Introduction

The originality of medieval philosophy and the creativity of its logic and theory of knowledge speak very much in its favor. Medieval philosophy may have been considered uninteresting because of its alleged lack of originality. However, its contributions are actually of tremendous cultural importance and they are theoretically interesting for modern philosophy and systematic theology. The reason is that many of its innovations do not have parallel theories in ancient philosophy. Medieval thought yields plenty of evidence refuting the popular view that systematic thought during these dark centuries was unilluminating, but the legacy of medieval theories is fresh and particularly conspicuous in logic and semantics, theology and philosophy. L. M. de Rijk brilliantly pointed out how creative medieval thought has been. In his important introduction to medieval philosophy, De Rijk lists four examples of original contributions that excel the inventions of ancient Greek, Hellenistic and Latin philosophy: terminist logic, which is in fact a part of the much wider phenomenon of the logica modernorum, the metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas, the critical theory of knowledge of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and a way of thought which differs markedly from necessitarian Greek philosophy. Duns Scotus' contributions to a critical theory of knowledge are the main theme of this chapter.

The union of existential and intellectual forces in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries created many theoretical innovations. Revelation influenced philosophy in terms of a specific theological model of thought.