The will is the key component of Duns Scotus’s moral theory, both because Duns Scotus held (quite uncontroversially) that we are morally responsible only for our free choices and their outcomes and because (more controversially) he thought that most principles detailing what is morally good and what is morally bad depends on God’s free decisions. The key, then, question is how we know contingent practical principles. This essay offers an account of our knowledge of such principles that is (a) consistent with what Duns Scotus says about the relationship of the moral law to the divine will and to human nature, (b) consistent with what he says more generally about our knowledge of contingent truths, and (c) consistent with his actual argumentative practice in dealing with contingent practical principles. The examination of Duns Scotus’s argumentative practice uncovers a third, hitherto unnoticed, sense of ‘natural law’. This essay suggests that the core unifying sense of ‘natural law’ for Duns Scotus is precisely the epistemic status of the precepts of natural law as non-inferentially evident.

This essay considers Duns Scotus’s arguments against the so-called semantic analogy—the view according to which a term can signify two or more things according to relations of priority and posteriority. It argues that this view was commonly adopted in Paris but was rejected by a group of late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century English thinkers, which included Duns Scotus. Since supporters of semantic analogy held that ‘being’ was the foremost example of a term signifying according to priority and posteriority, the implications of this debate on metaphysics are profound. This essay's conclusion is that Duns Scotus’s rejection of semantic analogy should be considered as preliminary to his famous claim that being is a univocal concept.

This essay focuses on the notion of the created agents’ will not in relation to God’s causality but in order to refine our understanding of what Duns Scotus meant by ‘freedom’. Unlike most of his predecessors, Duns Scotus considered a “synchronic” power for opposites as fundamental to human free will and set out to give a detailed account of the metaphysical makeup of the power through which we possess free will. The author of this essay, however, argues that this cannot be the full story, because Duns Scotus also maintained that freedom is compatible with necessity. To get a clearer picture of Duns Scotus’s overall understanding of freedom, this essay begins by focusing on how Scotus engaged with Anselm of Canterbury’s definition of freedom. After addressing the exact nature of the power for opposites that Duns Scotus frequently associated with freedom, this essay turns to the “formal concept” (ratio formalis) of freedom and how it is common to God and creatures. The conclusion is that freedom is for Duns Scotus fundamentally a power for self-determination rather than a power for opposites.

Like any good Aristotelian, Duns Scotus held that human beings share this feature with a large section of the created world. This essay provides an in-depth presentation and assessment of some crucial aspects of Duns Scotus’s contribution to the later medieval debate on hyomorphism, including his views on the existence and nature of prime matter, the plurality of substantial forms in a material substance, and the nature of animate substances.

This essay focuses on a concept that plays a central role in Duns Scotus’s metaphysics—essential order. It starts by considering Duns Scotus’s presentation of essential order in the De primo principio, where essential order is said to obtain between two beings, x and y, where x is essentially prior to y and y is essentially posterior to x. But Duns Scotus makes use of essential order in several other contexts as well, including his hylomorphism, chemistry, action theory, metaethics, and even ecclesiology. In these other contexts, the notion of essential order is not clearly defined, and it is not always obvious how its deployment is supposed to map onto the canonical definition of essential order offered in the De primo principio. This essay takes a step toward this systematization by analyzing Duns Scotus’s use of essential orders outside of the De primo principio, letting the De primo principio discussion both inform and be informed by these other contexts.

This essay focuses on the way the first cause’s action relates to the action of created causes, with a particular focus on the action of created wills. Since medieval thinkers considered God an active causal source of all existents, they believed that God must in some way actively cause the actions of created causes, including the acts of the will. Duns Scotus’s thought on this matter is particularly interesting because, as is widely recognized, he was committed to a robust understanding of the created will’s freedom. This essay argues that Duns Scotus struggled to figure out how God could be involved in causing the operation of such a spontaneously and autonomously operating cause. He wrestled with two different theories, and ultimately could not make up his mind. This essay reconstructs Duns Scotus’s analysis of competing positions while tracking the developments in his thought.

