Kenny Anthony. Medieval Philosophy: A New History of Western Philosophy. Volume 2

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gives us certainty. Aristotelian physics may teach that Wre burns, but it

is the child that is actually burnt that dreads the Wre. Experiment can

also take us beyond the demonstrated conclusions of the scientiWc discip-

lines, as we can see if we consider the pharmacopoeia built up by the

experience of practical physicians. Constructing a m odel of the heavens,

like an astrolabe, can teach us more things about them than deductive

science can.

Though Bacon believed in the possibility of the alchemical transmuta-

tion of baser metals into gold, and saw the ability to foretell the future and

to work wonders as being one of the rewards of scientiWc research, he made

a sharp distinction between science and magic. Indeed he thought that one

reason for taking up science was in order to refute the false claims made for

the magical arts. But before one salutes him as a protagonist in any war

between science and mysticism, it is important to remember that among

the ‘experien ce’ to which he attached such importance in philosophy he

includes religious visions and mystical states of rapture.

Roger Bacon was one of a distinguished trio of Franciscan thinkers who

graced Oxford in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the other two

being John Duns Scotus and William Ockham. The three are very diVerent

from each other, as we shall see, so that it would be quite wrong to think of

Oxford as the home of a particular Franciscan school of thought. But all

three of them had an inXuence that was to extend far beyond Oxford or

England.

Duns Scotus

Of all the great philosophers, John Duns Scotus is the one whose life is least

known and whose biography rests almost entirely on conjecture. Any

account of his career has to be based on just four Wrm dates for which

there is documentary evidence: on 17 March 1291 he was ordained priest at

Northampton; on 26 July 1300 he was at Oxford, as a Franciscan friar,

unsuccessfully seeking a licence to hear confessions; on 18 November 1304

he was commended by the Franciscan minister-general for a position of

authority in Paris; on 30 February 1308 he was a lector in theology at

Cologne. Even the date of his death is uncertain; the dat e traditionally

given is 8 November 1308.

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From these fragments of evidence scholars have built up skeleton

biographies: what follows is only one of several possible reconstructions.6

John was born, we are told, at Duns, a town on the Scottish border a few

miles inland from Berwick upon Tweed. Working back from his ordin -

ation, we can guess a birth date of early 1266. Some time in his teens he

seems to have become a novice in the Franciscan house at Dumfries, under

his uncle Elias Duns, head of the Scottish friars who had recently achieved

a degree of self-government under the English branch of the order. During

the 1280s he was sent to Oxford, where he studied philosophy in the

Franciscan house, Greyfriars, which was already large enough to contain

some seventy students. Scotus began theological studies in the university in

1288: the course lasted thirteen years and culminated with three years of

obligatory lecturing, two on the Sentence s of Peter Lombard and one on the

Bible. In 1300–1 he obtained his baccalaur eate in theology, a status equiva-

lent to that of assistant professor.

For reasons that can only be guessed, the Franciscan authorities decided

that instead of taking an Oxford doctorate Scotus should go as a bachelor

to Paris. Possibly he had shown such brilliance as a lecturer that they felt he

should be given a chance to shine in the premier university of the age—

one with which Oxford was only just now catching up. However, the

Franciscan convent in Paris, home of Alexander of Hales and Bonaventure,

did not provide a peaceful environment. After a year of lecturing on the

Sentences, Scotus, along with eighty other friars, was banished from France

for supporting the papal side in the dispute between Philip the Fair and

Boniface VIII.7 He left in June 1303, and returned to England, spending

some time at Cambridge , where there was a Franciscan graduate house.

After the death of Pope Boniface in late 1303 relations between the Holy

See and the French kingdom improved, and the ban on the Franciscans was

revoked. Scotus returned to Paris, completed his lecture series on the

Sentences, proceeded to his doctorate, and was regent master during the

year 1306–7. Once again he was forced to leave Paris at a time of political

unrest, and he spent the last year of his life—the forty-second—at Col-

ogne. He died there and was buried in the Franciscan church with the

6 My account of Scotus’ life owes much to a detailed study, sadly still unpublished, by

Antoon Vos.

