Duns Scotus Facing Reality: Between Absolute Contingency and Unquestionable Consistency

Modern secular reason is grounded in epistemological foundationalism, typically traced back to Descartes. Here, truth sits within the confines of what the autonomous human mind can indubitably know, and those confines are defined by what can be validly demonstrated by human logic and/or perception. Whilst this approach to truth greatly facilitated the launch of the modern scientific method, it was philosophically unstable from the outset. Hume argued that metaphysical and theological speculation grounded in the modern conception of truth invariably collapses, for modern truth feeds into fundamental solipsistic doubt in a manner that is not only theologically destructive, but that leads naturally to epistemological nihilism in relation to all realist conceptions of truth. "Truth" must hence be practical and sceptical and cannot be metaphysical or theological. Kant attempted to salvage Western metaphysics and theology from Humean doubt, but his "salvage" only deepened our problem. Since the opening of the nineteenth century, the West has been reeling in a cultural crisis of metaphysical and theological failure, what one scholar has called the "dis-enchantment of reason." 3 For

Section: Paul G Tysonmentioning

confidence: 99%

Transcendence and Epistemology: Exploring Truth via Post‐secular Christian Platonism

Tyson

2008

“…For Perrier, Scotus explores the implications of Christian faith as a genuine novum, such that revelation essentially settles inquiries which had occupied and vexed classical philosophy: "Not that these problematics suddenly revealed some fault that had passed up to that point unperceived, but because, relocated against the background of an established Christianity, they appeared quite simply obsolete: the intelligibility of the world and the vocation of humanity were no longer open questions." 32 Philosophy shifts domains, then: rather than pondering the "why" of things, philosophical inquiry turns to instrumental questions of "how". One might note that this same medieval change in the nature of "philosophy" is recognized by Pierre Hadot: " 'Philosophy,' when placed in the service of theology, was henceforth no more than a theoretical discourse; and when, in the seventeenth and especially the eighteenth century, modern philosophy conquered its autonomy, it retained the tendency to limit itself to this point of view."…”

Section: Emmanuel Perrier Opmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As Perrier says, "Scotist metaphysics draws its scientific rigor from the ontologico-logical parallelism from which it is inseparable". 36 Scotist argument derives its very strength from its account of the correspondence between ontology and logic; and well it should. From a different point of view, in order to make the logical claim about univocity, Scotus must make some judgment as to how God's being and creaturely being are related.…”

Section: A Ratio Deimentioning

confidence: 99%

The Ratio Dei and the Ambiguities of History

Hughes

2005

The Radical Orthodoxy movement has revived postmodern theology’s interest in John Duns Scotus. This article reviews Catherine Pickstock’s substantial contribution to this discussion and the several articles that engage Pickstock in this same issue. The article notes two lines of engagement: the first, more analytical line considers the logic of “God‐talk,” the ratio Dei, to consider whether Scotus’s doctrine of univocity is adequate to speak of divine transcendence. The second is more historical and asks whether Radical Orthodoxy’s historical genealogy offers a sufficiently generous account of the plurality and ambiguity of the history of the church.

God and Natural Law: Reflections on Genesis 22

Levering¹

2008

This essay first explores Immanuel Kant's reading of Genesis 22, which Kant identifies as a preeminent case of the irrationality of biblical religion. After comparing Kant's assurance about the norms of rationality with the postmodern work of John Thiel, which finds the world of disorder and death to be outside God's ordering and therefore unintelligible, the essay argues that one finds in Thomas Aquinas's and Duns Scotus's contrasting accounts of Genesis 22 the beginnings of the breakdown of the theocentric understanding of the natural law as a participation in God's wise ordering of created realities to their fulfillment. Modern and postmodern thinkers operate within the context of this anthropocentric shift.