Since their first formulation, many of John Duns Scotus’s views have attracted the attention of philosophers and theologians alike. Responses have ranged from admiration to opprobrium, including (perhaps most memorably) ridicule: in the sixteenth century, Duns Scotus gained the dubious distinction of entering the English language as a common noun—through the word ‘dunce’. In the relatively tolerant and sedate environment of contemporary academia, a mention of his name might still be met with a smirk, often on account of his alleged obscurity, or even provoke an occasional outburst of hostility, especially from those who are partial to interpreting the history of philosophy as a fight between abstractions (realism versus nominalism, voluntarism versus intellectualism, transcendence versus immanence, the Secular versus the Sacred, and so forth). For mysterious reasons—probably connected to the alleged opposition between two of those abstractions, Thomism and Scotism—it is not rare to see the name of Duns Scotus associated with some vague and ghastly philosophical catastrophe.1 It is high time for Duns Scotus to be considered sine ira et studio. It is also high time for his thought to be better known, and not just among the specialists of medieval philosophy.

This essay examines Duns Scotus’s celebrated modal argument for the existence of a first cause in the light of his most extensive discussion of modality: namely, the account of the senses of ‘potency’ in his questions on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, book IX, qq. 1–2. The author holds that it is possible to give two alternative reconstructions of Duns Scotus’s argument for the existence of a first cause depending on which of two alternative interpretations is given to the term ‘potency’. First, ‘potency’ can be taken as what is metaphysically possible. In this interpretation, the potential is co-extensive with ‘being’. Second, ‘potency’ can be taken to mean what is opposed to the actual. In this second interpretation, being in potency is a kind of non-being. The conclusion is that, contrary to what might first appear, it is the second interpretation of ‘potency’ that should be preferred if we want Duns Scotus’s argument for the existence of a first cause to work.

This essay shows that Duns Scotus firmly believed in the dignities (plural) of human nature—both the natural human dignity celebrated by Aristotle, who maintained that the material world was made for the sake of rational animals, and the supernatural dignities paid to humankind by God in the Incarnation and to particular human beings by predestining them to glory. When it comes to identifying more concretely the features in which such dignities consist, Duns Scotus’s metaphysical views—about essential powers and about what is essential to powers—combine with his theological conviction that, when it comes to patterns of Divine concurrence with or obstruction of natural powers, God has different policies for different states of human history—to complicate his method.

This essay focuses on the notion of “object of the intellect.” It argues that the distinction between “natural object of inclination” (obiectum naturale inclinabile) and “natural reachable object” (obiectum naturale attingibile) is at the basis of a fundamental reorientation in the doctrine of the first adequate object of the intellect in Duns Scotus’s later works. In the absence of any direct intellectual intuition of the soul and its potencies in this life, natural reason has no epistemic access to the first adequate object of the intellect except by way of abstraction of the per se objects it attains effectively. This insight induces Duns Scotus to revise his criticism of the position that he ascribes to Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, namely that the “quiddity of material things” is the first adequate object of the intellect. Although Duns Scotus claims consistently that this position cannot be maintained by a theologian, he comes to accept it in his later works as correctly expressing the philosopher’s view of the first adequate object of the intellect in this life.

This essay holds that there is room in Duns Scotus’s thought not only for things related to one another by a relation of dependence but also for analogous concepts, namely concepts that capture those real relations in the way they represent things in the world. Duns Scotus’s statements on the analogy of being, however, are fragmentary. They were reworked into a coherent theory by three Franciscans in Barcelona during the 1320s, namely, Aufredo Gonteri, Peter of Navarre, and Peter Thomae, who proposed three different ways to balance the analogy of being with the rival thesis of univocity and offered an early example of how Duns Scotus’s thought could be developed in different directions.

This essay reconsiders Duns Scotus's life in light of recent advancements in textual criticism and the considerable amount of information about the medieval educational system that has become available in the last couple of decades. As a result, it sheds new light on several aspects that had so far perplexed interpreters, including Duns Scotus’s possible stay in Cambridge, the way he commented on the Sentences in Oxford and Paris, and the precise dates of his Paris regency.