My initial motivation for the recent series on Boulnois’s Being and Representation had to do with large-scale, second-order, “historiographical” interpretation of the history of philosophy. More particularly, I wanted to draw attention to this work because it provides abundant evidence for a much more specific medieval and early modern counter-story to Heidegger’s sweeping claims to implicate Plato and Aristotle as well as Hegel in a wrong turn of metaphysics that is supposed to lead to technological domination and general evil. One of the distinctive features of Boulnois’s account is his highlighting of the novel theory of “objective being” in Duns Scotus.

As someone who much appreciates Aristotle’s view that being is “said in many ways”, I naturally have severe doubts about Scotus’s thesis of the univocity of being, though I don’t think it makes Scotus an apostle of secularism, as some have apparently been claiming in recent years. But on this issue, an interesting challenge is posed by Andrew Lazella’s The Singular Voice of Being: John Duns Scotus and Ultimate Difference (2019). Lazella makes a serious argument that Scotus puts difference before identity in the order of the constitution of things. If this is borne out, it would radically change the profile of the univocity claim.

I’m even starting to temper my very severe misgivings about Scotus’s theological and anthropological voluntarism. Franciscan scholar Allan Wolter’s translated volume Duns Scotus on the Will & Morality (1st ed. 1986) presents Scotus as in practice emphasizing a criterion of “right reason” in ethical matters, and as promoting Anselm’s thesis that the human soul is moved by an affectio justitiae or “affection for justice” as well as by a natural affection for the advantageous. It shows Scotus foregrounding Aristotelian phronesis or open-ended practical judgment in ethical matters. While I don’t much care for the narrowing latinization of the latter as prudentia or “prudence”, William Frank’s preface to this volume likens Scotist ethics in general to the “aesthetic judgment of a creative artist” (p. xiii). Not Scotus but William of Ockham is apparently the chief source of “divine command theory”, which reduces virtue to obedience.

There is a recent translation of the important Third Distinction of Scotus’s Ordinatio volume I as On Being and Cognition (2016) by John van den Bercken. Duns Scotus’s Theory of Cognition (2014) by Richard Cross pursues the same topics across the whole body of Scotus’s work. Voluntarism seems to play essentially no role in either of these. Cross incidentally says that both Scotus and Aquinas held that we have only inferential knowledge of Aristotelian substance. My Brandomian inferentialist ears perked up at this.

Another of Allan Wolter’s translated volumes is A Treatise on Potency and Act, which was a late addition to Scotus’s incomplete Questions on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, dealing with Book Theta. This work rather inauspiciously promotes a view of these matters as revolving around active and passive powers, in a context of efficient causality. But as such, it could make an interesting historiographical case study.