DUNS SCOTUS, JOHN (c. 1265-1308), the famous doc tor subtilis and the greatest British mediaeval philosopher, was born in the village of Duns, Scotland. He became a Franciscan and studied at Oxford, where shortly after i290 he lectured on the Sentences. He then spent some four years in Paris, and after re turning to Oxford, was again, by 1302, lecturer in Paris. There he received the master's licence. He was transferred to Cologne, where he died on Nov. 8, 1308.
Broadly speaking, Scotus, like Bonaventure and Pecham, seeks to defend the traditional Scholastic doctrines against Thomistic innovations (the same desire had already led Bishop Tempier of Paris to condemn in 1277 a number of Thomistic theories), and in so doing, incidentally manifests the scientific bent of the Ox ford Franciscan school by his hesitation in accepting what others regard as proof. He is commonly represented only as a destruc tive critic of St. Thomas, which is to say, as a Franciscan antag onistic to a Dominican, but, in reality, the critical position in volved in many of his famous speculations, e.g., his doctrine of the Trinity, his formal distinction in God, the univocacy of being in God and creatures, and the importance of the species intelligibiles, applies to the system of Henry of Ghent, while his voluntaristic leanings are a protest against Godfrey of Fontaine's stress on the passivity of the will. His is the legitimate aim of contributing to philosophical speculation by evaluating the theories of others. Again, certain superficial readers have absurdly accused Scotus, whom Thomas Cromwell in the 16th century attacked as the great defender of Scholasticism, of pantheism, scepticism, Pelagianism, indeterminism, excessive realism, subjectivism and a host of other imaginable iniquities. These accusations are due either to the assumption of the genuineness of the De Principio, now rejected by all first-rate scholars, or to a lack of patience in coping with the subtle and extensive writings of Scotus.
Bearing in mind the common doctrines of the Schoolmen (see SCHOLASTICISM), the chief points of interest in the metaphysics of Scotus are his rejection of the Augustinian theory of rationes seminales in matter, a theory which he regards as uselessly multi plying entities and as destroying the true nature of becoming; his contention that matter is not pure passive potency but has some positive entity of its own and, therefore, by the absolute power of God, could exist apart from form ; his denial of the numerical unity of matter in all things; his belief that the form is educed successively from the potency of matter, that the resulting com posite has in itself both a universal and an individual nature, the latter, which for Scotus means repugnance to division into sub jective parts, being due to none of the factors usually suggested, e.g., negation, existence, accidents, matter and quantity, but to a positive entity (haecceitas), an ultima realitas entis, which is a unity of this matter with this form in this composite.
In cosmology his two most important doctrines are those which maintain that elements must remain at least virtually in com pounds, since they can be regained from them, and that the Ptolemaic system of eccentric and epicycles is necessary to account for the phenomena observable in the movements of the celestial bodies.
In psychology, Scotus naturally upholds the theory of the plurality of forms in man, since he is interested in proclaiming the separability and independence of the rational soul and the body. The soul is created by God and is immortal, though its immortality for Scotus, contrary to the general Scholastic opinion, cannot be positively proved but only supported by possible persuasions. As regards the hylomorphic composition of the soul, a doctrine which had been proclaimed by all his Franciscan predecessors, Scotus neither accepts nor rejects it in his genuine works. The faculties of intellect, will and memory through which the soul acts, are for him, neither really distinct from the soul's essence, for that would imply their separability, nor only logically distinct, for then they would exist potentialiter rather than actualiter; they are for mally distinct, which is to say, they are inseparably founded in the essence ex natura rei and yet cannot be included in the same definition.
His view of cognition is very much the common Scholastic doc trine of moderate realism, except that he stresses the activity of the intellect, including the passive as well as the active intellect, and the importance of induction, that he rejects the Augustinian doctrine of Divine illumination, and that he maintains we have a direct though imperfect intuitive knowledge of singulars. In dis cussing our knowledge of spiritual beings, he denies that we have an immediate knowledge of the self and that we can have any other than a posteriori proofs for the existence of God. His asser tion that the concept of being which we apply to God is univocal with that applied to creatures, is meant to avoid agnosticism by proclaiming that our concept gives us some positive knowledge of the quiddity of being in God. He does not countenance pantheism by supposing that the actual realization of being in God is uni vocal with created being. All activities of the human intellect are closely related to those of the will, and hence, attention is a sine qua non for knowledge, just as much as a known object is essen tial for an act of will. Nevertheless, if the will requires such direc tion, it is not determined by the intellect. It is still able to deliber ate and it alone must accept or reject. It is just this emphasis on the will which has led to Scotus being called an extreme volunta rist, but, in reality, the necessity of interaction between intellect and will is fully recognized by the subtle doctor, the primacy of the will being more pronounced only in the supernatural life.
In angelology, the chief contributions of Scotus are his in decision as to their hylomorphic composition, his denial that each angel is a complete species, his opinion that, if the angelic beings are capable of development, they must receive species intelligibles from externals and must also possess a passive as well as an active intellect, and his assertion that the angelic will has a de pendency of activity as regards the intellect but a primacy of nature.
Finally in theodicy, the most important contributions of Scotus are his formal distinction between the Divine attributes and the Divine essence, which means that the attributes can be more than conceptual without imperilling the Divine simplicity ; his rejec tion of Henry of Ghent's esse essentiae simpliciter for the ex istence of things in the mind of God before creation; his support of the Divine knowledge of singulars and of the necessity of interaction between the Divine intellect and will, the latter being limited only according to the distinction between God's absolute power and his ordained power; and lastly his discussion of the unsatisfactory objections both to the theory of the possi bility of eternal creation and to that of the necessity of a temporal creation. The teaching of Scotus on the relation between reason and faith is practically that of St. Thomas.
uncritical edition of the works of Scotus by Wadding, 13 vols. (Lyons, 1639) was reprinted at Paris, 26 vols. (1891-95). Of these, as E. Longpre, La Philosophie du B. Duns Scot (Paris, 1924), has shown, only the Opus. Oxon., the Rep. Paris, Quodl. De Primo Principio and the Quaestiones on the Metaphysics can be unquestionably accepted as genuine.
As regards the life of Scotus, all that can be said with certainty has been summarized by A. G. Little, "The Franciscan School at Oxford" in Arch. Fran. Hist. (1926, p. 869 sq.). The most trust worthy accounts of the philosophy of Scotus are to be found in Longpre (see above) ; J. Klein, Der Gottesbegriff des D. Scotus (Paderborn, 19J3) ; H. Klug, "Die Lehre des Scotus fiber Materie and Form" in Philos. Jahrb. (1917) ; P. Minges, 1st Duns Scotus Indeterminist (Munster, 19o5) and Der angeblich exzessive Realismus des Duns Scotus (Munster, 1908) ; R. Seeberg, Die Theologie des Duns Scotus (1900) ; K. Werner, Die Psych. u. Erkenntnislehre des Scotus (Vienna, 1877) and Die Scholastik des spateren Mittelalters, vol. i. (Vienna, 1881). B. Landry, Duns Scot (Paris, 1922) is most uncritical, and C. R. S. Harris, Duns Scotus, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1927) is largely based on the spurious De Rerum Principio. (D. E. SH.)