7 Perhaps best known through Dante’s account of the French mistreatment of Boniface in

Anagni (Purgatorio, 20).

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epitaph ‘Scotland bore me | England taught me | France received me |

Cologne now keeps me’. He was beatiWed by Pope John Paul II in 1993.

Many manuscripts of Scotus’ writings survive, but their nature and

order present as much of an enigma as the details of his biography. Most

of them were in a fragmentary and incomplete form at the time of his

death, and they were collected and polished by the devoted labours of

disciples over several generations. The canon thus established was pub-

lished in twelve volumes by Luke Wadding in 1639, an edition republished

in 1891–5 by the Paris Wrm of Vives. The centrepieces of this edition were

two commentaries on the Sentences, entitled Opus Oxoniense and Reportata

Parisiensia; the collection also contained a series of commentaries on Aris-

totle, a set of quodlibetical questions, and a number of monographs,

notably De Rerum Principio, De Primo Principio, and Grammatica Speculativa.

Scholars were dependent on the Vives–Wadding edition until the latter

part of the twentieth century, and it still provides the only printed text for

a number of Scotus’ works.

The work of scholars in the twentieth century, however, has completely

refashioned the canon. Most of the commentaries on Aristotle turned out

to be the work of other, later, hands. There remain, as authentic, commen-

taries on the Categories, the De Interpretatione, and the Sophistici Elenchi, plus a

commentary on Porphyry. These logical works most probably date from

Scotus’ Wrst period in Oxford in the early 1290s.8 So too do a set of questions

on Aristotle’s De Anima, and probably a commentary on the Metaphysics,

though this appears to have undergone revision quite late in Scotus’ career.

Two of the most heavily studied monographs in the Vives–Wadding

edition, the De Rerum Principio and the Grammatica Speculativa, turned out, on

critical inspection, to be inauthentic.

In the mid-1920s manuscripts were discovered of a text which, after

some controversy, is now accepted as Scotus’ own notes for his lectures on

the Wrst two books of the Sentences in Oxford in the years 1298–1300. In 1938

the Franciscan order set up a scholarly commission in Rome to produce a

critical edition of Scotus’ works, and between 1950 and 1993 this important

text was published by the Vatican Press under the title Lectura I–II. Lectura III,

published in 2003, is most probably the course given by Scotus during his

8 The philosophical works of Scotus are being published, since 1999, in a critical edition by a

team of editors operating Wrst in St Bonaventure, NY, and later at the Catholic University of

America in Washington DC.

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period in Oxford during exile from Paris in 1303. The text previously

known as the Opus Oxoniense is now seen as consisting of elements from an

ongoing revision of this course, which continued throughout the Paris

years. The Reportata Parisiensia bears testimony to a late stage of the revision

from the hands of students attending the lectures. The deWnitive form of a

medieval lecture course was attained when the lecturer compared his own

drafts with his students’ notes, and incorporated the material into a single,

approved, text known as an Ordinatio. The publication of the Ordinatio—

never Wnally retouched by Scotus himself—has been the major task of the

Scotist Commission. Between 1950 and 2001 seven volumes of this critical

edition appeared, completing the commentary on Sentences I–II. For Ordinatio

III and IV scholars still rely on the last two books of the Opus Oxoniense as

printed by Wadding.

The Vatican editions of the Lectura and Ordinatio are the main point of

reference for the study of Scotus by present-day philosophers and theolo-

gians. But two works of uncontested authenticity provide evidence of

Scotus’ mature thought. The quodlibetical questions undoubtedly belong

to the brief period when Scotus was regent master in Paris, in 1306 or 1307.

The brief monograph De Primo Principio , published in several editions since

1941, belongs to the last period of his life, and some scholars believe that it

was written in Cologne in the year of his death. Finally, the genuineness of

a work entitled Theoremata is still the object of scholarly dispute. The balance

of opinion now seems in favour of authenticity, but if the work is genuine

it testiWes to a remarkable volte-face by Scotus on an important topic, the

question whether God’s existence can be proved by the natural light of

reason.

