John Duns Scotus ( ; , 'Duns the Scot'; – 8 November 1308) was a Scottish Catholic priest and Franciscan friar, university professor, philosopher and theologian. He is considered among the most important philosopher-theologians in Western Christendom during the last part of the medieval period, together with Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure and William of Ockham. The intellectual tradition derived from Scotus's work is called Scotism.
Duns Scotus has had considerable influence on both Catholic and secular thought. The doctrines for which he is best known are the "univocity of being", that existence is the most abstract concept we have, applicable to everything that exists; the formal distinction, a way of distinguishing between different formalities of the same thing; and the idea of haecceity, the property supposed to be in each individual thing that makes it an individual (i.e., a certain "thisness"). Duns Scotus also developed a complex argument for the existence of God, and argued for the Immaculate Conception of Mary.
Duns Scotus was given the scholastic accolade ('the subtle Doctor') for his penetrating and subtle manner of thought. He was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1993.
Life
Little is known of Duns Scotus apart from his work. His date of birth is believed to have been sometime between 23 December 1265 and 17 March 1266. He was born into a leading family of the region. The reputed site of his birth, in front of the Pavilion Lodge, near the North Lodge of Duns Castle in Scotland, is now marked by a cairn which was erected in 1966 by the Franciscan friars of the United Kingdom to mark the 700th anniversary of his birth. Duns Scotus received the religious habit of the Order of Friars Minor at Dumfries, where his uncle, Elias Duns, was guardian.
Duns Scotus's age is based on the first certain date for his life, that of his ordination to the priesthood at St Andrew's, Northampton, England, on 17 March 1291. The minimum canonical age for receiving holy orders is 25 and it is generally assumed that he would have been ordained as soon as it was permitted.Williams 2002, p. 2 That his contemporaries called him Johannes Duns, after the medieval practice of calling people by their Christian name followed by their place of origin, suggests that he came from Duns, in Berwickshire, Scotland.Although Vos (2006, p. 23) contends that 'Duns' was actually his family name, as someone from Duns would have been known as 'de Duns'.
According to tradition, Duns Scotus was educated at a Franciscan (a medieval university), a house behind St Ebbe's Church, Oxford, in a triangular area enclosed by Pennyfarthing Street and running from St Aldate's to the castle, the bailey and the old wall,Vos 2006, p. 27. See also where the Friars Minor had moved when the University of Paris was dispersed in 1229–30. At that time there would have been about 270 people living there, of whom about 80 would have been friars.Vos 2006, p. 27
Duns Scotus appears to have been in Oxford by 1300, as he is listed among a group of friars for whom the provincial superior of the English ecclesiastical province (which included Scotland) requested faculties from the Bishop of Lincoln for the hearing of confessions. He took part in a disputation under the regent master, Philip of Bridlington in 1300–01.Williams, Thomas (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Duns Scotus. Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 3. He began lecturing on Peter Lombard's Sentences at the prestigious University of Paris towards the end of 1302. Later in that academic year, however, he was expelled from the University of Paris for siding with Pope Boniface VIII in his feud with King Philip IV of France over the taxation of church property.
Duns Scotus was back in Paris before the end of 1304, probably returning in May. He continued lecturing there until, for reasons that are still mysterious, he was dispatched to the Franciscan at Cologne, probably in October 1307. According to the 15th-century writer William Vorilong, his departure was sudden and unexpected. He was relaxing or talking with students in the or an open area of the Rive Gauche used by scholars for recreationwhen orders arrived from the Franciscan Minister General; Scotus left immediately, taking few or no personal belongings.Narratur de Doctori Subtili qui in Prato clericorum, visa Generalis Ministri obedentia, dum actu Regens esse in scholis Parisiensibus, aut pauca aut nulla de rebus habita dispositione, Parisis exivit ut Coloniam iret, secundum ministri sententiam. William Vorilong, Opus super IV libros Sententiarum II, d. 44, q. 1 f. 161va.
Duns Scotus died unexpectedly in Cologne in November 1308; the date of his death is traditionally given as 8 November. He is buried in the Church of the Friars Minor there. His sarcophagus bears the Latin poem:
A story about Duns Scotus being buried alive, in the absence of his servant who alone knew of his susceptibility to coma, is probably a myth. The first known attestation of this theme dates from around 1400.K. J. Heilig, “Zum Tode des Johannes Duns Scot”, Historisches Jahrbuch, t. 49, 1929, pp. 641–645. For a discussion of this article, see Abate, Giuseppe, "La tomba del ven. Giovanni Duns Scoto […]", Miscellanea francescana, Rome, 45 (1945), pp. 29–79, which refers to Collectanea Franciscana, t. 1, 1931, p. 121. Among many authors, Francis Bacon reported it in his .
