Norris Clarke on Univocity

 W. Norris Clarke was a Jesuit philosopher who taught at Fordam, dying in 2008. His books are still used as textbooks, so I thought it useful to comment on his characterization of Scotistic univocity. The following text is from his book The One and the Many, p. 45. For some discussion of Clarke's views, see this.

The Analogy of Being vs. the Univocity of Being. Some metaphysicians in St. Thomas’s own time, e.g., Duns Scotus (d. 1308), and William of Ockham (d. 1347), with their followers to this day, defended the univocity of the concept of being against Thomas. Both were leaders in the strong development of logic at the end of the Middle Ages (anticipating many of the developments of modern symbolic logic), and logicians tend to be uncomfortable with flexible ideas, “systematically vague concepts” like the Thomistic analogy of proper proportionality, especially as applied to being in God and creatures. And since their metaphysics were “essentialist,” i.e., focussed on being as essence (not including the act of existence as part of its content), it was hard for them to see how the concept of being could be applied to different essences without breaking up into several distinct concepts ceasing to have the same meaning at all, hence useless as a valid term in any syllogism or other logical argument, where all the terms must remain strictly fixed in the same meaning. Therefore, to retain any unity at all, being always had to be a univocal concept, even applied to God and creatures with their immense diversity as finite and infinite. But they had to pay a heavy price for this apparent logical clarity: they had to make the concept of being so extremely abstract as to empty it of practically all content and make it merely an empty linguistic marker standing for both God and creatures but, as Ockham explicitly admitted, expressing nothing common at all between God and creatures! The result was to render God considerably more remote and inaccessible to human reason than St. Thomas’s God, with important repercussions for the philosophy, theology, and finally spirituality of the late Middle Ages.

Comments:

1.The first thing to note here is that Clarke reads Scotus and Ockham (though he does not distinguish between them) though the lens of Thomism, specifically the real distinction of essence and existence. Hence the label "essentialist", inherited from Gilson. The claim here is that Scotus and Ockham ignore existence and are talking about being as a purely non-existential essence. Wolter, way back in his transcendentals book, commented on this claim of Gilson to the effect that it was an ingenious account of what Scotus would have said if he were a Thomist. But of course, Scotus is not a Thomist. Scotus denies the real distinction of essence and existence.

2. Clarke does grasp that part of the concern of univocity is to have valid syllogisms. He, Clarke, seems to think that being does not have a distinct concept, however, given that he thinks Scotus was also motivated by discomfort with vague ideas. This is a matter of debate among Thomists themselves, historically and today. Some agree with Scotus that there is a distinct concept of being that includes nothing else, some, like Clarke, think you can't separate the concept of being from the concept of God or of something in the categories. One then has to "stretch" created being to get a notion of the divine. Scotus, as we know, did think being had a distinct concept. 

3. The heavy price of univocity. Here I think Clarke's explanation goes awry. He claims that Scotus and Ockham make the concept of being abstract and empty, just a linguistic marker, but also that it stands for God and creatures. Of course, the concept of being, as such, does not stand for God and creatures. As it is included in the concept of God and the concept of a creature it is univocal, but of itself the concept of being is neither the concept of God nor the concept of a creature.  Clarke does not give a reference to the remark of Ockham's that he claims is explicit, to wit, that there is nothing common to God and creatures. This seems to clinch matters for Clarke, we arrive at basically a contradiction, being is univocal, but there is nothing common (which equals univocal, anyway). This appears to be a garbled awareness on the part of Clarke to the problem of the reality of the concept of being. This is the problem that the concept of being, qua abstract and univocal, signifies no corresponding reality outside the mind. This runs against the common notion from the Aristotelian commentary tradition that concepts map directly onto things. Normally, Scotus would agree; but to get to concepts of the transcendentals, you have to abstract from the concept you have derived from the actually existing thing. That abstraction does not correspond to the reality outside the soul. And note, this is a different sense of the word 'abstraction' than you get in Aquinas or even when you are talking about the three acts of the Aristotelian intellect. There is abstraction from the phantasm, that gets you the concept of a nature, say catness. To get being, you abstract from this nature, present in the intellect as an intelligible species, by stripping off the modes of finitude and so on. So in the end, considering God and creatures as they exist outside the soul, there is nothing in common. But one can abstract from the concept of a creature to the concept of being, which can also be applied to God.