Scotus is not an easy author to read. His language is crabbed, technical,

and unaccommodating, and the structure of his a rguments is often diYcult

to discern. He had, however, one of the sharpest minds ever to have engaged

in philosophy, and he well deserved his sobriquet ‘the subtle doctor’. In his

brief academic career he altered the direction of philosophical thinking in

many areas and set it on new courses to be followed for centuries.

On many major issues Scotus took the opposite side to Aquinas. In his

own mind, if not in the light of history, equal importance attached to his

disagreements with another of his seniors, Henry of Ghent. Henry taught

at Paris from 1276 to 1292 and defended many of the ideas of Augustinian

Neoplatonism against the radical Aristotelianism of some of the arts

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faculty. Scotus often situated his own positions in relation to Henry’s

stance, and it was through Henry’s eyes that he viewed many of his

predecessors.

Scotus broke with the Aristotelian tradition by maintaining that the

concepts of being and of other universally applicable predicates such as

‘good’ were not analogous but univocal, and could be used about God in

exactly the same sense as about creatures.9 Metaphysics was the science that

studied the univocal concept of being and its fundamental properties.

Aristotle had deWned metaphysics as the science that studies Being qua

being. Scotus makes great use of this deWnition, but he understands it in a

highly personal way and broadens its scope immeasurably by including

within Being the inWnite Christian God. Whatever belongs to any of

Aristotle’s categories—substance or accident—is part of Being; but Being

is much greater than this, for whatever falls within the categories is Wnite,

and Being contain s the inWnite. The most important division to be made

within the realm of Being was the division between Wnite and inWnite

being.10

The existence of an inWnite being is something that, for Scotus, can be

philosophically proved. In this he agrees with Aquinas and the great

majority of medieval thinkers. But he rejects the proofs of God’s existence

oVered by Aquinas on the ground that they are too dependent on Aristo-

telian physics, and he oVers an elaborate metaphysical proof of his own to

establish the existence of God as Wrst eYcient cause, ultimate Wnal cause,

and most excellent of all beings. Unlike Aquinas, he thinks that divine

attributes such as omniscience and omnipotence can be known only by

revelation and cannot be established by natural reason alone.11

Scotus makes use of the apparatus of Aristotelian hylomorphism, using

familiar terms like ‘matter’, ‘form’, ‘substance’, and ‘accident’. But he gives

many of these terms a new and radical interpretation. In particular he

recasts the Aristotelian concepts of actuality and potentiality, treating

potential beings as if they are entities that possess all the detailed individu-

ality of actual beings. This comes out, for instance, in his treatment of place

and time: unlike Aristotle he held that there can be vacuous space and

motionless time. Where, for Aristotle, the presence of a body is needed in

9 Scotus’ theory of univocity is discussed in Ch. 3 below.

10 Scotus’ metaphysics is treated in more detail in Ch. 5 below.

11 Scotus’ natural theology is discussed in Ch. 9 below.

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order to create a space, for Scotus the mere possibility of a body is enough

to keep the walls of a vacuum apart. Where, for Aristotle, there must be

motion if there is to be time, since time is the measure of motion, for

Scotus there can be time without motion, time that measures the mere

potential for motion.12 In treating possibilities as shadowy, but deWnite,

individuals, Scotus betrays the inXuence of Avicenna; but he explores the

area with a degree of elaboration that entitles him to be regarded as the

begetter of the philosophy of possible worlds.

