Scotus’s natural theology has the following distinctive claims:

1. That we can reason demonstratively to the necessary existence and nature of God from what is actually so but not from imagined situations or from conceivability-to-us; rather, only from the possibility logically required for what we know actually to be so.

2. That there is a univocal transcendental notion of being.

3. That there are disjunctive transcendental notions that apply exclusively to everything, like 'contingent/necessary', and such that the inferior cannot have a case unless the superior does.

4. That an a priori demonstration of the existence of God is impossible because there is nothing explanatorily prior to the divine being; thus, reasoning must be a posteriori from the real dependences among things we perceive to the possibility of an absolutely First Being (The First Principle).

5. That such a being cannot be possible without existing necessarily.

6. That the First Being (God) is simple, omni-intelligent, free (spontaneous), omnipotent, and positively infinite.

7. That there is a formal distinction, which is more than a distinction within our concepts or definitions, among the divine attributes.

Unlike many thirteenth- and fourteenth-century authors, Scotus never wrote a grammar or logic handbook. Nor did he compose a treatise dealing explicitly with the grammatical and semantic issues that were eagerly debated at his time - for instance a treatise about the famous “properties of terms” or the “modes of signifying.” The only work concerning grammar and semantics, entitled Tractatus de modis significandi sive Grammatica speculativa, that was attributed to him until the beginning of the twentieth century, proved to be inauthentic; it was written by his contemporary Thomas of Erfurt, a leading representative of the school of the “modistae.” Given such an apparent lack of writings dedicated to grammatical and semantic problems, one may have the impression that Scotus was not particularly interested in linguistic analysis and that he should be regarded as a theologian, metaphysician, and moral philosopher, but not as a philosopher of language.

Yet such an impression would be quite misleading. Although Scotus never wrote a grammar or logic handbook, he had a keen interest in linguistic theory. This interest is most obvious in his commentaries on the Isagoge, on the Categories, and on Peri hermeneias. In these early writings, Scotus does not confine himself to paraphrasing Aristotle’s and Porphyry’s view. He rather uses their opinion as a starting point for a thorough discussion of fundamental issues in philosophical semantics – a discussion that allows him to critically examine various linguistic theories of his contemporaries and to develop his own theory. Such a discussion can also be found in some parts of his later works, especially in his metaphysical and theological writings.

The theory of natural law is the heart of the ethics of John Duns Scotus. Unlike other approaches in medieval ethics, Scotus’s framework is not that of an ethics of virtue. One reason for this is Scotus’s innovative concept of will, which diverges significantly from its classical and medieval predecessors. This new conception of will, and the assumptions for action theory that arise from it, require a different systematic role for the concept of virtue, one that accords greater weight to the judgment of reason than to the natural goal-directedness of purposive action. What takes center stage in Scotus’s ethics is the obligation on the part of reason to what is apprehended in the natural law as a practical truth, rather than what befits the agent’s end-directed nature as it is manifested in the virtues.

A second theme that determines the fundamental orientation of Scotus’s practical philosophy arises from the twofold task that confronted Scotus as a theologian. On the one hand, because of the influence of the Aristotelian conception of science, he had to show that the claim of theology to be a science could be made good. On the other hand, because he belonged to the Franciscan tradition, he also had to emphasize the practical character of theology. As a result, Scotus was faced with the task of developing an understanding of practical science that would show how both demands could be consistently met1 As I show in detail in this chapter, Scotus’s theory of natural law is precisely a response to this higher standard for rational acceptability.

By the end of the thirteenth century, it was clear that Aristotle’s physics and cosmology presented claims that were incompatible with God’s omnipotence. According to Scotus, “whatever does not evidently include a contradiction and from which a contradiction does not necessarily follow, is possible for God.” But many states of affairs, treated as impossible by Aristotle, seemed to involve no contradiction. Already in 1277, Stephen Tempier, Bishop of Paris, had issued his influential condemnation of, among other things, several key claims of Aristotle’s physics and cosmology precisely because they implied limitations on God’s absolute power. This condemnation did not lead to a wholesale rejection of Aristotelian thought, however. Aristotle had provided the most detailed and powerful conception of the physical universe known to medieval thinkers, and Scotus, like most of his contemporaries, was deeply wedded to this conception in its broad outlines and in a great deal of its detail. But he formed part of a movement, beginning in the late thirteenth century, and gathering momentum in the fourteenth, in which this conception was intensely scrutinized and modified in a number of fundamental respects. Nowhere did Aristotle’s thought pose greater problems than in doctrines concerning space and time. Scotus’s writings were an important chapter in the reexamination and modification of Aristotelian doctrines on these issues.

