Sunday, June 6, 2021

 Here is a recent post about Scotus, with many interesting reflections and reminiscences of the particular writers experiences in grad school.

He had some discussion of what he thought Scotus was trying to do that I think is not right, but worthy of consideration and reflection nevertheless.


The question I was trying to get to a little earlier was whether Duns Scotus was himself, ironically, rather less committed to the procedures of Scholastic philosophy than he seemed. By this I mean that there are at least two ways to do Scholastic philosophy though, I am sure, there are really many more than two ways. But we can establish at least these two possibilities. You do Scholastic philosophy in good faith, because you basically believe that it can deliver the goods, as it were, or you do it in bad faith, you do it in order to show what it can’t do. You run it into the ground. It’s possible that Duns Scotus was more or less of the latter sort. He was playing Scholastic philosophy against itself. To some degree. He was using the tools of Scholastic philosophy in order, in a sense, to break them, to destroy those tools. That’s probably too strong. But it was a tricky business, I think, what Scotus was up to.

Take the concept of haecceity, for instance, which must be one of the more unwieldy sort of words (how do you pronounce it?) in the history of philosophy and which is one of Scotus’ great gifts to us, though actually his students, the Dunses, came up with the word as their best shot at naming an idea that Scotus had elaborated in his philosophical treatises. Haecceity comes from the Latin word haec, which means ‘this’. So haecceity is best translated as ‘thisness’. Duns Scotus was trying to isolate the particular thisness that makes each thing a ‘this’ and therefore completely and totally unique. This is a rather perverse thing for a metaphysician to do. To focus on thisness is, in the mood of it, to turn philosophy on its head. It’s to say that the strange, unaccountable, irreducible quality of all things, that which makes each thing of creation just what it is, that this is the central and unsolvable mystery. The only way you are going to come into contact with thisness, and thus to know and to relate to anyone else, anything else, is to pay attention to that thing, that person, that object in its ineluctable, weird, unique specialness. That’s not really the sort of thing that a philosopher, especially a medieval Scholastic philosopher, is supposed to say. That’s the sort of thing a poet or a mystic says (Gerard Manley Hopkins, for instance, loved Scotus). But Scotus said it. He just said it with the words of Scholastic philosophy, so it sounds like a bit of philosophy when, in fact, it is a thought by which philosophy collapses in on itself. Or maybe truly becomes itself, finally. You could say that as well, maybe.

2 comments:

James A. Given said...


Thank you for discovering this writer for me. I must explore-
An award named for Andy Warhol ( a most confused Catholic) does not impress me; but why should one Zen Master not profit from another?

I think the writer's designated central point is at the very center of the Western philosophical tradition, as was Duns Scotus: WE DO LOSE. WE NEVER GET THERE. OUR STRIVING TO REALIZE COMPLETE BEING MUST ALWAYS FAIL; WE SET OUT IN FIERCE PRIDE; STRAINING FORWARD INTO THE FUTURE; STRIVING TO RE-MEMBER THE FUTURE; EKSTATIS OCCURS; AND THEN WE FIND OURSELVES ALREADY ALWAYS THERE IN THE PAST.
TRULY THE BASIC MOTION OF WESTERN PHILOSOPHY; ITS PRIMITIVE ACT; IS A TRACING OUT OF THE ARCHER'S MISSING OF THE MARK, OR HAMARTIA?

*I have been pondering this for decades. Isn't it written out somewhere by Aristotle; this "paradox of time"? Several good books on this, e.g. Pascal Massie, "Contingency Time and Possibility: An Essay on Aristotle and Duns Scotus."

A recurrent conclusion of mine in re Duns Scotus seems to me to be closely related: Aquinas writes metaphysics for the Afterlife. When we study metaphysics again, in Heaven, we will realize that Aquinas was exactly right. But Duns Scotus does Metaphysics for a Fallen Nature; for Those who Walk in Darkness-

Finally, the answer to the above Paradox of Time is artistic creation; because the artist reaches for the solidity of the Past; and finds their Creation approaching them from the Future. The Creation attains the Future, but the Artist must let it go-
I don't know if Aristotle tell us about this solution-

James A. Given said...



"Haecceity" is pronounced "high" + "kay" + "it" + "tee"

To believe as the author seems to that philosophy is about the largest categories and the most general concepts is to grasp half of the bequest of classical Greek philosophy. The tension between "the one and the many" is at least as old as Plato.
Theories of individuation do not contradict theories of general concepts any more than the essence contradicts the esse.

Put differently, medieval philosophy was not "contradictory"; rather, it formalized a pair of tensions within Being; tensions as old as Pythagoras, but framed very carefully by Aristotle. Tensions that yield the four elements; the four causes; the four humors.

The notion of philosophy as the search for the highest abstractions seems to be an essential fruit of modernist philosophical Idealism. (BTW, Duns Scotus had a lot to say about the Transcendental, too.)

Western philosophy, like Western science, is singular and startling in the sheer scope of its vision.