Author's Introduction
- I am not nearly old enough to remember dunce caps, but I do remember a pedagogical illustration of a sad little boy sitting in the corner of a classroom wearing a pointy hat while his peers gaze joyfully at their teacher. My teacher explained that the pointy hat was called a dunce cap, and was used in olden times to humiliate and so punish the dunces, that is, the students who cannot or will not learn their lessons. Our own lesson was clear: we might not have the pointy hats anymore, but only sorrow and ostracisation await children who do poorly in school.
- Ironically, John Duns Scotus (c1265-1308), after whom the dunces are named, did very well in school, impressing his Oxford Franciscan colleagues so much that they sent him to the University of Paris. His brilliance at Paris eventually earned him the temporary but prestigious post of Regent Master of Theology. His writings, despite their difficulty, were enormously influential in Western philosophy and theology, so much so that universities all over Europe established Chairs of Scotist thought side by side with Chairs dedicated to Thomism. In the 19th century, the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins declared that it is Scotus ‘who of all men most sways my spirits to peace’, and halfway through the 20th century the celebrity monk Thomas Merton could say that Duns Scotus’s proof for God’s existence is the best that has ever been offered.
- This prestigious legacy notwithstanding, as early as the 16th century educated Englishmen were appropriating ‘Duns’ as a term of abuse. In 1587, the English chronicler Raphael Holinshed wrote that ‘it is grown to be a common prouerbe in derision, to call such a person as is senselesse or without learning a Duns, which is as much as a foole.’ But in the same age a bookish person might also be labelled a dunce: ‘if a person is given to study, they proclayme him a duns,’ John Lyly explains in his Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578). Humanist contempt of scholastic methods and style – of which Scotus’s own tortuous texts sometimes read like a parody – is probably an adequate explanation of the unfortunate union of ‘fool’ and ‘studious’ in ‘dunce’. A person must be a fool to waste time reading John Duns Scotus!
- Scotus remains a polarising figure, but his humanist detractors would be horrified to learn that here in the 21st century we are witnessing a Scotus revival. Philosophers, theologians and intellectual historians are once again taking Scotus seriously, sometimes in a spirit of admiration and sometimes with passionate derision, but seriously nonetheless. Doubtless this is due in part to the progress of the International Scotistic Commission, which has in recent years completed critical editions of two of Scotus’s monumental works of philosophical theology: Ordinatio and Lectura. As these and other works have become more accessible, Scotus scholarship has boomed. According to the Scotus scholar Tobias Hoffmann, 20 per cent of all the Scotus scholarship produced over the past 70 years was produced in the past seven years. This explosion of interest in Scotus offers as good an occasion as any for introducing this brilliant and enigmatic thinker to a new audience.
Author's Conclusion
- Scotus’s doctrine of haecceity is yet another of his views in which some have discerned world-historical significance. In A Secular Age (2007), Charles Taylor, inspired by Louis Dupré, said that Ockham the nominalist and Scotus the realist share a focus on individuality that gives ‘a new status to the particular’, and marks ‘a major turning point in the history of Western civilisation, an important step towards that primacy of the individual which defines our culture.’
- I confess I am often tempted to make sweeping historical conclusions about the medieval figures I work on. If I could believe them, I might think my research is more important than it is, and conduct my work with extra vigour. In a Taylorian spirit, for example, I might say that Ockham and Scotus, along with their predecessor Aquinas, with the focus on individuals these three share, gave rise to the primacy of the individual that defines our culture. Or, in the same spirit but with a greater sense of boldness, I might say that Aquinas, with his materialistic answer to the problem of individuation, along with Scotus and Ockham, who believed in the existence of matter, together ushered in the pervasive materialism of contemporary science and culture.
- Of course, it would take a reckless frame of mind to believe either of these assertions: the connections drawn between Aquinas, Scotus and Ockham are insufficiently robust to unite them as common causes of the historical events attributed to them. But that’s the point: a theory of nominalism is about individuals in some sense (since it asserts there are only individuals) and so, too, a theory of haecceity is about individuals in some sense (since it asserts an individuating entity in addition to the common nature). But these theories are about individuals in radically different senses, just as Aquinas’s materialistic solution to the problem of individuation is about matter in a sense radically different from the sense in which, say, Thomas Hobbes is a materialist about human minds. Therefore, they should not be lumped together as common causes of the same historical event. Ockham’s denial that there is such a thing as human nature does seem like the sort of denial that would affect the way ordinary people live their lives, if it ever came to influence them. The same can be said of Scotus’s affirmation that there is such a thing as human nature. But it would be rather surprising – and a mere accident – if the denial and affirmation of exactly the same view had exactly the same influence on how people live their lives.
- As a Scotus scholar, I welcome this century’s revival of interest in Scotus. But a more fruitful way to indulge that interest, especially for those just starting their intellectual journey with Duns Scotus, is simply to try to take him on his own terms, engaging first-order questions of philosophy and theology with Scotus, and resisting the storyteller’s urge to situate this or that feature of Scotus’s thought within a narrative that explains why we are where we are now. It really is just as possible for a person of the 21st century as it was for a person of the 14th to wonder whether God exists, or whether universals are real, or whether objective morality requires a divine lawgiver. When we ask these questions now, we’re asking the very same questions they were asking then. And, thanks to the efforts of the dunces who for centuries have kept alive Scotus’s memory, editing and transmitting his texts, and writing papers and books trying to explain his thought, we can welcome Scotus into our own puzzlings over these and other perennial questions. At the speed of philosophy, 1308 is not so very far away after all.
Author Narrative
- Thomas M Ward is associate professor of philosophy at Baylor University in Texas. He is the author of Ordered by Love: An Introduction to John Duns Scotus (2022) and the translator of Duns Scotus’s Treatise on the First Principle (forthcoming, 2023).
Notes
Comment:
- Sub-Title: "His name is now the byword for a fool, yet his proof for the existence of God was the most rigorous of the medieval period"
- For the full text see Aeon: Ward - Who was Duns Scotus?.
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