Work on Scotus’s moral psychology and action theory has been concerned almost exclusively with questions about the relationship between will and intellect and in particular about the freedom of the will itself. In this chapter I broaden the scope of inquiry. For I contend that Scotus’s views in moral psychology are best understood against the background of a long tradition of metaethical reflection on the relationship between being and goodness. In the first section of this chapter, therefore, I sketch the main lines of that tradition in medieval thinking and examine the novel and sometimes daring ways in which Scotus appropriated them. In the sections that follow I elaborate on three areas of Scotus’s action theory, very broadly conceived, in which his modifications of the medieval metaethical tradition can be seen bearing philosophical fruit. Thus, in the second section I examine his account of the goodness of moral acts, in the third his understanding of the passive dispositions of both sensitive appetite and will, and in the fourth his account of the active power of will.

This chapter discusses Scotus’s metaphysics under six headings: the nature of metaphysics itself as a discipline (Section I); identity and distinctness (Section II); the extent and scope of the Aristotelian categories (Section III); causality and essential orders (Section IV); matter, form, and the composite of matter and form (Section V); and a brief return to the nature of metaphysics (Section VI). Some metaphysical topics are not treated here but in other chapters of this volume: space and time (Chapter 2), universals and individuation (Chapter 3), and modality (Chapter 4). Scotus’s proof of God’s existence, discussed in Section IV, is examined in Chapter 6.

METAPHYSICS AS THE SCIENCE OF BEING

Theoretical Science

Scotus holds that there are exactly three real theoretical sciences, pursued for their own sake, that are open to us in our present life: metaphysics, mathematics, and physics (In Metaph. 6, q. 1, nn. 43–6). Each qualification is important. The requirement that such sciences be “real” – that is, concerned with things in the world rather than our concepts of them – excludes logic, which is the normative science of how we are to think about things, and thus concerned with concepts. The requirement that such sciences be pursued for their own sake excludes ethics, whose primary goal is to direct and regulate the will. The requirement that we can attain such knowledge in the condition of our present life, where we can only know things through sense perception and hence have no direct epistemic access to principles or to immaterial beings, rules out theology in the strict sense as well as a properly axiomatic metaphysics; we can however construct a ‘natural’ theology and metaphysics within our limitations. Mathematics and physics are defined in terms of material substance. Mathematics deals with material substances in their material aspect, namely, in terms of their purely quantitative features (which they have in virtue of their matter) and whatever is consequent upon those features.

Scotus’s teachings on moral virtue have attracted little attention, in part because there is no single text where he presents them systematically, in part because scholars tend to associate Scotus with the ethics of freedom and right reason. Even those sympathetic to his views report, with apparent regret, his move away from the virtue-centered Aristotelian model of ethics. This chapter attempts to explain the various roles that virtues do and do not play in his ethical theory. While Aristotle receives his share of criticism, so, too, does Augustine.

THIRTEENTH-CENTURY ETHICS: A LARGE, CONFUSING LEGACY

Ancient ethics takes as its starting point questions about the happiest human life and the virtues needed to live such a life. Virtues are thought to be dispositions developed only through many years of learning and practice, beginning in childhood. Vices, too, are dispositions; and like virtues, they gradually become “second nature” to the individual. For this reason Aristotle describes moral character as impossible, or at least exceedingly difficult, to change. His definition of moral virtue as a disposition concerned with choice does not imply, then, that people always remain free to choose actions “out of character.”

