Duns Scotus has had considerable influence on both Catholic and secular thought. The doctrines for which he is best known are the "univocity of being", that existence is the most abstract concept we have, applicable to everything that exists; the formal distinction, a way of distinguishing between different formalities of the same thing; and the idea of haecceity, the property supposed to be in each individual thing that makes it an individual (i.e. a certain “thisness”). Duns Scotus also developed a complex argument for the existence of God, and argued for the Immaculate Conception of Mary. The intellectual tradition derived from Scotus' work is called Scotism.
Critics of Scotus' work described his followers as "dunces"; the "dunce cap" was later used as a form of punishment in schools and the word "dunce" has come to be used as a term to describe someone dull-witted.
^Cross, Richard (2014). Duns Scotus's Theory of Cognition. Oxford University Press. p. 18. ISBN9780199684885. Scotus is a good Aristotelian, in the sense that he believes that cognition always has an empirical starting point
^Williams, Thomas (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Duns Scotus. Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 2.
^He has long been claimed as a Merton alumnus, but there is no contemporary evidence to support this claim and as a Franciscan, he would have been ineligible for fellowships at Merton (see Martin, G. H. & Highfield, J. R. L. (1997). A History of Merton College. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 53).
^Anthony Kenny, Wyclif in His Times, Oxford UP, 1986, p. 35 n. 13.
^Harjeet Singh Gill, Signification in language and culture, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 2002, p. 109.
^Williams, Thomas (2019), "John Duns Scotus", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
^Spade, Paul Vincent (2018), "Medieval Philosophy", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Histories of medieval philosophy often treat Thomas Aquinas (1224/25–74), John Duns Scotus (c. 1265–1308) and William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347) as the "big three" figures in the later medieval period; a few add Bonaventure (1221–74) as a fourth.