The colophon of Codex 66 of Merton College, Oxford, says that Scotus was also at Cambridge.
Work Scotus's great work is his commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, which contains nearly all the philosophical views and arguments for which he is well known, including the univocity of being, the formal distinction, less than numerical unity, individual nature or "thisness" (haecceity), his critique of illuminationism and his renowned argument for the existence of God. His commentary exists in several versions. The standard version is the (also known as the ), a revised version of lectures he gave as a bachelor at Oxford. The initial revision was probably begun in the summer of 1300 – see the remarks in the Prologue, question 2, alluding to the Battle of Wadi al-Khazandar in 1299, news of which probably reached Oxford in the summer of 1300. It was still incomplete when Scotus left for Paris in 1302.
The two other versions of the work are Scotus's notes for the Oxford lectures, recently transcribed and published as the ,See the Bibliography under The Examined Report of the Paris Lecture, Reportatio I-A the first book of which was probably written in Oxford in the late 1290s, and the Reportatio parisiensis (or Opus parisiense), consisting of transcriptions of the lectures on the Sentences given by Scotus when he was in Paris. A is a student report or transcription of the original lecture of a master. A version that has been checked by the master himself is known as a .
By the time of Scotus, these "commentaries" on the Sentences were no longer literal commentaries. Instead, Peter Lombard's original text was used as a starting point for highly original discussions on topics of theological or philosophical interest.See e.g. Wolter 1995, p. 76 and passim For example, Book II Distinction 2, about the location of angels, is a starting point for a complex discussion about continuous motion, and whether the same thing can be in two different places at the same time (bilocation). In the same book, Distinction 3, he uses the question of how angels can be different from one another, given that they have no material bodies, to investigate the difficult question of individuation in general.
Scotus wrote purely philosophical and logical works at an early stage of his career, consisting of commentaries on Aristotle's . These are the Questions on Porphyry's Isagoge and Aristotle's Categories, Peri hermeneias, and , probably dating to around 1295.See the introduction to the critical edition: Duns Scoti Quaestiones in librum Porphyrii Isagoge et Quaestiones super Praedicamenta Aristotelis (Opera philosophica, I), xxix–xxxiv, xli–xlii. His commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics was probably written in stages, the first version having started around 1297, with significant additions and amendments possibly after the completion of the main body of the ., although this is speculative His on the Metaphysics was lost for centuries but was recently rediscovered and edited by Giorgio Pini.Thomas Williams (2009). "John Duns Scotus", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (online).
In addition, there are 46 short disputations called , probably dating from 1300 to 1305; a work in natural theology (); and his , a record of a quodlibetal disputation probably dating to Advent 1306 or Lent 1307.
A number of works once believed to have been written by Scotus are now known to have been misattributed. There were already concerns about this within two centuries of his death, when the 16th-century logician Jacobus Naveros noted inconsistencies between these texts and his commentary on the Sentences, leading him to doubt whether he had written any logical works at all.Ashworth 1987 The Questions on the Prior Analytics (In Librum Priorum Analyticorum Aristotelis Quaestiones) were also discovered to be mistakenly attributed. In 1922, Grabmann showed that the logical work was actually by Thomas of Erfurt, a 14th-century logician of the modist school. Thus the claim that Martin Heidegger wrote his habilitation thesis on ScotusDie Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus (Duns Scotus's Doctrine of Categories and Meaning, 1916. is only half true, as the second part is actually based on the work by Erfurt.
Metaphysics Realism Scotus's view of universals is known as Scotistic realism. Scotus is generally considered to be a realist (as opposed to a nominalist) in that he treated universals as real, but he held that they exist both in particular things and as concepts in the mind (as opposed to a Platonic "third realm"). He attacks a position close to that later defended by Ockham, arguing that things have a common nature – for example the humanity common to Socrates, Plato, and Plutarch.
Univocity of being He followed Aristotle in asserting that the subject matter of metaphysics is "being qua being" (). Being in general (), as a univocal notion, was for him the first object of the intellect. The doctrine of the univocity of being implies the denial of any real distinction between essence and existence. Aquinas had argued that in all finite being (i.e., all except God) the essence of a thing is distinct from its existence. Scotus rejected the real distinction in favor of the formal distinction, that two separate entities, though inseparable, do not enter into the definition of the other. Scotus argued that we cannot conceive of what it is to be something, without conceiving it as existing. We should not make any distinction between whether a thing exists () and what it is () for we never know whether something exists unless we have some concept of what we know to exist.Opus Oxoniense I iii 1–2, quoted in Grenz 2005, p. 55