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John Duns Scotus OFM (/ˈskoʊtəs/ SKOH-təs; Ecclesiastical Latin: [duns ˈskɔtus], "Duns the Scot"; c. 1265/66 – 8 November 1308)[9] was a Scottish Catholic priest and Franciscan friar, university professor, philosopher and theologian. He is one of the four most important Christian philosopher-theologians of Western Europe in the High Middle Ages, together with Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure and William of Ockham.[10]
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.
Duns Scotus was given the scholastic accolade Doctor Subtilis ("the subtle doctor") for his penetrating and subtle manner of thought. He was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1993.
- ^ Cross, Richard (2014). Duns Scotus's Theory of Cognition. Oxford University Press. p. 18. ISBN 9780199684885.
Scotus is a good Aristotelian, in the sense that he believes that cognition always has an empirical starting point
- ^ Walker, L. (1912). Voluntarism. In The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. Retrieved 27 September 2019 from New Advent.
- ^ 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).
- ^ The Sheed & Ward Anthology of Catholic Philosophy. Rowman & Littlefield. 2005. ISBN 9780742531987.
- ^ "Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109)", Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2006, retrieved 10 November 2017
- ^ 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.