Duns Scotus

John Duns Scotus was a medieval Scottish Franciscan philosopher and theologian. He defended univocal predication of being and developed haecceity, an account of what makes an individual uniquely itself.

Univocity of being: The thesis that “being” has the same basic meaning when predicated of God and creatures. Scotus used univocal being to make theological reasoning about God logically possible.
Scotus's proof of God's existence: A modal argument by Duns Scotus for a first, infinite being as the ultimate cause of reality. It applies his metaphysics of possibility and causal dependence to establish God's existence.
William of Ockham: An English Franciscan philosopher and theologian associated with nominalism and the principle of parsimony. Ockham inherited Scotus’s scholastic setting while revising key commitments about universals and explanation.
Scotism: The philosophical and theological tradition based on Duns Scotus’s teachings. Later Scotists developed and defended the doctrines presented on this page.
Haecceity: A thisness that makes an individual entity the particular individual it is. Scotus’s account explains individuation without reducing it to shared nature or matter.
Modal logic: The formal study of necessity, possibility, and related modes of truth. Scotus’s argument relies on reasoning about what can exist and what must exist.
Thomas Aquinas: A medieval Dominican theologian whose synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy and Christian doctrine became highly influential. Aquinas provides a major contemporary framework against which Scotus’s metaphysics is often compared.
Scholasticism: The medieval method of philosophical and theological inquiry using argument, distinction, and authoritative texts. Scotus’s work is a major example of scholastic reasoning at its most technically developed.
Formal distinction: A distinction between aspects of one thing that are real but not separable as independent entities. Scotus used it to distinguish attributes and formal aspects without multiplying things.
Divine simplicity: The doctrine that God has no parts and is not composed of distinct components. Scotus’s formal distinctions address how real divine attributes can differ without dividing God.

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