Introduction

Duns Scotus' philosophy has many ontological solutions which arise from theological dilemmas and the tension originates from the familiar modal limitations of conceptual structures at home in traditional thought. At the end of the thirteenth century, there is an innovative mixture of logica modernorum and theologia antiqua. John Duns' faith, the follower of the poverello from Italy, cannot be accounted for in terms of semantic, logical, and ontological presuppositions which are basic to any form of necessitarianism. When one sticks to such a type of logic, semantics, or ontology, the theory of divine properties and the doctrine of the incarnation become involved in glaring inconsistencies. The language games of Christian faith, philosophical theology, and church dogmatics are utterly incoherent if Aristotelian logics and ontologies were right. This is the general background of many philosophical digressions Scotus wove into his theological expositions. His theory of transcendent terms (transcendentia) is a major illustration.

Scotus' ontology, or metaphysics, is multifaceted. §7.2 discusses the subject matter of ontology. A host of themes are then reviewed separately: the main lines of his ontology of contingency (§7.3), the neutral proposition (§7.4), essence and existence (§7.5), real, rational, ideal and eternal relations (§7.6), universals (§7.7), conceptual univocity (§7.8), transcendent terms (§7.9), and, finally, the dilemma of rival interpretations of potentia (§7.10).

The subject matter of ontology

The motto of the Prologue in Duns' Quaestiones super libros Metaphysicae Aristotelis (Quaestiones Metaphysicae) is: All people desire knowledge by nature.