Cal Ledsham

I first examine John Duns Scotus’ view of contingency, pure possibility, and created possibilities, and his version of the celebrated distinction between ordained and absolute power. Scotus’ views on ethical natural law and his account of induction are characterised, and their dependence on the preceding doctrines detailed. I argue that there is an inconsistency in his treatments of the problem of induction and ethical natural law. Both proceed with God’s contingently willed creation of a given order of laws, which can be revoked and replaced with a new order of laws. In the case of ethical natural law God promulgated the Decalogue, for example; in the case of nature, there are physical laws that can be known by induction. Scotus exalts the freedom of God and the mutability of ethical natural law in order to explain exceptions to it disclosed by revelation (for example, the Old Testament command to Abraham to kill Isaac). Yet he treats ethical natural laws as (mostly) not universal and immutable. In contrast, he holds that we can arrive at knowledge of the universal and immutable laws of nature, except for those regularities that result from free will. Finally, I present several ways of characterising this tension between Scotus’ doctrines

This paper considers the hermeneutic position, recently gaining some traction in the secondary literature, that Scholastics in the years 1330-1350 were not primarily interested in theology. Rather, their increasing engagement with “English subtleties” – a set of “logico-mathematical” techniques we now associate with scientific inquiry – was driven by their new, distinctively secular, natural-philosophy interests. In this, they become proto-moderns and philosophers in our contemporary sense. Consideration is given to whether this “pretext” reading of the Scholastics is coherent and plausible, and whether the logico-mathematical techniques were the province of natural philosophy at the time, or actually instead discipline-neutral, being employable in both theology and natural theology. The paper then assesses the rather meagre evidence offered for this reading and its unfortunate historiographical implications. It ends by advocating an existing and far more pro...

Heidegger accuses ontotheologies of reducing God to a mere object of intelligibility, and thereby falsifying them, and in doing so distracting attention from or forgetting the ground of Being as unconcealment in the Lichtung. Conventional theistic responses to Heidegger’s ontotheological challenges proceed by offering analogy, speech-act theorising or negative theology as solutions. Yet these conventional solutions, however suitable as responses to Heidegger’s Die ontotheologische Verfassung der Metaphysik version of the ontotheological problem, still fall foul of Heidegger’s more profound characterisation of ontotheology in his treatise Seinsgeschichtliche Bestimmung des Nihilismus. Therein Heidegger characterises ontotheology as a metaphysics that posits a first-causal ground of Being combining together an essentia and an existentia. This article presents an alternative family of metaphysical schemes that instead develop their metaphysical ‘theology’ in a non-naive epistemological context, and indeed maintain that God cannot be cognised by us because we cannot reconcile the whatness and the that-ness of God in one coherent thought. God is thus unintelligible, and though able to be signified, cannot be reduced thereby to an object of cognition, and is not posited at the expense of considering the ground of Being as the encounter in Lichtung with Being. The two examples of such disrupted cognition accounts of a non-ontheological metaphysics are from the medieval Franciscan John Duns Scotus and the British Idealist Francis Herbert Bradley. The paper ends with a discussion of the characteristic ‘disrupted cognition’ as a movement between two concepts that are unreconcilable within thought, without being contradictories or contraries, and explores the differences between theological and philosophical employments of ‘disrupted cognition’.

This article contains an edition of a list of authors of Sentences commentaries in Vatican City, BAV, Cod. Vat. Lat. 3919, which is similar to one found in the 1535 Quentel edition of Denys the Carthusian's texts. This manuscript version is thus a primary text indicating the content of a (Germanic) library in the early 1500's, and showing how sixteenthcentury editors took library lists and both homogenized and regularized their attribution, orthography and chronology. The names listed are identified against modern lists and their variation against that 1535 edition noted, the provenance and date of the list established and not readily-identifiable names are discussed.