Tuesday, April 4, 2023

New Book: Cognitive Issues in the Long Scotist Tradition

 A book has appeared, edited by Heider and Andersen. Available here.

The blurb:

The late-scholastic school of Scotism (after John Duns Scotus, † 1308) left considerable room for disagreement. This volume innovatively demonstrates just how vividly Scotist philosophers and theologians discussed cognitive matters from the 14th until the 17th century. It further shows how the Scotist ideas were received in Protestant and Reformed milieus.

2 comments:

James A. Given said...

This comment relates marginally to your post. I have had a minor enlightenment reading te Velde's book "Participation and Substantiality in Thomas Aquinas p. 208ff. Te Velde tries very hard to persuade one that the binary coming to be of an entity is identical with its continuous and more-or-less complete "act of being". I will tentatively label these as 'subsistence' and 'existence.' The author reads Aquinas as offering a triadic ontology of essence, suppositum, and esse, with each one mediating the other two. I have long understood Duns Scotus to provide rather a fourfold ontology of substance, with the haecceity being included as fourth component. What fascinates me is that te Velde reads both Gilson and Fabro as favoring a fourfold Thomist ontology, with the (binary)'formal actuality' and (more-or-less) 'existential actuality' being distinct. I read this as these two scholars both tacitly recognizing a gross limitation in Aquinas ontology. My fantasy is to read this as an implicit recognition of the superiority of Duns Scotus' ontology over Aquinas' ontology. I would be grateful if you could tell me whether you think this is totally wrong-headed or potentially valuable for Thomist-Scotist synthesis. (Does anyone - besides me claim Duns Scotus has a fourfold ontology?)

James A. Given said...


Posting the Table of Contents for this book would be hugely helpful with a volume of this type.