An English translation of John Duns Scotus's The Questions on Aristotle's "De Interpretatione" including an extensive commentary on some of Scotus's more difficult ideas.

Duns Scotus (c. 1265-1308) is one of a handful of figures in the history of philosophy whose significance is truly difficult to overestimate. Despite an academic career that lasted barely two decades, and numerous writings left in various states of incompletion at his death, his thought has been profoundly influential in the history of western philosophy. The Questions on Aristotle's 'De interpretatione' is an early work, probably written at Oxford in the closing decade of the thirteenth century. The questions, which have come down to us in two sets ('Opus I' and 'Opus II'), most likely originated from Scotus's classroom lectures on Aristotle's text, a work now known by its Latin name, De interpretatione. The De interpretatione (or Perihermenias in the original Greek) was understood in the medieval university as a work of dialectic or logic, although the text itself deals with subjects we would nowadays consider to belong to the intersection of metaphysics and the philosophy of language: the semantics of time, existence, modality, and quantification. At its heart is the important and still philosophically relevant question of how we can talk about things which no longer exist, or which do not yet exist. The topics covered include reference and signification; existence and essence; truth and its relation to things. What is the relationship between existence in reality and existence in the understanding? Does the meaning of a name depend on the existence of the objects falling under it? Is the present time all that exists? If a proposition about the future can be true now, what now makes it true? The English translation includes an extensive commentary explaining and elaborating on some of the more difficult ideas Scotus develops in the work, placing them in the context of the teaching of logic and metaphysics in late-thirteenth century Europe.

John Duns Scotus (d.1308), known as the ‘subtle doctor' among medieval schoolmen, produced a formidable philosophical theology using and adapting an Aristotelian metaphysical framework. Critical of Thomas Aquinas' grand Summas, Scotus died before producing a final synthesis of his own. Indeed, his work, left in disarray for centuries, has only recently become available in an edited format. Contemporary metaphysics, taking up the problem of universals, treads on ground already well-worked by Scotus. Duns Scotus and the Problem of Universals shows how Scotus' treatment of the problem of universals is both coherent and, even by contemporary standards, cogent. Todd Bates recovers and sets out Scotus' understanding of the structure of material substance, reconstructs Scotus' arguments for universals and haecceities, and shows how Scotus' theory applies to the metaphysics of the Incarnation. This book makes an important contribution to a neglected but crucial area of Scotus scholarship.

Table of contents

This text contains detailed discussion and analysis of Dun Scotus's accounts of the nature of matter and the structure of material substance. His views on these matters are sophisticated and highly original.

Provides a reliable point of entrance to the thought of Duns Scotus.

This second volume of the series Mariological Studies in Honor of Our Lady of Guadalupe treats the mystery of the Immaculate Conception, hidden in plain sight for nearly a thousand years prior to Bl. John Duns Scotus and his later influence at the Council of Florence. Until now, practically nothing was known of this history. Key to the present study is St. Gregory Nazianzen, whose Marian doctrine inspired Benedict XVI at a 2007 public audience: "Mary, who gave human nature to Christ, is true Mother of God and, in view of her highest mission, was 'prepurified,' as if a distant prelude of the Immaculate Conception." Fr. Kappes' groundbreaking thesis confirms Benedict's insight beyond anything previously imaginable. The person and mystery of Mary in Christ and the Church unfolds as indispensable for ecumenical theology. Greco-Latin agreement on the Immaculate Conception at Florence was itself a portent to subsequent harmony on other doctrinal questions, then, as now. As Pope Francis intensifies efforts to resolve differences between Orthodox and Catholics, Fr. Kappes' research clarifies Our Lady's central role in these efforts.

This volume was a cooperative effort of European, American and Canadian scholars which was published to commemorate the occasion of the seventh centennial of the bith of John Duns Scotus.

Richard Cross provides the first complete and detailed account of Duns Scotus's theory of cognition, tracing the processes involved in cognition from sensation, through intuition and abstraction, to conceptual thought. He provides an analysis of the ontological status of the various mental items (acts and dispositions) involved in cognition, and a new account of Scotus on nature of conceptual content. Cross goes on to offer a novel, reductionist, interpretation of Scotus's view of the ontological status of representational content, as well as new accounts of Scotus's opinions on intuitive cognition, intelligible species, and the varieties of consciousness. Scotus was a perceptive but highly critical reader of his intellectual forebears, and this volume places his thought clearly within the context of thirteenth-century reflections on cognitive psychology, influenced as they were by Aristotle, Augustine, and Avicenna. As far as possible, Duns Scotus's Theory of Cognition traces developments in Scotus's thought during the ten or so highly productive years that formed the bulk of his intellectual life.

Étienne Gilson's Jean Duns Scot: Introduction À Ses Positions Fondamentales is widely understood to be one of the most important works on John Duns Scotus' texts, famous for their complexity. James Colbert's translation is the first time that Gilson's work on Scotus has been put into English, with an introduction by Trent Pomplun and an afterword by John Millbank. Scotus contributed to the development of a metaphysical system that was compatible with Christian doctrine, an epistemology that altered the 13th century understanding of human knowledge, and a theology that stressed both divine and human will. Gilson, in turn, offers a thoroughly comprehensive introduction to the fundamental positions that Scotus stood for. Explaining Scotus's views on metaphysics, the existence of infinite being and divine nature, the matter of the physical spiritual and angelic, intellectual knowledge and will and Scotus' relationship with other scholars, Gilson and Colbert show how deeply Scotus left a mark on discussions of such disparate topics as the semantics of religious language, the problem of universals, divine illumination, and the nature of human freedom. This work has been translated from the original work in French Jean Duns Scot. Introduction à ses positions fondamentales (© 1952 by Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin).