Duns Scotus’s Epistemic Argument against Divine Illumination

Theories of “divine illumination” were popular from St Augustine through the Middle Ages. Henry of Ghent is traditionally thought of as providing one of the last and most sophisticated theories of Divine Illumination. This chapter examines one of John Duns Scotus’s main arguments against Henry’s theory of Divine Illumination. The chapter reads Scotus as claiming that Henry’s theory aims, but fails, to avoid skepticism—the conclusion that we can’t have any knowledge on the basis of sensation. It shows how this argument can be understood formally on the basis of an analogy with modal logic, which Scotus explicitly calls attention to. The chapter argues that this way of understanding Scotus’s argument points toward some important refinements that contemporary anti-risk principles in epistemology will need to account for.