- Length
- 400 pagesWolter, Duns Scotus: Philosophical Writings, Hackett, 1987 - selections
- Reading
- SpecialistWritten for a school and normally read with a commentary
- Availability
- Specialist pressIn print from an academic publisher, priced accordingly
Ordinatio
A book its author never finished, in an edition nobody has finished either. Scotus died at forty-two with his revision incomplete, was printed for three hundred years in collections padded with other people's work, and the Vatican critical edition begun in 1950 is still appearing. What survives is among the most technically demanding philosophy ever written.
- Date
- c. 1300-1304
- Author
- John Duns Scotus
- Region
- Oxford, Paris and Cologne
- Language
- Latin
- 1962 English, Allan Wolter Selections; the standard entry point, in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Commentary
- Method
- Dialectical — Advance through contradiction and its resolution
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Revived — Out of circulation and read again
- Years back to what it answers
- 26 years
Unfinished by its author, printed for centuries in editions containing works he did not write, and still without a complete critical text after seventy-five years of work.
What the book says
Scotus' own revision of his Oxford lectures on the standard theology textbook, prepared for publication and never finished. Three doctrines carry it. The first is univocity: the concept of being must apply in exactly the same sense to God and to creatures, because otherwise any argument moving from the world to God changes the meaning of its middle term halfway and proves nothing. The second is the formal distinction, a device for cases where two things are neither really separable nor merely distinguished by our way of thinking - God's justice and God's mercy are not two things, and they are not simply one thing under two names either, and Scotus argues that a third option is required. The third is the one he is remembered by outside the schools: what makes an individual this individual. Not its matter, not its form, not any collection of properties, since properties are general and could in principle be shared. There is instead an individuating positive reality - later called thisness - which is what makes Socrates this man rather than an instance of humanity. Around these run arguments on the will's freedom, on why God's commands are not arbitrary, and a proof of God's existence more elaborate than anything before it.
What it argues
That the concept of being is univocal, and that a great deal follows. If being means the same when applied to an infinite and a finite thing, then metaphysics has a subject it can actually treat, and arguments from creatures to God are valid rather than equivocal - but God is also, in a sense Aquinas resisted, on a scale with creation rather than off it. The formal distinction extends the same demand for precision inward, giving a way to say that God's attributes are genuinely distinct without making God composite. And thisness answers a question the Aristotelian tradition had left: no assembly of general properties can pick out an individual, so individuality must be a positive reality of its own.
What it answered
Aquinas on analogy and on individuation, and Henry of Ghent on much else - a great deal of the Ordinatio is conducted against a contemporary whose name means nothing to modern readers, which is one reason it is hard going. The wider answer is to the whole thirteenth-century settlement between Aristotle and Christian doctrine. Scotus accepts the project and rejects the tools, and his revisions are consistently in the direction of more distinctions, more precision, and less willingness to let a difficulty be absorbed by a word.
How it argues
By distinction, relentlessly, in Latin of extreme compression. Scotus states a position, states the arguments for it, produces a distinction that shows the arguments do not establish what they seem to, and proceeds - and the reader who misses a distinction is lost for pages. His nickname, the Subtle Doctor, was not affectionate in all mouths, and it is from a later hostile view of his followers that English gets the word dunce. The text's difficulty is compounded by its state: layers of revision from three cities, marginal additions, and passages that update earlier ones without deleting them.
The moment
The generation after the Paris condemnations of 1277, when the confident assimilation of Aristotle had been officially checked and philosophers were more careful about what could be demonstrated. Scotus was a Franciscan, lectured at Oxford, Paris and Cologne, was expelled from France briefly in a quarrel between the king and the pope, and died at forty-two. His revision was interrupted by every one of those moves and never caught up.
How it travelled
Badly edited for six hundred years. The 1639 collected works and its nineteenth-century reprint mixed genuine and spurious material, so that much of what was attributed to Scotus and argued about was not his. The Franciscan order maintained the school and Scotism was a major force into the seventeenth century; then it faded, and the recovery is a twentieth-century project. The Scotistic Commission in Rome began the critical edition in 1950 and volumes have appeared at intervals ever since - the first two in 1950, the next in 1954, 1956, 1959, 1963, 1973 and onward - separating the original revision from the later additions.
The strongest objection
The Thomist reply, that univocity buys the argument's validity at the cost of what the argument was for. If being means exactly the same applied to God and to a stone, then God has been placed within a common category, and the doctrine that God is not one being among beings - which both traditions want - becomes hard to state. Scotus answers that univocity is a fact about a concept rather than about reality, and that the same concept can apply to an infinite and a finite instance without making them the same kind of thing. Whether that distinction between conceptual and real univocity holds under pressure is the question, and it is the point at which the two schools have argued past each other for seven hundred years.
Why read it
Only through selections, and only with a guide - the complete text does not exist in English and the Latin is unforgiving. Wolter's selections are the entry point. What repays the effort is the demonstration of what philosophical precision looked like at its medieval maximum: nobody before the twentieth century drew finer distinctions, and several of them turned out to be needed.
- First printed
- 1639
- First in English
- 1962
- Digitised
- Partial
The Wadding edition of 1639 and its 1891-95 reprint contain spurious works alongside genuine ones. The Vatican critical edition, begun in 1950 under Carl Balic, has been appearing volume by volume ever since and is not complete.
There is no complete English translation and there will not be one until the Latin edition is finished. Wolter's selections and Peter Simpson's ongoing translations of individual distinctions are what exist.
Where it stands
Revived, and the revival is recent and substantial. Univocity is a live position in metaphysics and in philosophy of religion; thisness under its Latin name is standard vocabulary in current debates about individuation; and Scotus' account of the will has been taken up in work on freedom. The obstacle to further recovery is textual rather than philosophical.
On quoting this book
The Latin is public domain but the critical text is incomplete and every English rendering is modern and in copyright. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
The state of the text is the largest problem: what Scotus wrote at Oxford, what he added at Paris, and what a redactor inserted are still being separated, and scholars warn against treating the printed critical volumes as his final views. Which works are genuinely his was uncertain until recently. Whether the formal distinction is a real discovery or a verbal device to have things both ways has been argued since Ockham said the latter. And whether univocity begins the road to a modern conception of being as a neutral category - a thesis some twentieth-century theologians pressed hard - is disputed and probably reads too much back into him.