Medieval Modal Spaces

2020 ◽  
Vol 94 (1) ◽  
pp. 225-254
Author(s):  
I—Robert Pasnau
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
John Duns Scotus ◽  
Modal Theory ◽  
Duns Scotus ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modal Space

Abstract There is often said to be something peculiar about the history of modal theory up until the turn of the fourteenth century, when John Duns Scotus decisively reframed the issues. I wish to argue that this impression of dramatic discontinuity is almost entirely a misimpression. Premodern philosophers prescind from the wide-open modal space of all possible worlds because they seek to adapt their modal discourse to the explanatory and linguistic demands of their context.

Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy: Volume 3. John Duns Scotus, 1265-1965.

1968 ◽  
Vol 77 (1) ◽  
pp. 101
Author(s):  
John Boler ◽  
John K. Ryan ◽  
Bernadine M. Bonansea
Keyword(s):  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
John Duns Scotus ◽  
Duns Scotus ◽  
History Of

Henry of Ghent (early 13th century–1293)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven P. Marrone
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Ontological Argument ◽  
Theory Of Knowledge ◽  
John Duns Scotus ◽  
13Th Century ◽  
Duns Scotus ◽  
Henry Of Ghent ◽  
Divine Illumination ◽  
True Knowledge

Perhaps the most influential theologian between Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure in the third quarter of the thirteenth century and John Duns Scotus at the beginning of the fourteenth century, Henry of Ghent stands at a turning point in scholastic philosophy. He was a defender of traditional Neoplatonic positions and has often been seen as the epitome of thirteenth-century Augustinianism. Yet his convoluted metaphysics and a theory of knowledge weaving together Neoplatonic and Aristotelian strands inspired novel philosophical trends in the fourteenth century, particularly among Franciscan thinkers. His work thus constituted the point of departure for scholastic giants like Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, who not only used him as a foil against which to articulate their own system of thought but also absorbed much of his fundamental philosophical outlook and terminology. Characteristic of Henry’s metaphysics was an essentialism so pronounced that critics accused him of positing a realm of essences separate from worldly actuality. In his defence, Henry insisted that essences, though prior to actual existence, were separate only as grounded in the divine exemplars of things, but the Platonism of his approach struck his contemporaries as extraordinary nonetheless. Ironically, Henry’s understanding of essence as congruent with intellectual coherence provided an opening for a more logic-based analysis of modality, especially possibility, in succeeding thinkers such as Duns Scotus. The emphasis on essence re-emerged in Henry’s theory of knowledge, and at least in his early writings he offered a vision of knowing truth through divine illumination often taken as paradigmatic of medieval Augustinianism. Even his later attempts to cast epistemology in a more Aristotelian light retained the insistence that true knowledge somehow entails access to the exemplary essences in God’s mind. The same essentialism led Henry to formulate what he called an a priori proof for God’s existence, best approximation in the thirteenth century to Anselm’s ontological argument. Again, however, Henry’s Augustinianism provided an unintended springboard for innovation, leading to Duns Scotus’ theory of the univocity of being and metaphysical proof of God’s existence.

Antonie Vos, John Duns Scotus. A Life. Studies in the History of Church and Theology, 2. Kampen: Summum, 2018, 243 pp.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 443-445
Author(s):  
Jan Alexander van Nahl
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
John Duns Scotus ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Duns Scotus ◽  
Present Book ◽  
History Of ◽  
The University ◽  
Early Late ◽  
P 53

“There exists little direct documentation regarding Duns’ life. […] The secret is to combine many new aspects with the significant body of biographical literature hidden in many books and contributions published in many countries in quite different languages over many decades” (p. 53). Few scholars would seem ready to reveal this secret in the sense of a state-of-the-art biography of John Duns Scotus (ca. 1266–1308), one of the foremost thinkers in philosophy and theology during the high or early late Middle Ages. Among those few, Antonie Vos (*1944) appears particularly well-prepared with his research on Duns spanning several decades, including seminal studies such as his 2006 monograph The Philosophy of John Duns Scotus. In the introduction to the present book, Vos openly reflects upon shortcomings of his own earlier research, thus justifying yet another attempt at coping with Duns and his work, or “the Scotist riddle” (p. 9), as Vos calls it. Despite his confident claim of being able “to extend, to enrich and to correct my story” (p. 7), the author is humble enough to start his journey into Duns’s life by stating: “The best professors at the university and the best handbooks do not speak with one voice. In the humanities, there are groups and movements, and even ideologies. There is confusion and there are many mistakes, but we do not give in” (p. 9).

The Notitia Intuitiva and Notitia Abstractiva of the External Senses in Second Scholasticism: Suárez, Poinsot and Francisco de Oviedo

Vivarium ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 54 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 173-203 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Heider
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
William Of Ockham ◽  
John Duns Scotus ◽  
Duns Scotus ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Francisco Suarez

This paper analyzes the theories of three representatives of Second Scholasticism, namely Francisco Suárez, sj, John Poinsot, op, and Francisco de Oviedo, sj, on the issue of the intuitive and abstractive cognition of the external senses. Based on a comparison of their theories, linked to the historical starting point of the debate in the first decades of the fourteenth century (Peter Auriol, John Duns Scotus, Francis of Meyronnes, William of Ockham and Walter Chatton), the paper argues that the doctrinal and argumentative matrix of these authors’ texts is significantly ‘present’ in the Second Scholastics as well. 1) As far as naturally produced sensation is concerned, all these authors, including Poinsot, follow the Scotistic justification of the natural infallibility of the external senses; 2) regarding the possibility of supernaturally caused objectless perception, Poinsot’s position can be labelled, surprisingly, Scotistic; 3) Suárez’s theory, although partly similar to the doctrine of the late Ockham, is an idiosyncratic stance; 4) Oviedo’s conception, even more distant from that of Ockham, can be characterized as ‘Auriolian’ and ‘Chattonian’.

Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Spell of John Duns Scotus

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Llewelyn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
John Duns Scotus ◽  
Gerard Manley Hopkins ◽  
Duns Scotus ◽  
Formal Distinction

The Early Mediaeval Scottish philosopher and theologian John Duns Scotus shook traditional doctrines of logical universality and logical particularity by arguing for a metaphysics of ‘formal distinction’. Why did the Nineteenth Century poet and self-styled philosopher Gerard Manley Hopkins find this revolutionary teaching so appealing? John Llewelyn answers this question by casting light on various neologisms introduced by Hopkins and reveals how Hopkins endorses Scotus’s claim that being and existence are grounded in doing and willing. Drawing on modern respon ses to Scotus made by Heidegger, Peirce, Arendt, Leibniz, Hume, Reid, Derrida and Deleuze, Llewelyn’s own response shows by way of bonus why it would be a pity to suppose that the rewards of reading Scotus and Hopkins are available only to those who share their theological presuppositions

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