Portal:Scotland/Selected article/Week 29, 2012



John (Johannes, Ioannes) Duns Scotus, O.F.M. (c. 1256 – November 18, 1308) was one of the more important theologians and philosophers of the High Middle Ages. He was given the medieval accolade Doctor Subtilis (Subtle Doctor) for his penetrating and subtle manner of thought. Scotus has had considerable influence on Roman Catholic thought. The doctrines for which he is best known are the "univocity of being," that existence is the most abstract concept we have, applicable to everything that exists; the formal distinction, a way of distinguishing between different aspects of the same thing; and the idea of haecceity, the property supposed to be in each individual thing that makes it an individual. Scotus also developed a complex argument for the existence of God, and argued for the Immaculate conception of Mary.

Little is known of Scotus' life. He was probably born in 1265 or 1276, probably at Duns, in Berwickshire, Scotland. In 1291 he was ordained as a priest in Northampton, England. A note in Codex 66 of Merton College, Oxford, records that Scotus "flourished at Cambridge, Oxford and Paris. He began lecturing on Peter Lombard's Sentences at the prestigious University of Paris in the Autumn of 1302. Later in that academic year, however, he was expelled from the University of Paris for siding with then Pope Boniface VIII in his feud with Philip the Fair of France, over the taxation of church property.