The fate of an oeuvre

The legacy of Duns Scotus' works is a complicated affair due to a number of different causes. His life was short. He studied and taught in all the theological faculties the universities of the thirteenth century possessed. He spent the last year of his life in the important academic center that Cologne had already become. The extraordinary brevity of his life is combined with a unique range of work. The specific nature of university education in these times, the stature of the University of Paris, the policy of the Franciscan Order and the academic legislation of the University of Paris transformed Duns Scotus' life. Unexpected events in his life led to the unique fact that he even acted as sententiarius in all the theological faculties he studied at. The period of Duns Scotus' theological productivity and his baccalaureate years (1297–1306) almost coincided. He died suddenly at Cologne, forty-two years of age. The world of the Franciscans was desolate. The early death of brother John in 1308 was felt in the whole of academic Europe. One of the brightest stars of the thought of mankind had gone dim.

The death of Duns Scotus was the end of an improbable individual history of thinking. His personal fate was an institutional disaster. The individual thinker John Duns managed to absorb the whole of the philosophia christiana and systematic theology but managed also to reconstruct it from a new semantic, logical and ontological perspective.