Both present-day historians of philosophy and those working in the past two centuries have considered the thought of Duns Scotus regarding the philosophical problems of universals and individuation as laying the groundwork for much of the philosophical speculation of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Their judgment is well founded, being based on numerous texts in writers such as William of Ockham, Adam Wodeham, Walter Burley, and a host of others whose starting points in discussing both universals and individuation were often the views of Duns Scotus. Furthermore, as the problem of justifying and delimiting the range of natural knowledge became more and more central to philosophical as well as theological investigation, the influence of Duns Scotus on the two problems under discussion continued to grow. Realists as late as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries looked to Scotus’s works for supporting arguments and conceptual tools whereby to salvage their claims that universals exist outside the mind, whereas the conceptualists and nominalists of later centuries often began their critique of contemporary opponents by pointing out the weaknesses in Scotus’s theories. The historical importance of Scotus’s thought on the subjects being considered here is then clear enough. But the systematic value of his solutions to the problems of universals and individuation should not be overlooked. Several contemporary philosophers working in the areas of metaphysics and epistemology appeal to distinctions bearing striking resemblances to those advanced by Scotus and his followers, especially regarding the problem of individuation.

The Earnest Professor begins the lecture by announcing that today we are going to investigate what we can know about God. The Artless Student immediately asks how it is possible that we finite minds can comprehend anything about the infinite. The Professor groans inwardly, resisting the temptation to retort by asking how the finite mind of the Student is so certain that God is infinite, given the Student’s avowal of doubt about the adequacy of finite minds.

Eager to maintain classroom civility, the Professor might congratulate the Student on fastening on a question discussed at length by John Duns Scotus. It is a sign of the seriousness with which Scotus takes this and related issues that he tackles them immediately in the Ordinatio version of his monumental Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard. The title of the first question in the Prologue to the First Part is “Whether It Is Necessary for Man in His Present State to Be Supernaturally Inspired with Some Doctrine.” The title of the first question of the First Part of the Third Distinction is “Whether God Is Naturally Knowable to the Wayfarer’s Intellect.” God’s existence is not at stake in these questions. Scotus thinks that God’s existence can be established as an item of natural theology, that part of theological speculation that can be developed by reason alone, independent of any kind of revelation. Scotus takes himself to be in agreement with Aristotle that human sense experience and natural reason are adequate to provide a demonstration of God’s existence.

Although the Brontës' lives are obviously inscribed within a world of Victorian religion from their births as daughters of a clergyman to the final death of survivor Charlotte in the loving arms of her curate husband, although their works are filled with striking and prominent religious characters and scenes turning on religious issues, critics of the twentieth century did not much view the Brontës within religious structures of understanding. Issues of psychology, sexuality, feminism, social power, even the apparently far-removed worlds of colonial and imperial England preoccupied us far more. Nor was this merely a matter of the good reasons, which I shall attempt to provide below, for not inscribing the Brontës into one or another simple religious construction, of their age or ours; and for not seeing their vision as ultimately focused, as say Christina Rossetti's was, on religion, especially not on religious ultimates. Even their world of death was not seen as the traditional one of death and the afterlife but, as with the Brontës' other contemporary Dickens, this world of the dead and dying.

On the whole, unless the religious issues were so central as to brook no avoidance – for instance in Tennyson’s In Memoriam, the priest Hopkins’ sonnets, Newman’s Apologia, or the very different representations of Trollope’s familiar world of Barsetshire clerical politics – we did not search with interest for religious themes.As the twentieth century turned away from those overstuffed Victorian memoirs of life and letters, they turned away from the obvious but rather unwelcome evidence of the age’s obsession with religion.

The two parts of Henry IV dramatise Prince Hal's coming of age amidst the political unrest following his father's usurpation of the throne of Richard II. The consequences of that usurpation weigh heavily upon King Henry: civil broils prolonged by those lords who helped him to the crown and now feel abandoned by him; fear of a rival claimant, Edmund Mortimer, whom Richard designated his heir; and an acute awareness that by killing Richard, he has violated - and made impossible to assume for himself - the divine right of kings. Such obstacles help to explain why his son Hal chooses to idle away his time in a tavern rather than at court. But Hal must learn to surmount them if he is to succeed his father, and in the royal narrative of Henry IV, which chronicles his progress from the taverns of Eastcheap to his coronation at Westminster, he does so: he defeats the rebels, transforms himself from wastrel to responsible heir, and strives to prove that linear succession can serve as a legitimate alternative to divine right. In dramatising his success, the two Henry IV plays offer a comic view of fifteenth-century history. Yet they also address political and social issues pertinent to Elizabethan England, and their popularity for Shakespeare's audiences no doubt resulted in part from their use of the past to comment on the present.

