Scotist Controversies

There is a conservative religious-political viewpoint or movement called Radical Orthodoxy, led by Anglican theologians John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock, which wants to blame all the ills of modernity on the univocity of being promoted by the medieval Franciscan theologian John Duns Scotus. Supposedly, the Scotist univocity of being is responsible for the very idea of the secular. Among the authorities they cite in support of this historical claim are the great French Thomist scholar Etienne Gilson, who contrasted the bad “essentialism” of Scotus with the good “existentialism” of Aquinas, and Olivier Boulnois, who has documented the role of Scotus in re-founding metaphysics as a “science” of ontology independent of Aristotle in the Latin-speaking world.

While I am very far from being an unequivocal defender of Scotus, and indeed worry quite a lot myself about the evils of voluntarism, I find myself sympathizing with the Franciscans on these historical claims. The point that I wanted to make in the recent series on Boulnois’s Being and Representation was that there are very specific and explicit medieval Latin sources for the “metaphysical” wrong turn that Heidegger claimed was endemic to Western philosophy as a whole, going all the way back to Plato and Aristotle.