Another chief point of difference with Aquinas was in regard to the freedom of the will, which Duns Scotus maintained absolutely.
As generally understood, Duns makes caprice supreme in God.
As you approach duns You need to turn left heading for Longformacus.
Burial cairns and stone circles, rock carvings and standing stones, duns and hillforts speak of millennia of continuous habitation.
Duns Scotus leaned toward Semi-Pelagianism, which rejected the doctrine of predestination, and maintained a co-operation of freedom and grace.
Expert knowledge and judicial insight must decide the point; but, so far as the present writer can judge, it is illusory to imagine that Duns points us beyond the medieval assumptions.
Following Duns Scotus, he adopted the Platonic theory of ideas, and denied that Aristotle had made any contribution to metaphysical speculation.
Further, while the genius of Aquinas was constructive, that of Duns Scotus was destructive; Aquinas was a philosopher, Duns a critic. The latter has been said to stand to the former in the relation of Kant to Leibnitz.
He does not enter into the animal comparisons of his predecessors, but occupies himself chiefly with simple descriptive physiognomy as indicative of character; and the same is true of the scattered references in the writings of Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas.
He entered the Franciscan order and subsequently went to Paris, where he was a pupil of Duns Scotus.
He was one of the first to attack the realist doctrines of Duns Scotus, and is interesting mainly as the precursor of William of Occam in his revival of Nominalism.
He was the pastor at Scituate, Massachusetts, from 1641 until 1654, and from 1654 until his death was president of Harvard College, as the successor of the first president Henry Duns ter (c. 1612-1659).
His birthplace has been variously given as Duns in Berwickshire, Dunum (Down) in Ulster, and Dunstane in Northumberland, but there is not sufficient evidence to settle the question.
In 1308 Duns Scotus was sent by the general of his order to Cologne, with the twofold object of engaging in a controversy with the Beghards and of assisting in the foundation of a university; according to some, his removal was due to jealousy.
In Duns Scotus, Averroes and Aristotle are the unequalled masters of the science of proof; and he pronounces distinctly the separation between Catholic and philosophical truth, which became the watchword of Averroism.
In general it may be said that Duns shows less confidence in the power of reason than Aquinas, and to that extent Erdmann and others are right in looking upon his system as the beginning of the decline of Scholasticism.
In his treatment of the conception of matter, Duns shows that he inclined much more to the Realism which makes for pantheism than was the case with the Aristotelianism of Thomas.
In opposition to Aquinas, who maintained that reason and revelation were two independent sources of knowledge, Duns Scotus held that there was no true knowledge of anything knowable apart from theology as based upon revelation.
In the matter of Universals, Duns was more of a realist and less of an eclectic than Aquinas.
Indeed, no sooner was the harmony apparently established by Aquinas than Duns Scotus began this negative criticism, which is carried much farther by William of Occam.
It is a curious commentary on the theories of Duns Scotus that one pupil, Francis, should have taken this course, while another pupil, Occam, should have used his arguments in a diametrically opposite direction and ended in extreme Nominalism.
It is against this part of his doctrines that the most important criticism, in ethics, of his rival Duns Scotus (c. 1266-1308) was directed.
It is generally held that he taught Bonaventura, Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas, but a comparison of dates makes it clear that the two latter could nothave been his pupils and that the statement about Bonaventura is open to doubt.
It is most noteworthy that they were joined by thinkers such as Grosseteste, Adam Marsh, Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus and William of Ockham.
It is the question of the particularity or " this-ness " (haecceitas, as Duns Scotus afterwards named it) that embarrasses the Scholastics.
It is traceable as far back as the schoolmen of whom Duns Scotus describes as "transcendental" those conceptions which have a higher degree of universality than the Aristotelian categories.
It was better, he said, to be weak in Duns Scotus, but strong in St Paul - than to be crammed with all the learning of Durandus, and ignorant of the law of Christ.
It was on Duns Law (700 ft.) that the Covenanters, under Alexander Leslie, were encamped in 1639, and the Covenanters' Stone on the top of the hill has been enclosed to preserve it from relic-hunters.
It was the county town from 1696 to 1853, when for several years it shared this dignity with Duns, which, however, is now the sole capital.
More importance attaches to Duns Scotus, who brings prominently forward the idea of a progressive development in nature by means of a process of determination.
On Duns Scotus generally, see life by Wadding in vol.
On the question of universals he endeavoured to steer a middle course between the pantheistically inclined realism of Duns Scotus and the extreme nominalism of William of Occam.
One might almost say that Duns Scotus recognizes the principle of a gradual physical evolution, only that he chooses to represent the mechanism by which the process is brought about by means of quaint scholastic fictions.
Paschasius shrank from the logical outcome of his view, namely, that Christ's body or part of it is turned into human excrement, but Ratramnus, another monk of Corbey, in a book afterwards ascribed to Duns Scotus, drew this inference in order to discredit his antagonists, and not because he believed it himself.
Rejected by Thomas, it is patronized by Duns - not, one thinks, that he loved tion.
Schneid, Die Korperlehre des Duns Scotus - its relation to Thomism and Atomism (1879); P. Minges, "Ist Duns Scotus Indeterminist?"
Seeberg to interpret Duns Scotus as the forerunner of Luther in his emphasis on the prac tical.
Seeberg, Die Theologie des Duns Scotus (1900), and in Herzog-Hauck, Realencyklopddie fiir protestantische Theologie (1898), with bibliog.
South of the Himalayas, from which it is separated by valleys or duns, is the Siwalik range, which slopes down to the fruitful plain of the Doab (two rivers), a large irregular horn-shaped tongue of land enclosed between the Ganges and Jumna.
St Martin's, built between the 10th and 12th centuries, has a fine baptistery; St Gereon's, built in the 11th century on the site of a Roman rotunda, is noted for its mosaics, and glass and oil-paintings; the Minorite church, begun in the same year as the cathedral, contains the tomb of Duns Scotus.
Still later Duns Scotus and Occam were both Franciscans.
The antiquities include stone circles, duns, the ruins of Breachacha Castle, once a fortress of the Lords of the Isles.
The chief characteristic of this criticism is well expressed in the name bestowed on Duns by his contemporaries - Doctor subtilis.
The critics of Aquinas - Duns Scotus and the later Nominalists - show some tendency towards rational scepticism.
The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was the great subject in dispute between the two parties; it was strenuously opposed by Aquinas, and supported by Duns Scotus, although not without reserve.
The exact relation between the two was, however, a matter of controversy, Aquinas and Duns Scotus holding that both are practical reason, while Bonaventura narrows synderesis to the volitional tendency to good actions.
The latent nominalism of Aristotle only came gradually to be emphasized through the prominence which Christianity gave to the individual life, and, apart from passing notices as in Abelard, first found clear enunciation in the school of Duns Scotus.
There are remains of ancient chapels, Danish duns and Druidical circles on the island.
This difficulty was presently raised by Duns Scotus and the realistically-inclined opponents of the Thomist doctrine.
This serves Duns Scotus as the most universal basis of existence, all angels having material bodies.
Thomas' great rival, Duns Scotus, does this to a large extent, at times affirming " two truths."
Thomas's great rival, Duns Scotus, does this to a large extent, at times affirming " two truths."
Though he may technically be classed as an " extreme realist, " Duns is the forerunner of those later Nominalists, like William of Occam, who unsettled every intellectual ground of belief in order that they might resettle belief upon Church authority, not reason but rather scepticism being for them the ancilla domini.
When his master, William Varron, removed to Paris in 1301, Duns Scotus was appointed to succeed him as professor of philosophy, and his lectures attracted an immense number of students.
When we turn to Duns Scotus, we still find realism, still predestinarianism.
While agreeing with Albert and Thomas in maintaining the threefold existence of the universals, Duns Scotus attacked the Thomist doctrine of individuation.
While Charles hung irresolute on the eastern border, the Covenanters, under Alexander Leslie, took heart, occupied Duns Law, and terrified Charles into negotiations (11th-18th June).