Scotism

In this paper I present an interpretation of Deleuze’s concept of difference-in-itself. I argue that this is best understood as an ad(o/a)ption of Duns Scotus’s concept of ultimate difference. After suggesting that the influence of Scotus on Deleuze extends beyond their shared commitment to the univocity of being (I), I turn to briefly review Deleuze’s notion of absolute difference (II). I proceed from there to explain Scotus’s accounts of univocity (III) and ultimate difference (IV), throughout noting the many stark parallels with Deleuze. On the basis of this Scotistic reading of Deleuzian difference, I then show how Deleuze’s synthesis of univocal being and difference-in-itself can be uniquely situated within the fourteenth-century Scotistic disputations on the predicability of univocal being to ultimate difference (V). I conclude with some suggestions on possible further connections between Deleuze and medieval metaphysics which are opened up through this association of Deleuze with Scotus and the Scotistic tradition (VI).

The Virgin Shall Give Birth is two books in one: in addition to presenting an original defense of the traditional doctrine of the virgin birth, it also introduces the reader to aspects of the Mariology of Blessed John Duns Scotus and his school. In both respects it is thoroughly researched.

The author first studies the validity of the traditional doctrine in view of Scripture, Tradition, and the Magisterium, as well as contemporary objections. Then he brings the insights of great, but largely forgotten, theologians of the past into the contemporary debate.

These Franciscans show us that the miraculous character of the birth does not in any way contradict Mary’s exercise of motherhood in giving birth. Rather, the miracle makes possible a unique mode of birth that more closely resembles the eternal generation of the Word, and thus constitutes a revelation of the Trinity.

Quaestio. Annuario di storia della metafisica (2014), 14: 315-327.

This review-article examines Daniel Novotný’s new book on entia rationis in Baroque-Age scholasticism. Novotný’s presentation of Francisco Suárez’, Pedro Hurtado’s, Bartolomeo Mastri’s and Bonaventura Belluto’s as well as Juan Caramuel’s theories of beings of reason is discussed. Beyond Novotný’s results, it is pointed out 1) that Suárez’ theory of the causation of beings of reason is anticipated by his explanation of the relationship between formal and objective concepts, and 2) that the traditional division of distinctions of reason lies in the background of some scholastic authors’ differentiation between entia rationis ratiocinatae and entia rationis ratiocinantis; this latter motif is echoed in German Enlightenment metaphysics.

"This contribution to a volume on the“ultimate why-question” discusses ambiguities in Leibniz’s formulation of the question, “[. . . ] pourquoi il y a plus tôt quelque chose que rien”. This formulation poses two problems: Leibniz does not explain how to understand the concepts of “something” and “nothing”. And it is not clear, whether “something” and “nothing” are contradictory opposites, so that there is either nothing or something, or whether both concepts denote principles which are effective in the world at the same time. My analysis rests on the hypothesis that the relevant context for Leibniz’s question is the theology of creation.

Hence, the paper compares eight different approaches to “creation from nothing” (Thomists, Scotists, Taurellus, Lubinus, Timpler, Keckermann, Kircher, Knorr von Rosenroth, van Helmont). Candidates for the nihil the world was created from include absolute non-being, thoughts in God’s mind, unformed  matter, imaginary space, or a self-contraction of the Divine spirit. These different approaches can be translated into different versions of the “ultimate why-question”. The paper concludes that Leibniz’s formulation contains a comparison between two Divine acts of creation, because not only “something”, but “nothing” as well owes its subsistence to the Divine will. This rises substantial questions: either God created first an imperfect entity in order to create the world as a whole, or Leibniz subscribes to an emanative understanding of creation that either levels the difference between creation and (natural) generation or is based on misunderstanding God as a material entity."

It is widely believed today that John Duns Scotus’s doctrine of the univocity of being ushered in various deleterious philosophical and theological consequences that resulted in the negative features of modernity. Included in this common opinion, but not examined, is the belief that by affirming univocity Scotus thereby also denied the analogy of being (analogia entis). The present essay challenges this belief by recovering Scotus’s true position on analogy, namely that it obtains in the order of the real, and that complex concepts of creatures are analogically related to complex concepts of God. Scotus’s doctrine is then compared to the later Scotist tradition. The common opinion of the Scotist school from the fourteenth century onward followed Scotus’s position on analogy and considerably expanded upon his scattered remarks.

In histories of medieval ethics, Thomists are usually portrayed as intellectualists and Scotists as voluntarists. The typically voluntarist linking of the morality of acts with an obligation towards a superior law is also often seen as the major influence exerted by late medieval ethics on early-modern natural law theories. The present article will challenge this standard narrative by presenting the early-modern scholastic debate on the constitutive characters of sin (peccatum), as it was proposed by the Spanish Cistercian Juan Caramuel Lobkowitz (1606-82). It will reveal that most Thomists advocated in reality a very voluntarist and theocentric definition of sin, whereas many Scotists on the contrary defended a very intellectualist approach. Caramuel and some early-modern Scotists thereby played an important role in the development of a non-theological definition of sin, the peccatum philosophicum, which represents a major moment in the development of a strictly philosophical ethics during modernity.

In this paper I argue that the conceptual basis for the Leibnizian concept of force does not derive only from Hobbes and other early modern authors, but it owes much to late scholasticism as well inasmuch as it depends on the theory of univocal predication elaborated by Duns Scotus. To achieve this goal, first I show that the conceptual content of the term "conatus" has much to do with Leibniz’s criticism of Descartes’s ontological proof.

This is an early draft of an article forthcoming in the American Philosophical Quarterly. The paper investigates an aporia in the thought of Bl. John Duns Scotus. The puzzle pertains to Scotus's account of common being and the scope of metaphysical science. First, an argument is made that Scotus's metaphysics should exclude logical being from its subject matter. Next, an argument is made that Scotus's metaphysics should include logical being in its subject matter. Then the paper considers two possible avenues for resolving this aporia and notes problematic aspects of each. Finally, the paper concludes that there is a genuine tension within Scotus's thought regarding the scope of metaphysics and the univocity of being, and that this tension served as a seed for the supertranscendental theorizing in later scholastic thought.

For more than four decades around the middle of the sixteenth century, Giacomino Malafossa from Barge († 1563) held the Scotist chair of metaphysics at the University of Padua. In his A Question on the Subject of Metaphysics, in Which Is Included the Question, Whether Metaphysics Is a Science, he developed a remarkable stance on the subject matter of metaphysics. Metaphysics has two objects: being qua being and God. However, only when it deals with the latter object can it be said to be a science in a strict sense. The reason is that the strict Aristotelian notion of science presupposes that the object of any science has demonstrable properties, which is the case with God, but not with being as being. Although being qua being does have certain properties, namely the transcendentals, these cannot be truly demonstrated. Malafossa’s Quaestio bears witness both to the clash between Averroism and Scotism at the Italian Renaissance universities and to the complexity of the Scotist tradition itself. This introductory article highlights Malafossa’s sources and traces the critical reception of his views among later Scotist authors.

The present contribution interprets the results of the statistic of explicit sources employed in the first volume of Pelbartus of Themeswar’s Rosarium. This author was a late 15th century Hungarian Observant Franciscan who wrote a number of texts that were real “bestsellers” in his time and in the century following his death. The Rosarium is his work of theoretic theology and the one closest to what might be called a medieval philosophical endeavor. By seeing who he quotes and in what way, we get to showcase his doctrinal preference for the Scotist school and, as a bonus, identify some of the works that the 15th century library of the “Saint John” Observant convent of Buda, where he worked during the last period of his life, owned.

Himbert of Garda was a little-known Franciscan theologian who studied at Paris around 1320 and probably served as Francis of Meyronnes’ secretary. His commentary on the Sentences provides precious insights on the development of Franciscan thought at Paris, connecting Francis of Meyronnes’ refined presentations of doctrine with raw academic debates between bachelors and masters in the Faculty of Theology. An appendix presents Himbert’s discussion of intrinsic degrees in Book I d.36, and both redactions of his treatment of the formal distinction in the context of the divine attributes in Book I d.8, as well as parallel texts from Francis of Meyronnes. A second appendix provides a full question- and citation-list for Himbert’s commentary on the Sentences.

Pre-publication version. Full version available at http://www.brepolsonline.net/doi/abs/10.1484/J.BPM.1.102682

It is the penultimate version. The pages do not correspond to the final version of the paper.
The bibliographical record: in: Herausforderung durch Religion? Begegnungen der Philosophie mit Religionen in Mittelalter und Renaissance, G. Krieger (ed.), Verlag Königshausen und Neumann, Würzburg, 2011, 268–284

Esta es una introducción a la filosofía de Edith Stein en el formato de la colección "Filósofos y textos", de Ediciones del Orto. Por tanto, ofrece una bio-bibliografía, una exposición de la filosofía de la autora, una selección de textos conectada con la exposición y una bibliografía. El hilo conductor de la exposición es la tesis de que la filosofía de Edith Stein tiene una clave (el espíritu), un tema (la estructura de la persona humana) y un método (la fenomenología). Desde ahí se recorren las dos etapas en que dividimos su pensamiento: la estrictamente fenomenológica y la de filosofía cristiana, en la que pervive significativamente la orientación fenomenológica.