In Aristotelian tradition matter was the principle of individuation: two

humans, Peter and Paul, were distinct from each other not on account of

their form but on account of their matter. Scotus rejected this: it was not

matter that made the diVerence between Peter and Paul, but a unique

identifying feature that each alone possessed, a haecceitas, or thisness. Thus,

in an individual such as Socrates there was both a common human nature

and an individuating prin ciple. The common nature and the individual

diVerence were, he maintained, really identical, but distinguished from

each other by a distinction of a special kind, the ‘formal distinction’. By this

means Scotus hoped to preserve the validity of universal terms without

falling into Platonism: the common nature was real enough, and was not

merely created by the human intellect, but it could never occur in reality

except in company with an individuating element.

By comparison with Aquinas, Scotus extended the scope of the human

intellect in two directions. Aquinas had held that there was no purely

intellectual knowledge of individuals, because an immaterial faculty could

not grasp matter, which was the principle of individuation. For Scotus,

each thing has within it an intelligible principle of individuality, and

therefore the intellect can grasp the individual in its singularity. Aquin as

maintained that the proper object of the intellect, in this life, was the

knowledge of the nature of material things. Scotus said that if we were to

take the future as well as the present life into consideration, we must say

that the proper object of the intellect was as wide as Being itself. To

deWne the object of the intellect as Aquinas had, he maintained, was like

deWning the object of sight as what could be seen by candlelight.

Scotus deWnitively rejected the thesis—dear to the Augustinian tradition

and revived by Henry of Ghent—that a special divine illumination was

12 See N. Lewis, ‘Space and Time’, in CCDS.

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needed to enable the human intellect to grasp universals. God, however, is

not totally excluded from his epistemology. God’s power is absolute: he

can do anything that does not involve contradiction. Accordingly, God

could create in a human mind a conviction of the presence of an individual

entity without that entity being present. Fortunately, while having abso-

lute power, God acts only in accordance with his orderly power, power

guided by wisdom. Hence, he would not exercise the absolute power that

would deceive us in the manner suggested. Here Scotus, like Descartes

centuries later, can exclude radical scepticism only by appealing to the

doctrine that the good God is no deceiver.

In philosophy of mind Scotus innovated in his description of the

relationship between the intellect and the will. Whereas for Aquinas the

will was essentially a rational appetite which derived its freedom from

the Xexible nature of practical reasoning, Scotus saw the will as a sovereign

power whose activity could not be caused by anything except its own self-

determination. The will was indeed a rational power, a power capable of

being exercised in more than one way, but this did not mean that its

exercise was under the direction of reason. The intellect, by contrast, was a

natural power, a power which, given the appropriate natural conditions for

its operation, could act only in one way. Whereas for most Aristotelian

scholastics the ultimate end of human beings is an intellectual operation,

the beatiWc vision of God, for Scotus the union of the blessed with God in

heaven consists essentially in a free act of the will.13

In both humans and in God, Scotus assigns to the will a much broader

scope than any of his predecessor s had done. The human will is a power for

opposites, not just in the sense that it can will diVerent things at diVerent

times, but that at the very time of willing one thing it retains a power for

willing its opposite at the same time. A created will that existed only for a

single moment could still make a free choice between opposites. Again, the

divine will, for Scotus, enjoys a freedom far wider than that attributed to it

by previous theologians. God was free, for instance, to dispense with or

cancel many of the moral precepts commonly believed to belong to the

natural law.

Duns Scotus is important in the history of philosophy not so much for

founding a school—though there have been devoted Scotists in every

13 Scotus’ philosophy of mind is discussed in Ch. 7 below.

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generation up to the present—but because many of his philosophical

innovations came to be accepted as unquestioned principles by thinkers

in later generations who had never read a word of his works. The Refor-

mation debates between Luther and Calvin and their Catholic adversaries

took place against a backcloth of fundamentally Scotist assumptions. The

framework within which Descartes laid out the foundations of modern

philosophy was in all its essentials a construction erected in Oxford around

the year 1300. The quarter of a century that separated Aquinas’ Summa

Theologiae from Scotus’ Lectura was one of the most momentous periods in

the history of philosophy.

