By all accounts one of the most influential philosophical contributions of Duns Scotus is his distinction between intuitive cognition, in which a thing is known as present and existing, and abstractive cognition, which abstracts from actual presence and existence. Recent scholarship has focused almost exclusively on the role given intuitive cognition in the justification of contingent propositions and on the debates over certitude which arose from the critiques of Scotus's distinction by Peter Aureoli and William of Ockham.

Of singular importance to the medieval theory of transcendentals was the position of John Duns Scotus that there could be a concept of being univocally common, not only to substance and accidents, but even to God and creatures. Scotus''s doctrine of univocal transcendental concepts violated the accepted view that, owing to its generality, no transcendental notion could be univocal. The major difficulty facing Scotus''s doctrine of univocity was to explain how a real, as opposed to a purely logical, concept could (...) be abstracted from what agreed in nothing real, in this case, God and creatures. The present article examines Scotus''s solution to this difficulty and its interpretation in four of his noted fourteenth-century followers. It is shown that the balance Scotus''s solution achieved between the competing demands of the real diversity between God and creatures, on the one side, and the conceptual unity of transcendental being, on the other, is taken in opposed directions by his interpreters. Either the real diversity of God and creatures is given priority, so that the concept of being becomes a purely logical notion, or the real unity of the concept of being is stressed, so that some sort of real community is posited between God and creatures. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Metaphysics Epistemology Ethical theory.

L'importance de Duns Scot (1265?-1308) pour l'histoire de la métaphysique et de l'éthique n'est plus à démontrer. En demandant à Olivier Boulnois de recueillir ces études, Philosophie tente de se faire l'écho de la floraison récente de travaux consacrés à cet auteur, aussi bien à l'étranger qu'en France. L'article de Stephen Dumont souligne la place fondamentale de Scot dans l'histoire de la métaphysique. Mais au lieu de se centrer sur la tradition moderne de la métaphysique transcendantale (de Suarez à Kant), (...) il insiste sur le fait que Scot résout l'énigme de la Métaphysique d'Aristote en réduisant sa dimension théologique de celle-ci à sa dimension ontologique. La philosophie scotiste apparaît ainsi comme l'aboutissement d'une exploration systématique des possibilités d'interprétation ouvertes par le texte aristotélicien. L'étude d'Olivier Boulnois fait la transition entre la métaphysique et l'éthique. Elle s'interroge sur le fondement métaphysique de l'éthique scotiste et montre comment le primat d'une volonté libre, et, dans le monde fini, la contingence de la loi morale, s'accompagnent d'une objectivité du bien. La rigueur de la liberté n'est précisément pas l'arbitraire. Gérard Sondag, quant à lui, pose, à partir d'un point très précis d'exégèse aristotélicienne - pour quelle raison le citoyen courageux expose-t-il sa vie quand la Cité est en danger? - la question du fondement éthique du sacrifice de soi. En rejetant, dans sa réponse, toute éthique de l'intérêt personnel, et en posant une objectivité de la norme éthique indépendante de notre propre avantage, Scot ouvre une voie qui conduit à la morale normative de Kant. Duns Scot apparaît ainsi à la fois comme le refondateur de la métaphysique comme discipline transcendantale et comme un penseur original de l'éthique. Unissant ces deux dimensions, il est l'auteur d'une véritable métaphysique de l'éthique. (shrink)

On Being and Cognition: Ordinatio 1.3 is a translation by John van den Bercken of John Duns Scotus's large and influential treatise on mind and knowledge contained in book 1, distinction 3, of his Ordinatio. This is the first English rendering of Scotus's important distinction that is both complete and made from the definitive Latin text. Scotus's Ordinatio is the revised and greatly expanded version of his Oxford lectures on Sentences of Peter Lombard. The Sentences of Lombard was itself a (...) twelfth-century summa, later adopted as the required systematic text for theology in the medieval university. Commentaries on the work rapidly evolved into... (shrink)

Duns Scotus's famous proposition was first attacked in a short polemical treatise attributed to Thomas of Sutton. By the time of Ockham, the proposition was known as the propositio famosa, so called by Walter Chatton, Ockham's colleague at Oxford and London, who defended it against Ockham's lengthy critique. At Paris, during the same period, it was called the propositio vulgata and was used approvingly by Francis of Meyronnes, Peter of Navarre and Durandus St. Pourçain. This “famous proposition” was so controverted (...) because on it depended the acceptance, with Duns Scotus, or the rejection, with Ockham, of theology as a strict, propter quid science. As its detractors and defenders must have realized, it also struck at the heart of the divergent philosophical outlooks of Duns Scotus and Ockham. For all of this, Duns Scotus's famous proposition and its history have all but escaped notice. (shrink)