    2010

Religion

Duns Scotus was a Roman Catholic monk and theologian who proposed a number of original religious concepts. He is usually associated with theological voluntarism, the tendency to emphasize God's will and human freedom in all philosophical issues.

Politics

Duns Scotus wasn't involved in politics directly into politics himself except as a member of the Franciscan order.

Views

John Duns Scotus's connexion with the university was made memorable by his defense of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, in which he displayed such dialectical ingenuity as to win for himself the title Doctor Subtilis. The doctrine long continued to be one of the main subjects in dispute between the Scotists and the Thomists, or, what is almost the same thing, between the Franciscans and the Dominicans. The University of Paris was so impressed by his arguments, that in 1387 it formally condemned the Thomist doctrine, and a century afterwards required all who received the doctor's degree to bind themselves by an oath to defend the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. In 1308 Duns Scotus was sent by the general of his order to Cologne, with the twofold object of engaging in a controversy with the Beghards and of assisting in the foundation of a university; according to some, his removal was due to jealousy. He was received with enthusiasm by the inhabitants but died suddenly (it was said, of apoplexy) on the 8th of November in the same year. There was also a tradition that he had been buried alive.

Scotus's philosophical position was determined, or at least very greatly influenced, by the antagonism between the Dominicans and the Franciscans. Further, while the genius of Aquinas was constructive, that of Duns Scotus was destructive; Aquinas was a philosopher, Duns a critic. The latter has been said to stand to the former in the relation of Kant to Leibnitz. In the matter of Universals, Duns was more of a realist and less of an eclectic than Aquinas. Theologically, the Thomistic system approximates to pantheism, while that of Scotus inclines distinctly to Pelagianism. The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was the great subject in dispute between the two parties; it was strenuously opposed by Aquinas, and supported by Duns Scotus, although not without reserve. There were, however, differences of a wider and deeper kind. In opposition to Aquinas, who maintained that reason and revelation were two independent sources of knowledge, Duns Scotus held that there was no true knowledge of anything knowable apart from theology as based upon revelation. In conformity with this principle, he denied that the existence of God was capable of being proved, or that the nature of God was capable of being comprehended. He therefore rejected as worthless the ontological proof offered by Aquinas. Another chief point of difference with Aquinas was in regard to the freedom of the will, which Duns Scotus maintained absolutely. He reconciled free-will and necessity by representing the divine decree not as temporarily antecedent but as immediately related to the action of the created will. He maintained, in opposition to Aquinas, that the will was independent of the understanding, that only will could affect will. From this difference as to the nature of free-will followed by necessary consequence a difference with the Thomists as to the operation of divine grace. In ethics, the distinction he drew between natural and theological virtues is common to him with the rest of the schoolmen. Duns Scotus strongly upheld the authority of the church, making it the ultimate authority on which that of Scripture depends.

Quotations: "If all men by nature desire to know, then they desire most of all the greatest knowledge of science."

Membership

Blessed John Duns Scotus was a member of the Orders of Friars Minor.

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  Orders of Friars Minor

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• "Friar John Scotus, of whose laudable life, excellent knowledge, and most subtle ability as well as his other remarkable qualities I am fully informed, partly from long experience, partly from report which has spread everywhere." - Gonsalvus Hispanus, Spanish Franciscan theologian and scholastic philosopher

Connections

Being a Catholic monk since young age John Duns didn't marry and had no legitimate children.

Father:

Ninian Duns

Uncle:

Elias Duns

Friend:

Gonsalvus Hispanus

References

• Duns Scotus
  1999
• John Duns Scotus: Selected Writings on Ethics
  2017
• John Duns Scotus: Four Questions on Mary
  2000
• God and Creatures: The Quodlibetal Questions
  2015
• Blessed John Duns Scotus: The Case for the Existence of God and the Immaculate Conception
  2013
• Postmodernity and Univocity: A Critical Account of Radical Orthodoxy and John Duns Scotus
  2014
• The Philosophy of John Duns Scotus
  2006
• Blessed John Duns Scotus: Marian Doctor
  2011