Duns Scotus on the Immaterial

Can anything logically be immaterial in any of the three senses of the term distinguished by Scotus? His first definition, using the notion of dependence, seems not to work. The second and third, using extension and abstractness, do not provide necessary conditions of immateriality, and do not distinguish different senses of the term. But being non-spatial is indeed a sufficient condition of being immaterial, and I argue that there could be non-spatial and therefore immaterial existents.     

Voluntarism,Atonement, and Duns Scotus

The two most important concepts in Duns Scotus's (1265/6‐1308) theology of the Atonement are satisfaction and merit. Just what these amount to and how they function in his theory are heavily conditioned by two more general commitments: Scotus's voluntarism, which includes the claim that nearly all of God's relations with the created order are contingent; and his formulation of the Franciscan Thesis, which holds that fixing the sin problem is not the primary purpose of God's Incarnation in Christ and that if Adam hadn't sinned God would have become incarnate anyway. In this essay I will discuss the theoretical background of Scotus's atonement theology—his voluntarism and his version of the Franciscan Thesis—before moving on to discuss his understanding of merit and satisfaction, how these are related, and how they relate to the theoretical background. I will engage some important recent scholarly attempts to position Scotus's Atonement theology as not quite as anti‐Anselmian as history has characterized it, arguing that one of these attributes to Scotus an understanding of merit which cannot be Scotus's in fact, since it entails a restriction on divine freedom that Scotus certainly would reject.     

Freedom Beyond Practical Reason: Duns Scotus on Will-Dependent Relations

Most acts of the will have a complex structure, i.e. wanting A in relation to B (e.g. as a means for an end or as a good for another person or for oneself). Duns Scotus makes the innovative claim that the will itself is responsible for the order of this complex structure. It does this by causing its own will-dependent relations, which he construes as a kind of mind-dependent relations (relationes rationis). By means of these relations, the will can arrange the terms of its will-acts independently of any arrangement proposed by the intellect. This not only allows the structure of one's will-act to diverge from the structure proposed by the intellect's final practical judgement; the structure of the will-act need not even have been considered by the intellect at all. One could, therefore, even will an inconceivable state of affairs. I argue that this theory, which scholars have virtually ignored, is fundamental to Scotus's account of divine, angelic, and human freedom, and that it follows necessarily from his voluntarist understanding of freedom. For Scotus, if the will could not structure its acts independently of the intellect, it would not be free.¹¹Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Hoger Instituut voor Wijsbegeerte (Leuven), the Cornell Summer Colloquium in Medieval Philosophy, and at UCLA. I am grateful for the discussion with those present on these occasions. Special thanks are due to Joshua Benson, Francis Feingold, Gloria Frost, Michael Gorman, Bonnie Kent, Calvin Normore, and Nick Kahm for helpful comments.     

Duns Scotus on the metaphysics of virtue and conformity to right reason

For Duns Scotus, facts about moral psychology are ultimately reducible to facts about ontology. The created agent has a soul which includes as formal “parts” the intellect and will; the intellect and will, of course, are the seat of qualities (e.g. thoughts and volitions, respectively) and habits (e.g. virtues) that are related to one another in various ways. One of these ways is the conformity relation. From a metaphysical base of categorical being – whether Substance, Quality/Habit, or Relation – Scotus constructs an ethical theory which complements, though in some interesting ways departs from, the Aristotelian tradition of which he is a part. In this essay, our aim is twofold: first, to reconstruct the ontological status of virtue within Scotus's overall metaphysical framework. Second, we attend to the ways in which this metaphysic of virtue places constraints on how one is to understand the conformity relation that, according to Scotus, must exist between an agent's will and right reason whenever a morally good action results.     

Duns Scotus on material substances and cognition: a discussion of two recent books

In a recent book, Thomas Ward advances an original interpretation of Duns Scotus’s hylomorphism, which stresses the ability of the parts of certain kinds of composites to exist independently from each other and from the composite to which they belong. Ward argues that the notion of essential order plays a key role in accounting for the unity of those parts in a composite. In another book, Richard Cross gives a comprehensive treatment of Duns Scotus’s theory of cognition, which proposes an interesting but controversial interpretation of Duns Scotus as introducing a distinction between object and content and defending the view that the contents of intellectual cognitive acts are determined only by their internal structure.     

William A. Frank and Allan B. Wolter,Duns Scotus,Metaphysician

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion -     

John Duns Scotus: On being and cognition: Ordinatio 1.3, Edited and Translated by John van den Bercken

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion -     

« Dire une chose et en faire une autre » : de la déclaration de liberté dans le paradigme de l'hypocrisie induite

According to induced hypocrisy paradigm, participants were led to advocate a pro-attitudinal position (commitment step), such as to respect the driving rules. Subsequently they were made mindful of their own transgressions (mindfulness step). Afterwards, the target-behavior was administered: spending time in a safety road association. We manipulated the declaration of freedom either within the mindfulness step (study 1), either at the twice steps (study 2). Results indicated that declaration of freedom increased the hypocritical effect. Implications for further research in the area of hypocrisy are discussed.     

Influence de la composition de la fratrie sur les pratiques éducatives parentales déclarées et sur la représentation de l'éducation chez les préadolescents

The aim of our study is to analyze the influence of the make up of the siblings on the parents' educational practices and also on the meaning of education to preadolescents. The results gathered from a sample of 88 preadolescents and their mothers show a difference of parental educational practices according to the make up of the siblings (relaxation of the practices with the youngest). The study of the meaning of education to preadolescents shows that only children are the most in accordance with their mothers. Children from large families imagine a future education further from mothers' educational practices.     

Être mère dans la famille recomposée : défis de la conciliation des rôles de belle-mère et de mère biologique

This study examines issues related to occupying both the role of stepmother and biological mother in a stepfamily. A sample of twelve participants was interviewed. The central theme of the interviews concerned the psychological state of the women as they tried to reconcile their biological maternity with their role as a stepmother. A qualitative analysis of the interviews enabled us to propose three themes emerging from their experience: a) a comparison of their different parental roles in the stepfamily; b) the issues related to managing stepfamily dynamics; c) the challenges linked to the development of a family identity.     

L'effet de l'hétérogénéité sémantique dans la détection de mots

The effects of three semantic factors (semantic priming of the target, semantic distance between the word-target and distractors, and semantic heterogeneity of the target context) on the detection of a word among other words were examined by using the classical paradigm of target detection (varying the number of distractors). Results showed that these three semantic factors affect performance: a target was better detected 1) when primed by its superordinate category than when it was defined as the “odd-one-out”; 2) when the semantic context was homogeneous than heterogeneous; and 3) when it was semantically unrelated to the context than semantically related. These results help specifying the cognitive processing of each word while searching for a word among others.