Scotus is not widely read outside professional circles: he is a philoso-

phers’ philosopher. But one of those who had the most vivid appreciation

of his genius was the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. In his poem

‘Duns Scotus’ Oxford’ Hopkins placed him on a pedestal above Aquinas,

Plato, and Aristotle, saluting him as

Of realty the rarest-veined unraveller; a not

rivalled insight, be rival Italy or Greece.

What most impressed Hopkins was the concept of haecceity, which he took

as anticipating his own concept of inscape, the unique characteristic of each

individual, which he celebrated in many of his poems, notably ‘As king-

Wshers catch Wre’.

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

In the decades immediately after his death Scotus did not receive such

applause in Oxford, and even among his fellow Franciscans there was

strong opposition to his views.

William Ockham

William Ockham arrived in Oxford shortly after Scotus had left it for the

last time. He took his surname from his birthplace, the village of Ockham

in Surrey. He was born in the late 1280s and joined the Franciscan order

around 1302. It was probably at Greyfriars in London that he received his

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philosophical training. At the end of the decade he went to Oxford to

commence the study of theology. By the time of his lectures on the

Sentences in 1317–19 a school of Scotists was building up in Oxford, and

Ockham deWned his own position partly in contrast to them. He was soon

criticized by fellow Franciscans, and also regarded with suspicion by the

university’s chancellor, Thomas Lutterell, who was a Thomist. He left

Oxford without proceeding to the doctorate, and lived in London in the

early 1320s, probably again at Greyfriars.14 He became a lecturer in philoso-

phy and held a number of quodlibetal disputations. He also wrote up his

Oxford lecture s, composed a systematic textbook of logic, a number of

commentaries on the logical and physical works of Aristotle, and an

inXuential treatise on predestination and future contingent s. He is best

remembered for something he never said, namely ‘Entities are not to be

multiplied beyond necessity’, the famous ‘Ockham’s razor’.

In his works Ockham took up a number of positions in logic and

metaphysics either in development of, or in opposition to, Scotus . Though

his thought is less sophisticated than Scotus’, his language is mercifully

much clearer. Like Scotus, he treated ‘being’ as a univocal term, applicable

to God and creatures in the same sense. He sharply reduced, however, the

number of created beings, reducing the ten Aristotelian categories to two,

namely substances and qualities. Ockham’s most signiWcant disagreement

with Scotus concerned the nature of universals. He rejected outright the

idea that there was a common nature existing in the many individuals we

call by a common name. No universal exists outside the mind; everything

in the world is singular. Universals are not things but signs, simple signs

representing many things.

According to Ockham, there are two kinds of signs: natural signs and

conventional signs. Natural signs are the thoughts in our minds, and

conventional signs are the words that we coin to express these thoughts.

The concepts in our minds form a language system, a language common to

all humans and prior to all the diVerent spoken languages such as English

14 Ockham’s premature departure from Oxford without a doctorate may be the reason why

his medieval nickname was venerabilis inceptor—‘the venerable beginner’. This seems more likely

than the alternative explanation, that he was regarded as an admirable innovator. But at all

events, the title involves complicated wordplay, since ‘incept’ was, in medieval jargon, the word

for actually taking the doctorate, something that Ockham never did. His other title, ‘the

invincible doctor’, needs less explanation.

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and Latin. Ockham’s denial of real universals is often called ‘nominalism’:

but the names which, according to him, are the only true universals are

not only spoken and written names, but also the inward names of our

mental language. Accordingly, when we are making a contrast between

Ockham’s teaching and the realism of his opponents it would be more apt

to call him a conceptualist than a nominalist.15

At diVerent times Ockham gave diVerent accounts of the way in which

the names of mental language are related to objects in the world.

According to his earlier theory, the mind fashioned mental images, or

‘Wctions’, that resembled real things, and that provided the terms of mental

propositions, as proxies for the corresponding realities. Fictions were uni-

versals in the sense of having an equal likeness to many diVerent things in

The palace of the Popes at Avignon, where Ockham was tried and whence he Xed to

the Emperor.

15 Ockham’s nominalism is discussed in Ch. 3 below.

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