Giorgio Pini

John Duns Scotus authored two works on Aristotle's metaphysics, the Questions on the Metaphysics and the Remarks on the Metaphysics. The Questions were copied several times and were soon regarded as one of Scotus's major works. A close study of Scotus's views on the nature, method, and limits of metaphysics in the Questions provides an access key to an otherwise intractable work. Scotus had a particularly lofty conception of metaphysics as the discipline that both considers anything whatsoever with regard to its most general features and inquires into the deeper structure of reality. Scotus was acutely aware of some severe cognitive limitations that actually mar our current practice of metaphysics. Scotus developed an original conception of how it is possible to overcome the current cognitive limitations and grasp the deeper structure of reality by the exercise of purely intellectual powers.

Even though Scotus did not develop his account in direct opposition to Aquinas, a contrast between these two thinkers helps us to focus on some distinctive features of their respective approaches and on some characteristic moves they made to answer the question, “What is it to think?” Scotus agreed with Aquinas that, barring divine intervention, an intelligible species must be received in the intellect prior to the production of an occurrent thought about a thing’s essence. Unlike Aquinas, however, Scotus argued that occurrent thoughts are qualities and not actions. This allowed him to reject the view held by Aquinas that the presence of the intelligible species in the intellect explains a thought’s intentionality. Rather, Scotus claimed that a thought’s intentionality is explained by a relation grounded in that thought and directed at its object.

ABSTRACTIn a recent book, Thomas Ward advances an original interpretation of Duns Scotus’s hylomorphism, which stresses the ability of the parts of certain kinds of composites to exist independently from each other and from the composite to which they belong. Ward argues that the notion of essential order plays a key role in accounting for the unity of those parts in a composite. In another book, Richard Cross gives a comprehensive treatment of Duns Scotus’s theory of cognition, which proposes an interesting but controversial interpretation of Duns Scotus as introducing a distinction between object and content and defending the view that the contents of intellectual cognitive acts are determined only by their internal structure.

L'A. sottolinea come la posizione di Scoto sugli universali, sebbene mal compresa e incomprensibile, è davvero un tentativo interessante di dire cosa sia possibile e necessario circa la struttura della realtà senza far confusione fra la realtà stessa e il nostro modo di conoscerla. Non è possibile dire che cosa gli oggetti siano nel mondo e se siano individui o universali sulla base di una semantica o una considerazione epistemologica. Non è possibile formulare la struttura del mondo sulla base dei nostri concetti o delle parole che si si usano per descriverlo. L'A. è conscio del fatto che questa posizione che rileva all'interno della filosofia scotista è inedita rispetto alla sua linea interpretativa, che si allineava con quanti intendevano leggere la filosofia del Doctor subtilis sugli universali nell'ambito di una linea realista, non tenendo conto della palese reticenza del filosofo in merito alla questione degli universali. I nodi testuali esaminati sono quelli delle Quaestiones super libros Metaphysicorum, della Lectura, dell'Ordinatio e del Quodlibet

L'A. propone una nuova indagine sull'essenzialismo di Scoto attraverso una lettura analitica della questione 7 delle Questiones sul settimo libro della Metafisica. Nello stesso luogo Scoto critica la dottrina di Tommaso sull'essenza. In tal modo, l'A. evidenzia profonde differenziazioni fra ciò che è comunemente etichettato essenzialismo aristotelico. Nel caso dei due filosofi, infatti, pur partendo entrambi dall'interpretazione del pensiero aristotelico e da una comune assunzione della dottrina avicenniana dell'indifferenza dell'essenza, si approda ad opposte teorie

The existence of everlasting punishment has sometimes been thought to be incompatible with God’s goodness and omnipotence. John Duns Scotus focused on the key issue concerning everlasting punishment, i.e., the impossibility for the damned to repent of their evil deeds and so to obtain forgiveness. Scotus’s claimwas that such an impossibility is not logical but nomological, i.e., it depends on the rules God established to govern the world, specifically on what I call ‘the rule of the permanence of the last volition.’ Scotus does not try to defend God’s decision to implement the rule of the permanence of the last volition. I suggest, however, that that decision can be taken as an indication of God’s preference for a world where this life is given unique value as the only test rational creatures have to prove themselves as moral agents.

This paper discusses the views of three medieval thinkers—Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, and John Duns Scotus—about a specific aspect of the problem of evil, which can be dubbed ‘the Lucifer problem’. What was the object of the first evil choice? What could entice a perfectly rational agent placed in ideal circumstances into doing evil? Those thinkers agreed that Lucifer wanted to be happier, but while Anselm thought that that was something Lucifer could achieve by his natural powers, Aquinas held that it was not naturally possible for Lucifer to be happier, even though it was something he could obtain supernaturally. By contrast, Scotus posited that what Lucifer wanted was beyond what was logically possible, i.e. to be as happy as God (or to be God’s equal). An interesting consequence of Scotus’s hypothesis is that God could have done nothing to make Lucifer’s evil choice less likely.

Between the thirteenth and fourteenth century, a remarkable number of thinkers developed an interest in explaining a cognitive state's property of being about something, as many recent studies have shown.1 Several of those later medieval accounts shared a common strategy. According to this common strategy, intentionality was explained in causal terms. Thus, it was contended that cognitive states are about what causes them, and that it is precisely because a certain thing causes a certain cognitive state that such a cognitive state is about that thing. For example, I see something white because my act of seeing is caused by something white. Similarly, my act of thinking is about horses because horses cause it. I ..

Giorgio Pini - Duns Scotus on God - Journal of the History of Philosophy 45:3 Journal of the History of Philosophy 45.3 497-498 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Giorgio Pini Fordham University Richard Cross. Duns Scotus on God. Ashgate Studies in the History of Philosophical Theology. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005. Pp. xi + 289. Paper, $34.95. In this volume, Richard Cross gives us an excellent treatment of Duns Scotus's teaching on God, admirable for both its comprehensiveness and philosophical rigor. Scotus's positions on God's existence and nature, and on the Trinity, are reconstructed and evaluated with close attention to their argumentative soundness. Cross's method is particularly well-suited to his subject. As he notices, Scotus is, among theologians, "the least likely to appeal to mystery, and most likely to try to solve a..

Scotus claims that the extramental world is divided into ten distinct kinds of essences, no one of which can be reduced to another one. Although by the end of the thirteenth century this claim was not new, Scotus's way of articulating it into a comprehensive metaphysical doctrine resulted into a ground-breaking contribution to what became known as 'late medieval realism'. This paper shows how Scotus's view of the categories as ten kinds of irreducible essences should be seen as a development and correction of his predecessors' (including Thomas Aquinas's and Henry of Ghent's) views. The main elements of Scotus's doctrine are his application of the real distinction to the categories, his view of inherence as a categorial item separated from accidents, and his distinction between absolute and non-absolute accidents. Finally, although Scotus's doctrine of the univocity of being seems to pose a challenge to his claim that categories are irreducible to each other and do not have anything in common, this paper shows how Scotus's doctrine of univocity and his realist conception of the categories can be reconciled as two theories that describe the world from different points of view.