4.  The alleged result is to make God more remote and unknowable. But since we have now seen that Scotus does not hold that the concept of being is both pure and contains the concept of God and creatures, the result doesn't follow either. Scotus himself, interestingly, defends the univocity of being not in metaphysics, but in the context of describing the natural knowledge of God. Not only being is univocal, but all the transcendentals, general divine attributes, are as well. So a lot more is known, both by an intellect trying to have a general cognition of the divine nature, as well as scientifically by means of forming valid demonstrations. Indeed, it has always seemed to me that Scotus is the affirmative theologian par excellence, who ought rather than Aquinas to be paired with Dante. But that can wait for another day.

5. Repurcussions. The alleged effect of rendering God more remote has repurcussions many later areas of life. The usual Thomist claim from the 20th century, disagreement with our man leads to societal decay. I've always been rather struck that the ones who trumpet this the loudest, the RO crowd, are by practice theologians who supposedly believe in sin, or at least weakness of will. sin seems to me to be a far better explanation than that of univocity for the apparently inevitable march from Scotus to whatever modern thing you don't like. If I were to have lived during the reformation period and watched christians killing each other over the proper definition of the eucharist I would probably try to set up a non christian secular state of skepticism as well. To be fair to Clarke, this is not the focus of the discussion, just a throwaway line at the end.

The Realm of Shadows

I have been working through Hegel's science of logic of late, and in the process I came across a nice enigmatic quote I thought I would share.

"The system of logic is the realm of shadows, the world of simple essentilialities, freed of all sensuous concretion. To study this science, to dwell and to labor in this realm of shadows, is the absolute culture and discipline of consciousness. Its task is one which is remote from the intuititions and the goals of the senses, remote from feelings and from the world of merely fancied representation."

Scotus Quodlibet Translation

For a limited time, Allan Wolter's translation is available for free from Project Muse!

What is reality?

Here are some remarks by Peter Thomae on the notion of reality. one should keep these definitions in mind when reading Scotist thought.

Petrus Thomae, Quaestiones de modis distinctionum q. 2 a. 1 (ed. forthcoming ca. 2030)

De tertio, scilicet quid sit realitas, dico duo:

Primum est quod realitas non dicit proprie rem, sed aliquid aliud ad rem pertinens. Hoc patet ex modo significandi, nam ab hoc quod ‘res’ derivatur ‘reale’, unde illud dicitur ‘reale’ quod est ad rem pertinens; sed ab hoc quod dicitur ‘reale’ derivatur ‘realitas’; realitas ergo proprie non dicit rem sed aliquid ad rem pertinens.

Secundum est descriptio quam pono de realitate, quae talis est: illud voco ‘realitatem’ quod est aliquid positivum in re ex natura rei, non contentum in alio | ut in pure passivo vel activo praecise vel sicut in superiori inferius sed actualiter et formaliter inexistens, ita quod ultimate abstractum nullum illorum a quo formaliter distinguitur includit impossibile est in actuali existentia ab illis separari per aliquam potentiam.

Translation:

Concerning the third [section], namely, 'what is reality', I say two things"

First is that 'reality' does not mean properly 'thing', but something other pertaining to a thing. This is clear from the mode of understanding, for from this that 'real' is derived from 'thing', it is said that 'real' is that is pertaining ot a thing; but from 'real' is derived 'reality'; therefore, reality properly does not mean thing but something pertaining to a thing.

Second is the description which I posit of reality, which is thus: I call that [a] 'reality' which is something positive in a thing from the nature of a thing, not contained in anthoer as in the purely passive or purely active or as an inferior in a superior, but formally and actually existing-in, so that when it is ultimately abstracted it includes none of those from which it is formally distinguished [and] it is possible that it can be spearated from them in actual existence by some power.

Hmmm. well, it is based on two manuscripts. Good manuscripts, sure, but maybe something is missing. Commentary to come.

A Hegel-Scotus Connection?

Alas, bad scholarship has much in common, no matter the topic.

From an Essay by Walter Kaufmann:

One of the few things on which the analysts, pragmatists, and existentialists agree with the dialectical theologians is that Hegel is to be repudiated: their attitude toward Kant, Aristotle, Plato, and the other great philosophers is not at all unanimous even within each movement; but opposition to Hegel is part of the platform of all four, and of the Marxists, too. Oddly, the man whom all these movements take to be so crucially important is but little known to most of their adherents; very few indeed have read as many as two of the four books that Hegel published.

Hegel is known largely through secondary sources and a few incriminating slogans and generalizations. The resulting myth, however, lacked a comprehensive, documented statement till Karl Popper found a place for it in his widely discussed book, The Open Society and Its Enemies. After it had gone through three impressions in England, a revised one-volume edition was brought out in the United States in 1950, five years after its original appearance.

[...]

Furthermore, Popper has relied largely on Scribner’s Hegel Selections, a little anthology for students that contains not a single complete work. Like Gilson in The Unity of Philosophical Experience (p. 246), Popper takes over such a gross mistranslation as “the State is the march of God through the world,” although the original says merely that it is the way of God with the world that there should be the State, and even this sentence is lacking in the text published by Hegel and comes from one of the editor’s additions to the posthumous edition of The Philosophy of Right — and the editor admitted in his Preface that, though these additions were based on lecture notes, “the choice of words” was sometimes his rather than Hegel’s.

[...]

No conception is bandied about more unscrupulously in the history of ideas than “Influence.” Popper’s notion of it is so utterly unscientific that one should never guess that he has done important work on logic and on scientific method. At best, it is reducible to post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Thus he speaks of “the Hegelian Bergson” (p. 256 and n. 66) and assumes, without giving any evidence whatever, that Bergson, Smuts, Alexander, and Whitehead were all interested in Hegel, simply because they were “evolutionists” (p. 225 and n. 6).

Festum Scoti

Happy feast everyone! I am too busy to post anything, but feel free to post celebratory comments in the combox!

A Text on Scotus on Essence and Existence

While transcribing some stuff out of the Additiones secundi libri (compiled by William of Alnwick from the Oxford and Paris lectures of Scotus), I came across the following comment about the relation of essence and existence, a doctrine of paramount iportance in Thomism, but less so in Scotism.

Additiones II d. 16 q. 1: "esse est actus intrinsecus essentiae idem sibi realiter non ab ea progrediens"

"'to be' is an act intrinsic to essence, really the same as it, not coming forth from it"

Aufredo Gonteri, the Book of the Beadle and the Formal Distinction

I had meant to post this ages ago. Aufredo Gonteri, a Scotist who knew Scotus personally (he is on the Adhesion list of 1303), attests to a debate over the formal distinction at Paris in the 1320's. First I list the literature below, then the quote. Apparently, the result of the debate was that all the masters of Paris declared that the Scotist formal distinction is fully catholic and sound. This was written in the "book of the beadle". A beadle was an office pertaining to management in the university, apparently they also kept records of official decisions as well. Anyway, the quote is below, the debate was with a Dominican who claimed the formal distinction was heretical (time travelling Garrigou-Lagrange perhaps). All knowledge of this debate has perished, save for Gonteri's reference, nor does the book of the beadle survive either.

Note that Gonteri's discussion of the univocity of being was recently published in Mediaeval Studies.



William Duba, Russell Friedman, Chris Schabel, “Henry of Harclay and Aufredo Gonteri Brito,” in Mediaeval Commentaries on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, vol. 2, ed. P.W. Rosemann, Brill 2010, pp. 263-368, at 291.


Doucet, “Der unbekannte Skotist des Vaticanus Lat. 1113, Fr. Anfredus Gonteri OFM (1325),” Franziskanische Studien 25 (1938), 201-40, at 206

Aufredo Gonteri Sent. I d. 34 q. 3. “But on account of a controversy of Master Benedict of the Preachers, this truth was determined for me in Paris by all the masters regent and non-regent in the theological faculty, and it was promulgated publicly by the beadle and recorded in the common book of the masters, although the aforesaid Master publicly dogmatized otherwise in the schools that this determined truth is heretical. All the aforesaid masters determined that the contrary is true, Catholic, and sound.”

Hall on Scotus

Alexander Hall has an entry in the internet encyclopedia of philosophy on Scotus' on natural knowledge of God. A good intro  to the topic by a specialist currently working in the field. It had escaped my notice before, so  I call your attention to it now. Here it is.

Scotist analogy

A new essay on the Scotist analogy of being (analogia entis) has appeared. Here is the abstract.

It is widely believed today that John Duns Scotus’s doctrine of the univocity of being ushered in various deleterious philosophical and theological consequences that resulted in the negative features of modernity. Included in this common opinion, but not examined, is the belief that by affirming univocity Scotus thereby also denied the analogy of being (analogia entis). The present essay challenges this belief by recovering Scotus’s true position on analogy, namely that it obtains in the order of the real, and that complex concepts of creatures are analogically related to complex concepts of God. Scotus’s doctrine is then compared to the later Scotist tradition. The common opinion of the Scotist school from the fourteenth century onward followed Scotus’s position on analogy and considerably expanded upon his scattered remarks.

Divine Simplicity again

There is currently an ongoing internet debate over divine simplicity, between the Thomist Feser and the analytic philosopher Mullins. The latest entry is here.  An indefatigable maker of memes on Facebook sent me a meme about this debate that I paste below. I won't comment directly on the debate, the Scotist position is well known, even if not normally brought up in these debates. Given the nature of this particular debate, even Aquinas' own solution of the rationes is also not at play.

As everyone knows, I did my dissertation on the divine attributes. The medieval debate went through a logical development.
1. Aquinas, adapting Bonaventure, argued that divine attributes all had distinct definitions (rationes) but these rationes were all in the human mind, or at least their distinction. They weren't false, because God verifies them all from afar. God is just undifferentiated perfection, no distinct attributes.
2. someone pointed out that this means that God has no knowledge of his own attributes.
3. all the early Thomists then argued, 'aha, no, see, God knows the contents of the human mind, and thus he has knowledge of divine attributes ex consequenti'.
4. Henry came along, and said that this was all bunk, that the divine intellect and divine will, which are distinct, each generate their own attributes. all attributes are reducible to either intellect or will, that produces them in the divine essence.
5. Scotus comes along and says Henry is bunk, all attributes are already there, formally distinct before even the divine intellect thinks about them.
6. Ockham: the word 'attribute' is causing all this problem, lets get rid of it. 

And that is about it.

here's the meme. It is not really right, since Mullins is denying divine simplicity full stop, and Scotists do defend it with the formal distinction and instants of nature. So they cannot really sit back and watch Feser go it alone. But this time we will. For Scotus' theory of formal distinction, see here. 

Mayronis was the first Scotist to come into direct conflict with Thomism, in a series of debates at the university of Paris in the 1320's. The debate was over the formal distinction and instants of nature.

Scotus makes the following comment in Lectura I d. 8 p. 1 q. 4 (ed. Vat. XVII p. 48) about the various debates over the distinction of reason "...dicunt aliqui concordando in conclusione principali, sed discordant in modo ponendi, in quo se impugnant; et eorum impugnatio est pax nostra." Basically, they agree that divine attributes are distinct only by the intellect, but disagree how it comes about. 

Mayronis also talks about the peace, but his peace is between the schola minorum and the thomists; he has some interesting rhetoric about the thomist pierre roger disturbing the peace of the schools, and he reformulates it a few times. Anyway, on this see the "Disputatio" volume, just about the only text of Mayronis that has been critically edited.

Update: Feser adds to the debate with an entry on Scotus, here. His point is that divine simplicity has been interpreted in different ways, that attacking Aquinas, even if the attack succeeded, does not suffice for defeating divine simplicity. My co-blogger clashed with Feser on the formal distinction around the time Feser's book on Scholastic Metaphysics was published. In the post linked above he is fairly general about it. I would probably only quibble by saying that the formal distinction, in keeping with the Parisian account, is a diminished real distinction, not a midway distinction between real and rational distinctions. But given the internal Scotist debate over such matters, I don't fault Feser for this. Blander, in his dissertation, attacked the connection between separability and the real distinction, which Feser holds, but this is quite recent research, even for Scotists (see the link to his paper in the combox). I am sympathetic to this, though I wonder how separability fits in, since the separability criterion shows up in the Quodlibet, perhaps Scotus' final work (assuming the final work was not the Quaestio de formalitatibus). 

One could also point out, regarding Feser's post, that the Scotist position on univocity and analogy is that they are compatible in the same concept. This has ever been the opinion of the Scotist school, with the sole exceptions of Mayronis and Bonetus. I have a piece appearing eventually on this topic. But Feser can't be expected to know this, since even Scotus-scholars have forgotten it. The modern study of Scotus, rightly focused on his manuscripts and actual doctrines he held, has unfortunately neglected the study of the ancient school. Thus certain things that should not have been forgotten, were lost.

Anyway, the debate continues.

Eric Perl on Neoplatonism

Eric Perl is a prominent neoplatonist author. He has some Plotinus translations with commentary out there that look interesting. But he doesn't like Scotus.  I give some quotes below that might be of interest to or foster discussion by our readers.


Quote 1:
From Thinking Being: Introduction to Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition, p. 6:

In this perspective, we must concur with those who hold that the principal break in the continuity of western philosophy comes not between ancient and medieval, nor between pagan and Christian, nor even in early modernity with figures such as Galileo and Descartes, but rather between the Platonic and Aristotelian tradition up to and including Aquinas, on the one hand, and the modes of thought represented by Duns Scotus and William of Ockham on the other. It is here, not in the sixteenth or seventeenth but in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, that modernity in a philosophical rather than a merely chronological sense truly begins. With Scotistic univocity, the first principle becomes a being, subject to a conceptual grasp and included within the whole of reality as a member of it, as is not the case for the One of Plotinus or the God of Aquinas. Between Scotus' God who is an infinite being (ens infinitum) and Aquinas' God who is infinite existence (esse infinitum), the difference is of world-shattering proportions. it is precisely here that 'metaphysics' in the pejorative, postmodern sense begins, with the reduction of the first principle to a conceptually representabile being and the fading from view of the very question 'Why are there beings, rather than nothing?' And the Ockhamist denial that things really have 'whatnesses' in virtue of which they are what they are, a repudiation of the very foundation of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy, already carries with it the divorce of thought from being, the loss of intelligibility, the move toward consciousness as 'subject' and being as 'object' and the failing of the vision of all things as the presence and manifestation of the divine.

He gives a single reference to Scotus, shockingly a quote, though he doesn't cite an edition or translator:

Duns Scotus, Opus oxoniense, I, 3, 1: "I say, then, first, that not only can a concept naturally be had in which God is conceived as it were accidentally, for instance, with regard to some attribute, but also a certain concept in which God is conceived by himself and quidditatively".

Comment: as is usual with modern philosophers who are non specialists, it is univocity that ruined good traditional philosophy. For these people, it is more important that philosophy be a tradition than that it be an activity in any way related to arguments. Scotus' arguments are not quoted nor shown to be false, it is just taken to be obvious since the author disagrees with the conclusions of Scotus' arguments. The quote also has some ambiguities. "reality" is not defined. If by "reality" you mean creation, then Scotus would deny that God is part of reality or within the horizon of reality if you prefer to talk in that fashion. But if by "reality" you mean the totality of existing things, then Scotus would agree, even if he would qualify it and say that God and creatures agree in no reality. 

Perl does not provide exegesis of the quote. It is clear that he interprets it as implying that since we can grasp God by a concept that we totally and completely grasp God in a concept, and that there can thus be no divine transcendence. But Scotus would deny this as well, saying instead that even if we grasp God quidditatively we do not have full comprehension of the divine essence, which, since it is infinite, always exceeds our finite minds. Also, the concept that we form of God, infinite being, only imperfectly represents the divine reality, since 'infinite being' is a complex concept and God is simple. This too does not warrant a mention.

Perl's central thesis is that thought and being are parallel, and Scotus, or at least Ockham are a threat to this. Univocity might seem a threat to this, since, in Richard Cross' words, the concept of being is a "vicious abstraction", ie. it does not correspond to any extra mental reality. But the concept of being is the result of an operation (abstraction) performed on the complex concept of a creature, which itself is based on an extramental thing. So Scotus also believes in the parallel of thought and being, but this doesn't mean that we can't perform mental operations the products of which might not themselves be directly parallel. At least, perl would need another argument to show this. Maybe he has one and I will find it as I read his book. We will see.

I am always somewhat bemused by the intense hatred of Scotus by modern neoplatonists, especially in theology. naturally, it is univocity they focus on, which is opposed to the de facto hero of theology, Thomas aquinas. But for centuries Scotus has himself been seen as part of the neoplatonist movement, given the extreme platonism of his doctrine of the Ideas. Renaissance platonists, such as Ficino, numbered him among their own school. But all such niceties have been forgotten these days.

