Duns Scotus, John

Duns Scotus, John (c.1266 or 1270–1308), the ‘Doctor Subtilis’, a Scottish Franciscan. He lectured on the Sententiae of Peter Lombard at Oxford (c.1300–4) and at Paris (c.1304–5). His principal works were his two series of commentaries on the Sententiae, the Reportata Parisiensia (?1306) and the Opus Oxoniense (?1297). He wrote many other works, though many of those attributed to him are of disputed authorship (such as the De Anima and the important, advanced Theoremata). His principal significance in the history of Scholasticism is that he drove the first wedge between theology and philosophy with his emphasis on the separation between God as necessary Being from all contingent Beings, and the impossibility of arguing from the latter to the former. Although this emphasis, together with his associated Augustinian–Franciscan stress on faith and will rather than reason, distinguishes him from the synthesis of Aquinas, he resembles him in the employment of an emphatically Realist metaphysics in the theory of Essences, and in his incorporation of a good deal of Aristotle into his metaphysics. He was much influenced too by Arabic philosophers, especially Avicenna. His great significance is that he straddles the dividing-line between 13th-cent. system-building and 14th-cent. scepticism. The word ‘dunce’, first in the sense of ‘a maker of impossibly ingenious distinctions’, derives from him.