Duns Scotus

Who Was Duns Scotus?

John Duns Scotus — known as the Subtle Doctor — was one of the most important philosopher-theologians of the medieval period and the founder of the Scotist school of thought that would significantly influence the development of Western philosophy and theology. Born around 1266 in Duns, Scotland (from which his name derives), he joined the Franciscan order and was educated at Oxford and Paris before teaching at both universities and at Cologne, where he died in 1308 at approximately forty-two years of age.

His major works — the Ordinatio (his Oxford lectures on the Sentences of Peter Lombard) and the Reportatio Parisiensis (his Paris lectures) — engage the full range of medieval philosophical and theological questions with a subtlety and a precision that earned him his epithet. His disagreements with Thomas Aquinas on the nature of being, the will, and the relationship between philosophy and theology generated a tradition of Scotist thought that runs through William of Ockham to Duns Scotus’s most famous literary admirer, Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Scotus is significant for TLA primarily through his doctrine of haecceitas — thisness — the claim that individual things have an irreducible particularity that makes them what they are rather than something else. This doctrine provided Hopkins with the philosophical framework for his concept of inscape and is the foundation of TLA’s conviction that the specific, the particular, and the individual are worthy of the full attention that literature gives them.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Ordinatio — c. 1300–1304 — Oxford lectures, unfinished
• Reportatio Parisiensis — c. 1302–1307 — Paris lectures
• Quaestiones Quodlibetales — c. 1306–1307
• De Primo Principio — c. 1305–1308 — on God as first principle