Here's a quote from a different book that caught my eye, and though it is implicitly directed against Scotus, it seems to implicitly embrace univocity of being.

Quote 2 (copied from the David Bentley Hart discussion group on Facebook)

The disjunctive presupposition that 𝘦𝘪𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 God chooses between possible alternatives 𝘰𝘳 he is necessitated to create situates God within a total framework of possibilities, as though the logical conditions of possibility and impossibility were prior to and more universal than God, conditions to which even he is subject. This presupposition envisions God either as confronted with a multiplicity of logical possibilities among which he can choose, or as subject to a logical law such that there is only one possibility open to him.

This is precisely the "ontic" conception of God that Plotinus, and Dionysius, are concerned to avoid by declaring him, "beyond being." God is not a being, subject, as are all beings, to the conditions of logical possibility such as the principle of non-contradiction. This is not to say that God can violate that principle; on the contrary, it would be more accurate to say that for the Neoplatonists, God or the One 𝘪𝘴 the principle of non-contradiction. For what is that principle but the very condition of intelligibility and therefore of being?

"To be is to be intelligible" means that to be is to conform to the laws of thought, which necessarily apprehends its object as determined by certain attributes and (therefore) as excluding the contradictory ones. The unity, the identity, and therefore the being of any thing consists in its uniformity to this law. That law, therefore, is an expression of God as the unity, the identity, the being of beings.

God is not a being, contained within a framework of possibilities determined by an abstract logic independent of himself. Rather, he is that framework within which all beings are contained, and hence he cannot be considered 𝘦𝘪𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 as a being who chooses among a multiplicity of logical possibilities, 𝘰𝘳 as a being confined by principles more universal than himself to a single possibility.

—Eric D. Perl, 𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘺: 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘕𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘵𝘰𝘯𝘪𝘤 𝘗𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘰𝘴𝘰𝘱𝘩𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘋𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘺𝘴𝘪𝘶𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘈𝘳𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘢𝘨𝘪𝘵𝘦, Ch. 3, "Goodness, Beauty, and Love"

On this quote, see the various posts from the past few months (Foxal, Mayronis, Petrus Thomae) on the principle of non-contradiction. To make God the principle itself, or make it somehow apply to God, is to concede the field to univocity. The reason is that the PNC is the first complex principle; it can be broken down into the first incomplex principle, the notion of being. To posit the PNC as applying to God and creatures is to posit being as common to God and creatures. Unless you want to destroy the PNC by making it apply in a different,unknowable way in God, it must be univocal.

Hoenen on Scotism

From an interesting essay by Hoenen on characteristics of Scotism. in the book John Duns Scotus: Renewal of Philosophy... p. 198:

Scotism claims a special place among medieval schools of philosophy, in that it was not a school in the normal sense of the word. Thomism, for example, originated from the desire to strengthen the coherence of the Dominican order, while Albertism in its later develoment was able to establish itself by virtue of its connection to education at the so-called bursae. Scotism, by contrast, emerged and established itself more or less spontaneously, having its origins in the efforts of individuals rather than in the promptings of ecclesiastical or educational institutions.  

John Foxal on the First Complex Principle

In light of this previous post on the univocity of the principle of non-contradiction, here are some remarks on the same topic from John Foxal, the fifteenth-century English Scotus who spent his career in Italy teaching at Rome and Bologna. Foxal was also part of the circle of Bessarion and became bishop of Armagh but died before taking up his see.

A possibly necessary piece of background terminology: Scotists typically refer to the principle of non contradiction as the first complex principle. The principle of non contradiction contains being as its subject, and so being is called the first incomplex principle.

The following text is from a commentary Foxal wrote at Bologna on the first question of Scotus' Ordinatio, dated to 1465.

"Contra: certum est” etc. pro hoc argumento nota quod prima quaestio prologi Conflatus Francisci de Maronis maxime valet ad confutandum hanc opinionem Henrici, quia in illa multipliciter probatur et demonstratur primum principium tenere in theologia, et ita bene formari in Deo sicut in creaturis et ita applicari ad spiritualia et insensibilia sicut ad corporalia et sensibilia vel materialia. Non adduco autem aliqua de quaestione illa, quia ubique habetur et eandem viam tenet Scotus hic, arguendo contra Henricum. Etiam pro hoc est Aristoteles in pluribus locis qui vult primum principium ita bene applicari ad conclusiones non sensibiles sicut sensibiles, nam in libris Metaphysicae agit principaliter de substantiis non sensibilbus, ut patet in pluribus locis et maxime in 2. xi. et 12, et in 4 libro agit per totum de primo principio complexo ubi ponit illas proprietates qua ponit Franciscus ubi supra in principio quaestionis. Et utique mirum esset quod in illis praedictis libris dixisset tot et tanta de primo principio complexo si voluisset quod illud excludetur a rebus insensibilibus et separatis a materia de quibus agit ibi, et principalius de ipsis tractat librosque Metaphysicae omnes propter illas principaliter ordinavit.

Et ad litteram Doctoris revertendo et probando antecedens ipsius patet quod ita bene potest sciri ab intellectu nostro quod impossibile est quod unus angelus simul sit et non sit, vel descendendo ad specialiores terminos quod idem angelus sit materialis et non materialis aut sensibilis et non sensibilis, sicut quod idem lapis simul sit et non sit, aut simul sit durus et non durus, et sic de aliis, et ita bene poterit primum principium applicari ad insensibilia sicut ad sensibilia, ergo vana est responsio illa.

Translation:

"Contra: it is certain" [this is a lemma from Scotus' Ord.] for this argument note that the first question of the prologue of the Conflatus of Francis of Meyronnes is maximally valid for refuting this opinion of Henry, because in that it is proved in many ways and demonstrated that the first principle holds in theology, and so also it can be formed in God just as in creatures and so applied to spiritual and insensible just as to corporeal and sensible or material [matters]. I do not adduce anything from that question [of Francis], because it is found everywhere and Scotus holds the same way here, arguing against Henry. Also for this is Aristotle in many places, who intended that the first principle be applied to substances and non sensibiles just as to sensibiles, for in the books of the Metaphysics he treats principally of substances and non sensibles, as is clear in many places, most of all in [books] II, XI, and XII, and in the fourth book he treats throughout about the first complex principle where he posits those properties which Francis posits above in the beginning of the question [i.e. Conflatus prol. q. 1]. And indeed it would be marvellous that in those aforesaid books he would have said to much about the first complex principle if he had intened that that be excluded from insensible things and separated from matter about which he treats there, and principally about them he treated and ordered the books of the Metaphysics principally on account of them.

And returning to the letter of the Doctor and proving his antecedent, it is clear that well indeed it can be known by our intellect that it is impossible that one angle at once is and is not, or by descending to more special terms that the same angel is material and not material or sensible and non sensible, just as the same stone at once is and is not, or at once is rough and not rough, and thus for others, and so can the first principle be applied to insensibles just as to sensibles, therefore that response [of Henry's] is vain.

Introduction to Scotus

Here is a handy introduction to Scotus for the philosophical layperson. Written by Jack Allen.

Here are his thoughts on why Scotus is not read much today.

Given all these major doctrines, one might wonder why Scotus doesn’t get much air time these days. To my mind there are three reasons. Firstly, since the Enlightenment, Medieval philosophy has been seen as backward, superstitious, or just a bit weird. This attitude is encapsulated by David Hume’s famous Enlightenment claim that “If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion” (An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1748). Scholasticism, then, has been given a fairly hard time, often by influential philosophers who have not engaged with it in any deep manner.

Secondly, there is St Thomas Aquinas. Since Pope Leo XIII wrote Aeterni Patris in 1879, great philosophical importance has been given to Aquinas in Catholic and Anglo-Catholic thinking. The 1917 Code of Canon Law claimed that Aquinas’ methods should be used in teaching philosophy and theology. The popularity of Aquinas (which is certainly not entirely unjustified), combined with the negative view of Scotus put about by the Radical Orthodoxy movement, has led to a marginalisation of Scotus’ work.

Thirdly, Scotus’ writings are famous for being difficult to read. It is easy to disparage Scotus for the same reason it is easy to disparage any postmodernist: their writing is dense and subtle, and it can be difficult to see what they are saying, if anything. And not only is Scotus’ Latin tight and elliptical – earning him the title of ‘the Subtle Doctor’ – but little of his work is available in English, although more is becoming available year on year.