I have read Ockham, Bradwardine, and other of the schoolmen, together with the learned
Duns Scotus and the book of the holy Aquinas."
The ever-widening gap between Trump's self-presentation and reality has returned my attention to one of the best-known contributions the late Trappist monk Thomas Merton made to Catholic spirituality in the 20th century, namely, the distinction between what he called the "true self" and the "false self." Drawing on the insights of his intellectual predecessors, such as the medieval Franciscan theologian Blessed John
Duns Scotus and the great 19th-century Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, Merton held that each of us has a true identity--who we are in the most foundational sense--and that true identity is intrinsic, inalienable, unique and unrepeatable.
We cannot cling solely to the Bonaventurian origin of Franciscan thought, even though the "Seraphic Doctor" (Bonaventure) gives birth to or will found both the "Subtle Doctor" (
Duns Scotus) and the "Venerable Doctor" (William of Ockham) in their respective origins.
John
Duns Scotus (1266-1308), a Franciscan theologian from Oxford University, explained that the formula of the Scholastics is potuit, decuit, ergo fecit (Latin for 'He could do it, it was fitting that He do it, therefore, He did it) solved the controversy.
Having recently set out his formal account of natural kinds in Natural Kinds and Genesis: The Classification of Material Entities, Umphrey here turns to the history of the tradition instituted by Aristotle and adhered to by such luminaries as Avicenna, Maimonides, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, and
Duns Scotus. He covers the origin of the idea of natural kinds, eidos and genesis: Plato and Aristotle, the Word of God, lex and motus: Galilean science and after Descartes, and Darwin.
That critics have tended to offer such readings stems in part from their treating Hopkins's poems as they do his journals, in which he does indeed labor to describe the inscapes of (usually natural) things, and in part from a misreading of Hopkins's relation to
Duns Scotus, the thirteenth-century Franciscan whose theology he cherished.
Cloth, $65.00--In On Being and Cognition: Ordinatio 1.3, John van den Bercken offers the English-speaking world the first complete translation of book 1, distinction 3 of John
Duns Scotus's redacted and expanded edition of his Oxford lectures on the Sentences of Peter Lombard.
Slain The killing of the Comyn John
Duns Scotus (c.
Early scholars had fixated on the place of
Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, with their doctrines of voluntarism and radicalized nominalism (in the latter's case), as the roots of subjective theories of rights.