Duns Scotus John (1266–1308), Scottish Franciscan metaphysician and philosophical theologian. He lectured at Oxford, Paris, and Cologne, where he died and his remains are still venerated. Modifying Avicenna’s conception of metaphysics as the science of being qua being, but univocally conceived, Duns Scotus showed its goal was to demonstrate God as the Infinite Being (revealed to Moses as the ‘I am who am’), whose creative will is the source of the world’s contingency. Out of love God fashioned each creature with a unique ‘haecceity’ or particularity formally distinct from its individualized nature. Descriptively identical with others of its kind, this nature, conceived in abstraction from haecceity, is both objectively real and potentially universal, and provides the basis for scientific knowledge that Peirce calls ‘Scotistic realism.’ Duns Scotus brought many of Augustine’s insights, treasured by his Franciscan predecessors, into the mainstream of the Aristotelianism of his day. Their notion of the will’s ‘supersufficient potentiality’ for self-determination he showed can be reconciled with Aristotle’s notion of an ‘active potency,’ if one rejects the controversial principle that ‘whatever is moved is moved by another.’ Paradoxically, Aristotle’s criteria for rational and non-rational potencies prove the rationality of the will, not the intellect, for he claimed that only rational faculties are able to act in opposite ways and are thus the source of creativity in the arts. If so, then intellect, with but one mode of acting determined by objective evidence, is non-rational, and so is classed with active potencies called collectively ‘nature.’ Only the will, acting ‘with reason,’ is free to will or nill this or that. Thus ‘nature’ and ‘will’ represent Duns Scotus’s primary division of active potencies, corresponding roughly to Aristotle’s dichotomy of non-rational and rational. Original too is his development of Anselm’s distinction of the will’s twofold inclination or ‘affection’: one for the advantageous, the other for justice. The first endows the will with an ‘intellectual appetite’ for happiness and actualization of self or species; the second supplies the will’s specific difference from other natural appetites, giving it an innate desire to love goods objectively according to their intrinsic worth. Guided by right reason, this ‘affection for justice’ inclines the will to act ethically, giving it a congenital freedom from the need always to seek the advantageous. Both natural affections can be supernaturalized, the ‘affection for justice’ by charity, inclining us to love God above all and for his own sake; the affection for the advantageous by the virtue of hope, inclining us to love God as our ultimate good and future source of beatitude.
Another influential psychological theory is that of intuitive intellectual cognition, or the simple, non-judgmental awareness of a hereand-now existential situation. First developed as a necessary theological condition for the face-toface vision of God in the next life, intellectual intuition is needed to explain our certainty of primary contingent truths, such as ‘I think,’ ‘I choose,’ etc., and our awareness of existence. Unlike Ockham, Duns Scotus never made intellectual intuition the basis for his epistemology, nor believed it puts one in direct contact with any extramental substance material or spiritual, for in this life, at least, our intellect works through the sensory imagination. Intellectual intuition seems to be that indistinct peripheral aura associated with each direct sensory-intellectual cognition. We know of it explicitly only in retrospect when we consider the necessary conditions for intellectual memory. It continued to be a topic of discussion and dispute down to the time of Calvin, who, influenced by the Scotist John Major, used an auditory rather than a visual sense model of intellectual intuition to explain our ‘experience of God.’ See also AUGUSTINE , AVICENNA, OCKHAM. A.B.W.