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

Complexity without Composition

2019 ◽  
Vol 93 (4) ◽  
pp. 611-631
Author(s):  
Jeff Steele ◽  
Thomas Williams ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Correct Interpretation ◽  
John Duns Scotus ◽  
Divine Simplicity ◽  
Duns Scotus ◽  
Formal Distinction

John Duns Scotus recognizes complexity in God both at the level of God’s being and at the level of God’s attributes. Using the formal distinction and the notion of “unitive containment,” he argues for real plurality in God, but in a way that permits him to affirm the doctrine of divine simplicity. We argue that his allegiance to the doctrine of divine simplicity is purely verbal, that he flatly denies traditional aspects of the doctrine as he had received it from Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas, and that his denial of the doctrine allows him to escape certain counterintuitive consequences of the doctrine without falling afoul of the worries that motivated the doctrine in the first place. We note also an important consequence of Scotus’s approach to simplicity for the correct interpretation of his view of the foundation of morality.

The Crux

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Llewelyn
Keyword(s):  
John Duns Scotus ◽  
Gerard Manley Hopkins ◽  
Turn On ◽  
Duns Scotus

Gerard Manley Hopkins called John Duns Scotus the rarest-veinèd unraveller of realty (sic). But unravelling and ravelling call for unravelling in order to lay bare that their meanings turn on the crucial antagonymy that throughout this book will be named chiasmus or chiasm. Another example of such crossover is a certain middle-voiced relation of activity and passivity which, subsequent chapters will show, meshes with the relation between intention and attention in which the latter is seen to have at least as much importance as its less neglected partner, phenomenological or quasi-phenomenological intentionality.

Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Duns Scotus

1988 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 337-364
Author(s):  
Hywel Thomas
Keyword(s):  
John Duns Scotus ◽  
Gerard Manley Hopkins ◽  
Eternal Truth ◽  
Duns Scotus ◽  
The World ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Invisible

The lord whose is the oracle at Delphoi neither utters nor conceals his meaning, but reveals it with a sign.(Heracleitos fragment)In the eternal truth from which all temporal things are made, we behold the form … and we have within us like a word the knowledge of what we have conceived.(St augustine, De Trin.)For the invisible things of Him, since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood through the things that are made.(St Paul, Romans i, 20)

scholarly journals Accounting for the Whole: Why Pantheism is on a Metaphysical Par with Complex Theism

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-219
Author(s):  
Caleb Cohoe
Keyword(s):  
John Duns Scotus ◽  
Divine Simplicity ◽  
Duns Scotus ◽  
Priority Monism ◽  
Formal Distinction

Pantheists are often accused of lacking a sufficient account of the unity of the cosmos and its supposed priority over its many parts. I argue that complex theists, those who think that God has ontologically distinct parts or attributes, face the same problems. Current proposals for the metaphysics of complex theism do not offer any greater unity or ontological independence than pantheism, since they are modeled on priority monism. I then discuss whether the formal distinction of John Duns Scotus offers a way forward for complex theists. I show that only those classical theists who affirm divine simplicity are better off with respect to aseity and unity than pantheists. Only proponents of divine simplicity can fairly claim to have found a fully independent ultimate being.

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