Scotism

The claim

Being is univocal. If the word meant something merely analogous when applied to God, no argument could reach him from creatures at all, since the middle term would shift under the inference.

What it held

Scotus is the hardest of the scholastics to read and the one whose disagreements with Aquinas turn out to matter most. Three moves define the school.

First, univocity. Aquinas held that being is said analogically of God and creatures. Scotus objects that an analogical term cannot support a valid inference, and that if we can say anything about God at all, the concept of being must be the same concept in both uses — thinner than either, but shared.

Second, the formal distinction: a distinction in the thing itself, less than a real separation but more than a mere way of thinking about it. It lets him say the divine attributes are genuinely distinct without dividing God, and it is the tool most often accused of multiplying entities.

Third, haecceity — thisness. Aquinas explains what makes this horse this horse by its matter. Scotus finds that inadequate for angels, for souls, and finally for anything, and posits a positive individuating principle. Individuality is not a limitation on a nature; it is something a thing has.

Underneath all three is the primacy of the will. God did not command what is good because it is good; a range of things are good because commanded, and freedom goes all the way up.

How it argued

Distinction driven to a fineness nobody had attempted, in commentaries on the Sentences that were revised repeatedly and left in several versions at his death.

What it was arguing against

Thomism, on analogy, on individuation, and on whether the intellect moves the will. Also Henry of Ghent, his immediate target on most pages.

Where it disagreed with itself

Whether the formal distinction is coherent or a fudge — Ockham thought the latter and razored it away. Which version of his Sentences commentary represents his settled view, since he died at forty-two leaving contradictory revisions.

Common misconceptions

That Scotism is Thomism with extra complications. The disagreements are foundational: univocity, individuation and the will are three different metaphysics, and later philosophy took Scotus' side more often than not. And the word dunce comes from his name, applied by sixteenth-century humanists who found the subtlety unbearable — which is a verdict on them as much as on him.

How it began

A Franciscan from the Scottish borders who taught at Oxford, Paris and Cologne and died at forty-two, leaving almost everything unfinished.

What became of it

The main Franciscan alternative to Dominican Thomism for four centuries, sidelined in the modern period, and now the subject of a serious revival.

Lasting influence

Univocity is arguably the beginning of modern metaphysics — Deleuze builds an entire ontology on it. Voluntarism runs through Ockham to the Reformation. Peirce and Hopkins both took haecceity from him directly.

Why it still matters

The individuation question is live in contemporary metaphysics, and Scotus' answer is one of the standing options rather than a historical curiosity.

Put another way

A jeweller's loupe applied to a joint everyone else had called seamless.

Where to start

The Treatise on God as First Principle, in a modern translation with the notes. He cannot be read cold.

The surprising bit

He argued for the Immaculate Conception against Aquinas and nearly everyone else, and was vindicated five and a half centuries later when it became doctrine.

In their own words

Connections

Answers

Early Scholasticism

Opposed by

Thomism

Influenced

Ockhamism, Nominalism

The verdict

The subtlest metaphysician of the Middle Ages, whose name became a word for stupidity.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy