44 Facts About Duns Scotus

1.

Duns Scotus is one of the four most important Christian philosopher-theologians of Western Europe in the High Middle Ages, together with Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, and William of Ockham.

2.

Duns Scotus developed a complex argument for the existence of God, and argued for the Immaculate Conception of Mary.

3.

Duns Scotus was given the scholastic accolade Doctor Subtilis for his penetrating and subtle manner of thought.

4.

Duns Scotus was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1993.

5.

Duns Scotus was born into a leading family of the region.

6.

Duns Scotus received the religious habit of the Order of Friars Minor at Dumfries, where his uncle, Elias Duns, was guardian.

7.

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 requested faculties from the Bishop of Lincoln for the hearing of confessions.

8.

Duns Scotus began lecturing on Peter Lombard's Sentences at the prestigious University of Paris towards the end of 1302.

9.

Duns Scotus is buried in the Church of the Friars Minor there.

10.

The 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.

11.

The colophon of Codex 66 of Merton College, Oxford, says that Duns Scotus was at Cambridge.

12.

Duns Scotus wrote purely philosophical and logical works at an early stage of his career, consisting of commentaries on Aristotle's Organon.

13.

Duns Scotus is generally considered to be a realist in that he treated universals as real, but he held that they exist both in particular things and as concepts in the mind.

14.

Duns Scotus followed Aristotle in asserting that the subject matter of metaphysics is "being qua being".

15.

Duns Scotus argued that we cannot conceive of what it is to be something, without conceiving it as existing.

16.

Duns Scotus held: 1) that there exists matter that has no form whatsoever, or prime matter, as the stuff underlying all change, against Aquinas (cf.

17.

For Duns Scotus, the axiom stating that only the individual exists is a dominating principle of the understanding of reality.

18.

Duns Scotus argued for a formal distinction, which holds between entities which are inseparable and indistinct in reality but whose definitions are not identical.

19.

Duns Scotus is usually associated with theological voluntarism, the tendency to emphasize God's will and human freedom in all philosophical issues.

20.

Duns Scotus struggled throughout his works in demonstrating his univocity theory against Aquinas's analogy doctrine.

21.

Duns Scotus tries to defend the validity of Christian theology against the attack of ancient philosophers.

22.

Duns Scotus argues that a necessary being is able to have contingent knowledge, and that although this knowledge is contingent, it is not necessarily mutable and temporal by that very fact.

23.

Duns Scotus appears to try to fully demonstrate that Aristotle's text is not contradictory to the Christian doctrine of God.

24.

Duns Scotus argues that God wills with one single volition whatever he wills.

25.

Duns Scotus argued that it is better to construct a metaphysical argument for the existence of God, rather than the more common physical argument from motion favoured by Aquinas, following Aristotle.

26.

Briefly, Duns Scotus begins his proof by explaining that there are two angles we must take in arguing for the existence of an actually infinite being.

27.

Under the first heading of Relative Properties, Duns Scotus argues for a triple primacy of efficiency, finality and pre-eminence.

28.

Duns Scotus explains the differences between the two and offers proofs for the conclusion that an infinity of essentially ordered causes in a series is impossible.

29.

Duns Scotus says that while that is true, it is utterly manifest that things are produced or effected.

30.

Duns Scotus asserts that the last claim will be proved later in the argument.

31.

Duns Scotus argued against the version of illuminationism that had been defended earlier in the century by Henry of Ghent.

32.

Duns Scotus argued that if our thinking were fallible in the way Henry had believed, such illumination could not, even in principle, ensure "certain and pure knowledge".

33.

Duns Scotus was long honored as a Blessed by the Order of Friars Minor, as well as in the Archdioceses of Edinburgh and Cologne.

34.

Duns Scotus was declared Venerable by Pope John Paul II in 1991, who officially recognized his liturgical cult, effectively beatifying him on 20 March 1993.

35.

Duns Scotus's reputation suffered during the English reformation, probably due to its association with the Franciscans.

36.

Duns Scotus's works were collected into many editions, particularly in the late fifteenth century with the advent of printing.

37.

For one thing, Duns Scotus has received interest from secular philosophers such as Peter King, Gyula Klima, Paul Vincent Spade, and others.

38.

For some today, Duns Scotus is one of the most important Franciscan theologians and the founder of Scotism, a special form of Scholasticism.

39.

Duns Scotus came out of the Old Franciscan School, to which Haymo of Faversham, Alexander of Hales, John of Rupella, William of Melitona, St Bonaventure, Cardinal Matthew of Aquasparta, John Peckham, Archbishop of Canterbury, Richard of Middletown, etc.

40.

Duns Scotus was known as "Doctor Subtilis" because of the subtle distinctions and nuances of his thinking.

41.

An important question since the 1960s has revolved over whether Duns Scotus's thought heralded a change in thinking on the nature of 'being,' a change which marked a shift from Aquinas and other previous thinkers; this question has been particularly significant in recent years because it has come to be seen as a debate over the origins of 'modernity.

42.

In recent years, this criticism of Duns Scotus has become disseminated in particular through the writings of the 'Radical Orthodox' group of theologians, drawing on John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock.

43.

The Radical Orthodox model has been questioned by Daniel Horan and Thomas Williams, both of whom claim that Duns Scotus's doctrine of the univocity of being is a semantic, rather than an ontological theory.

44.

Such a quotation seems to refer to epistemology, with abstracted concepts, rather than with ontology, which Duns Scotus admits can be diverse.