Typical of many contemporary theories of the origin of the modernity is the claim that Duns Scotus " doctrine of the univocity of being signifies a major break with all previous philosophical and theological speculation, a break that initiated a decline in late medieval thought that led to a general collapse of late medieval society. Central to this narrative of a decline initated by the univocity of being is the assumption that John Duns Scotus rejected the " traditional " doctrine of the analogy of being, and intended his theory of univocity to supplant it. There is also a widely held—but entirely unexamined—assumption that analogy and univocity are incompatible. After some consideration of Duns Scotus " view on the compatibility of analogy and univocity, I will look at how his mature position was interpreted and developed by early Scotists such as Antonius Andreae and Petrus Thomae. One interesting feature of their accounts of the analogy and univocity of being is how they sidestep traditional interpretations of Aristotle that claim the Stagirite denied univocity and affirmed only analogy: the early Scotists drew a distinction between categorical univocity and transcendental univocity. The former pertains to the ten Aristotelian categories, the latter to God and creatures. Aristotle, the Scotists claimed, only denied categorical univocity, and indeed, contrary to common opinion, even affirmed transcendental univocity in an (obscure) argument in Metaphysics II concerning the nature of truth. Another common distinction in early Scotism is that whereby the senses of the term " univocity " are shown to be non-univocal, with variations introduced depending on the perspective of various sciences. So for metaphysics and physics, univocity is " real, " that is univocal concepts have corresponding realities. But for logic, univocity is of concept alone, without a corresponding reality. This brings us to Scotus " own ultimate solution of the problem of the relation of analogy and univocity, which is that analogy is a feature of things outside the mind, while univocity is a feature of concepts. Antonius Andreas and a number of other Scotists simply repeat Scotus on this point, but Petrus Thomae moved beyond Scotus and developed one of the most elaborate theories of analogy to be found during the entire medieval period. His theory is contained in the currently unedited Quaestiones de ente, written at Barcelona around 1325. In this work he makes the innovative claim that the same concept can be both analogical and univocal, for the terms " analogical " and " univocal " are both terms of second intention. This position proved to be at least historically successful, for the claim was repeated by various Scotists into the seventeenth century. Furthermore, Petrus Thomae devoted much space to close textual analysis in order to harmonizes the previous discussion of analogy in the Greek, Arabic, and Latin traditions. The result of this analysis was a theory of twelve degrees of analogy, various degrees of which were compatible with univocity or equivocity

Reviews
(1) Kant-Studien 101 (2010): 119–120 [R. Pozzo].
(2) Journal of Ecclesiastical History 57 (2006): 790-791 [W. P. Ward]
(3) Theological Studies 68 (2007): 471-472 [J. Betz]
(4) Journal for the History of Modern Theology  15 (2008): 173–174 [J.  Wischmeyer].
(5) Theologie und Philosophie 81 (2006): 585-587 [G. Sala]
(6) Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Theologie 53 (2006): 527-531 [S. Knebel]
(7) Theologische Revue 103 (2007), 516-518 [A. Winter]

Metaphysik im Barockscotismus. Untersuchungen zum Metaphysikwerk des Bartholomaeus Mastrius. Mit Dokumentation der Metaphysik in der scotistischen Tradition ca. 1620-1750.  August 2016.
Bochumer Studien zur Philosophie, 57; pp. xviii + 993.
Cf. https://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/bsp.57/main.

Reviews:
Thomas Marschler, in: Archivum franciscanum historicum 110, 2017: 362-366.
Rafael Ramis Barceló, in: Revista Española de Filosofía Medieval 24, 2017: 300-303.
Ulrich L. Lehner, in: Theological Studies 79, 2018: 227-228.

A full length study comparing and contrasting Scotus to Newman. Most fans of Newman do not consider his brief though approving remarks on Scotus. If he explicitly agreed with Scotus on points, what were they and why? The paper seeks to show those areas of harmony and similitude of observation in areas such as cognition and the proofs for the existence of God as well as the primacy of the Incarnation. The paper is sensitive to differences of terminology and approach to the same objects of study in two very different English contexts and universitarian language.

This contribution offers a first-hand impression of Bartolomeo Mastri’s Disputations on Metaphysics, the single most important work on metaphysics produced in the Scotist school during the Early Modern period. I shall highlight a selection of key passages that convey an impression of this work’s historical-literary context, its subject matter, its main motifs, and scientific aims, but also its limitations. Notably, we see Mastri emphasizing the theological aspect of metaphysics, though he in the end refrains from exploring this aspect of metaphysics within his work on metaphysics. I suggest that this discrepancy between Mastri’s concept of metaphysics and his practice of metaphysics showcases the difficulty of organizing this discipline during the period of transition from the traditional commentary format, typical of medieval scholasticism, to the Early Modern scholastic Cursus philosophicus literature.

