Primum cognitum at the End of the 13th Century: Raymundus Rigaldus and Duns Scotus

2018 ◽  
pp. 443-476
Keyword(s):  
13Th Century ◽  
Duns Scotus

scholarly journals Demonstrability of Categories: the viae divisivae and their criticisms

2018 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 51-75
Author(s):  
Mário João Correia
Keyword(s):  
Early Stage ◽  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
13Th Century ◽  
Second Moment ◽  
Duns Scotus ◽  
Albert The Great ◽  
Robert Kilwardby

From an early stage, the Aristotelian list of ten categories was seen with suspicion. Authors discussed not only the scope of the list - expressions, concepts, realities -, but also its alleged arbitrariness. One of the attempts to give an account of the completeness and sufficiency of the Aristotelian categories was inspired by a passage in Aristotle’s Topics: a via divisiva, in a shape of a tree, which covers all the possibilities. At least since Porphyry, several authors applied this scheme to the ten categories. With this work, I intend to present some of the viae divisivae created by 13th century authors, i.e., Robert Kilwardby, Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. In a second moment, I will give an account about Duns Scotus’ critique to this kind of procedure. According to Scotus, theviae divisivae do the opposite of what is intended.

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.

scholarly journals PHENOMENOLOGY OF HAPPINESS AND ETHICS: FROM ARISTOTLE TO DUNS SCOTUS AND E. LÉVINAS / LAIMĖS IR ETIKOS FENOMENOLOGIJA: NUO ARISTOTELIO IKI DUNSO ŠKOTO IR E. LÉVINO

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 82-92
Author(s):  
Nerijus Čepulis
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
The Other ◽  
13Th Century ◽  
Duns Scotus ◽  
Aristotelian Ethics ◽  
Western View

In this paper I focus on the most problematic aspects of Aristotelian notion of happiness and ethics. Aristotelian ethics and the Greek wisdom on the whole strove for being, completeness and totality. Such thinking and its total attempt to achieve being, especialy rational being, that often became ideological violence, nowadays is receiving more and more incredulity and criticism. The schoolman of the 13th century Duns Scotus already stated such notions of happiness and ethics that required otherness with its radical transcendence. Also the phenomenologist of the 20th century Emmanuel Lévinas criticizes the Western view of humanity. The total(itarian) consciousness and any systematization in Lévinas’ alternative thinking are ruptured by the ideas of infinity and the other that enable to think otherwise, and outside of being. Santrauka Šiame straipsnyje, atsispiriant nuo Aristotelio laimės sąvokos, siekiama kritiškai apmąstyti klasikinę graikiškąją etikos sampratą. Aristotelio etika, o ir graikiškojoje ontologijoje įsišaknijusi (iš)mintis visada siekė apimti, išbaigti ir imanentiškai suvokti būties visumą. Toks vyraujančia tradicija tapęs mąstymas, pagrįstas conatus essendi ir dažnai neišvengiantis tapti ideologine prievarta, šiandien sulaukia vis daugiau nepasitikėjimo ir kritikos. Ir ne tik šiandien. Jau XIII a. scholastas Dunsas Škotas mąstė apie minėtos laimės ir etikos sampratos alternatyvą, kuri reikalauja kitybės idėjos, nurodančios į tai, kas absoliučiai transcenduoja mąstantįjį subjektą. Taip pat ir XX a. fenomenologas Emmanuelis Lévinas savo kritiką nukreipia į vakarietiškąją ontocentrinę pasaulėvoką ir iš jos išplaukiančią žmogiškumo sampratą. Totalią, sisteminančią ir neišvengiamai totalitarinę sąmonę Lévino alternatyviojoje fenomenologijoje „praplėšia“ begalybės ir kitybės idėjos, padedančios mąstyti kitaip ir anapus buvimo.

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

A Short Modern History of Studying Sacrobosco’s De sphaera

2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (Special Issue) ◽  
pp. 23-33
Author(s):  
Alin Constantin Corfu
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Modern History ◽  
13Th Century ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
University Of Paris ◽  
The University

"A Short Modern History of Studying Sacrobosco’s De sphaera. The treatise generally known as De sphaera offered at the beginning of the 13th century a general image of the structure of the cosmos. In this paper I’m first trying to present a triple stake with which this treaty of Johannes de Sacrobosco (c. 1195 - c. 1256). This effort is intended to draw a context upon the treaty on which I will present in the second part of this paper namely, a short modern history of studying this treaty starting from the beginning of the 20th century up to this day. The first stake consists in the well-known episode of translation of the XI-XII centuries in the Latin milieu of the Greek and Arabic treaties. The treatise De sphaera taking over, assimilating and comparing some of the new translations of the texts dedicated to astronomy. The second Consists in the fact that Sacrobosco`s work can be considered a response to a need of renewal of the curriculum dedicated to astronomy at the University of Paris. And the third consists in the novelty and the need to use the De sphaera treatise in the Parisian University’s curriculum of the 13th century. Keywords: astronomy, translation, university, 13th Century, Sacrobosco, Paris, curriculum"

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