Theology
c. 1266 to 1308, Duns, Scotland to Cologne
The Subtle Doctor - univocity of being, the thisness of the individual, the formal distinction, the free will that loves, and Christ as creation’s crown.
Start learning John →Scotus’s foundational claim that being (ens) is said in one and the same sense of God and creatures - not merely by analogy - because otherwise no concept we form could ever reach across to God at all. It is the g…
Scotus’s positive principle of individuation - haecceitas , ‘thisness’ - the ultimate reality that makes this individual this unrepeatable thing, over and above the common nature (natura communis) it s…
Scotus’s subtlest tool - the distinctio formalis a parte rei , a distinction in the thing itself that is less than a real distinction between separable things, yet more than a merely mental one - used to hold toge…
Scotus’s voluntarism - the will, not the intellect, is the highest and freest power; it is self-determining, able to choose otherwise even given the intellect’s judgment; the created moral order is contingen…
Scotus’s thesis that God willed the Incarnation independently of sin - Christ as the crown and first purpose of all creation, not merely its remedy - together with his celebrated defense of Mary’s Immaculate…
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