From the 14th to the 17th centuries the idea gradually emerged that created intellects can entertain several acts or apprehend several objects at the same time. While Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274) explicitly rejects such a view, claiming that there can be one and only one intellectual act referring to one intelligible at a time, from John of Jandun (d. 1328) to the Scotist Franciscus Lychetus (d. 1520), many argued that not only in angelic but also in human intellects several intellectual acts are compossible with each other and, as a consequence, that a simultaneous grasp of multiple and distinct objects can occur. At the end of the 16th century, this conception is based on the idea that the attention of the mind can be divided. In his De angelis, Suárez (d. 1617), while ostensibly restricting the discussion to the case of the angelic intellect, nevertheless gives a systematic treatment of the way that attention can be proportioned to the nature and diversity of the objects considered.

Importanti erano i personaggi storici di Agostino, Tomasso d'Aquino e Duns Scoto per quanto riguarda le controversie palamitiche dei 14o e 15o secoli. Fra delle diverse tematiche nell'articolo attuale, ci si trovano le fonti latine per la teologia e la filosofia di Gennadio Scolario riguardo alla distinzione formale fra l'essenza e gli attributi (le energie) di Dio. Erveo Natale si rivela come il portatore della tradizione scotista a Bizanzio. Erveo, essendo uno scotistico-tomista, diviene la ulteriore giustificazione della validità metafisica di Palamismo. Numerose scoperte ed edizioni nuove di autori tardivo-bizantini vengono annunciate in questo articolo.

si vede NICOLAUS 40 (2013)

El libro se centra en la figura del franciscano chileno Juan de Fuica (La Serena, ca.1660 – ca.1735) y sus Comentarios Acerca del alma, dictados en el Colegio San Diego de Alcalá de Santiago de Chile en el año 1689. Ellos forman parte del curso trienal de la cátedra de artes o filosofía (1687-1689), que incluye otros cuatro comentarios según la interpretación escotista y se conserva actualmente en el Archivo Histórico Franciscano en la misma ciudad.

De acuerdo con nuestras investigaciones, las lecciones del franciscano de La Serena son el testimonio más antiguo entre los cursos de autor chileno que en la actualidad se conservan sobre esta materia. Cabe destacar que, al considerar la información biográfica sobre el fraile, se constata que en ellos se expone una mentalidad juvenil, propia de los inicios de su magisterio. Asimismo, si bien se hallan errores ortográficos y gramaticales que no dan cuenta de una revisión cuidadosa de los textos, nos inclinamos a pensar que el libro que reúne los comentarios del trienio indicado podría ser el esfuerzo del fraile por responder a las demandas de la orden de unificar las materias requeridas por los estudiantes de filosofía. Por ello, el libro podría constituir un esbozo para un eventual manual de estudios de la provincia franciscana chilena.

Con la edición bilingüe de esta obra (latín-castellano), que por cierto se encuentra en su mayor parte inédita, se rescata un testimonio exclusivo de la enseñanza filosófica de la época colonial y, con ello, se llena una gran laguna en la historia de la filosofía chilena.

A critique of the Scholium of the Quaracchi editors of Bonaventure's critical edition of 1882 AD, wherein they deny Bonaventure set forth a doctrine concerning the Ratio Formalis Personae, & a proposed solution to the historical debate on the question, derived from a close reading of Bonaventure's Commentaria on Lombard, with principles used to arrive at said solution.

El siguiente artículo revisa brevemente diferentes aspectos de los Comentarios Acerca del alma, dictados por el franciscano chileno fray Juan de Fuica, en mayo de 1689, en el Colegio San Diego de Alcalá de Santiago de Chile. Presentamos, primero, una nota biográfica del fraile con información relativa a su trayectoria académica y administrativa dentro de la orden franciscana. Luego, analizamos en cinco categorías
los aspectos fundamentales de este curso inédito: características generales, características del lenguaje, estructura, método de enseñanza y contenidos ad mentem Scoti. Creemos que con la edición de este testimonio exclusivo de la enseñanza filosófica de la época, visibilizamos el patrimonio filosófico colonial del país y, en consecuencia, llenamos una gran laguna en la historia de la filosofía chilena.

Electronic leaflet: Claus A. Andersen, Metaphysik im Barockscotismus. Untersuchungen zum Metaphysikwerk des Bartholomaeus Mastrius. Mit Dokumentation der Metaphysik in der scotistischen Tradition ca. 1620-1750, Amsterdam/Philadelphia (Bochumer Studien zur Philosophie 57).
Cf. http://benjamins.com/catalog/bsp.57

First part of my introduction, and the appendix to, Pere Tomàs [PETRUS THOMAE], Tractatus brevis de modis distinctionum, Obrador Edendum, Santa Coloma de Queralt (Bibliotheca philosophorum medii aevi Cataloniae 2), 2011.
The Latin text of treatise was edited by Celia López Alcalde; Catalan translation by Josep Batalla; English translation by Robert Hughes.
The appendix contains accounts of Petrus Thomae's seven kinds of distinctions by William of Vorillon, Pierre Tartaret, and Alipius Locherer.