1. Pale Sisters! reared amid the purple sea

2. Of windy moorland, where, remote, ye plied

3. All household arts, meek, passion-taught and free,

4. Kinship your joy and Fantasy your guide!

5. Ah! Who again ’mid English heaths shall see

6. Such strength in frailest weakness, or so fierce

7. Behest on tender women laid, to pierce

8. The world’s dull ear with burning poetry?

9. Whence was your spell? and at what magic spring,

10. Under what guardian Muse, drank ye so deep

11. That still ye call and we are listening;

12. That still ye plain to us and we must weep?

13. Ask of the winds that haunt the moors, what breath

14. Blows in their storms, outlasting life and death!

Myth or myths?

A sombre moor – a treeless expanse of barely inhabited upland swept by savage storms. Three solitary figures, struggling against the wind or, perhaps, sitting in the austere parsonage, reading, writing and eagerly conversing about life, and literature, and love. From their talk rise other figures in similar landscapes, suffering, even tragic, but likewise bold and eager in claiming their share of 'life, fire, incident'. Jane and Rochester, Catherine and Heathcliff are names that shape the dreams of the young and haunt the minds of the old.

The Brontë sisters are not obviously difficult writers. Indeed, they may seem all too easily accessible. Generations of readers have thrilled to the passion of Cathy and Heathcliff, identified with the sufferings of Lucy Snowe and Agnes Grey, succumbed to Mr Rochester's dark allure. These are not texts which seem to require elucidation, but stories which millions have urgently, if often incoherently, felt to be speaking of and to their own most intimate concerns. And if - as Charlotte Brontë acknowledged, in the Biographical Notice with which, in 1850, she prefaced her sisters' novels - their strangeness has needed explanation, explanation has seemed readily to hand. Since the publication of that Notice, and of Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë seven years later, the key to the Brontë s' works has been found - straightforwardly or more indirectly, both by ordinary reader and professional academic - in the peculiar circumstances of their authors' brief and tragic lives. The story of those lives has, indeed, assumed an almost mythic place in the English cultural imagination: after Shakespeare's Stratford, Haworth Parsonage is England's most visited literary shrine.

Richard II is a tour de force in verse with every character speaking poetry from beginning to end, but the play has many languages: its poetry is only one of them. Believed to have been written in 1595, Richard II is poised midway through the decade in which Shakespeare rewrote English history for the years 1398 to 1485. This play, whose second Quarto (1598) was the first of his published play-texts to have Shakespeare's name on its title-page, is also a key text for exploring his development as a writer. In 1679, thinking particularly of York's speech in 5.2 (lines 23-40), Dryden suggested that Shakespeare was able to 'infuse a natural passion into the mind', the implication being that he operated at a level deeper than the superficial 'noise' of bombastic poetry. Following the recognition of dramatic (as opposed to purely verbal) imagery in the early 1950s, in 1966 John Russell Brown stressed that understanding Richard's character involved more than merely analysing what he said: the importance of audiences being able to reach thoughts beyond words and read a subtext from them was seen as crucial to the 'stage reality' of Richard himself. For Russell Brown, Richard's silences and 'his last unthinking, physical reactions' were also part of languages that needed to be read.

Thus the thirteen-year-old Branwell recorded, with an acute sense of historical momentousness, his acquisition of various sets of toy soldiers, the 'Young Men', who were destined to have such an adventurous afterlife in the Brontë children's writings. The first set was given to him in 1824, the year in which four of his sisters, Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte and Emily, left home for school. If the soldiers were meant to keep him company in the absence of all except the four-year-old Anne, the acquisition of three more sets in the following two years may have retained a connection with more traumatic losses: the deaths, in 1825, of his older sisters, Maria and Elizabeth. When, in 1826, Charlotte, Emily and Anne pounced with delight on a new set of soldiers and each chose for herself the one who would become the projection and object of her special 'genius', the children had lost not only their mother, Maria Branwell, in 1821, but also these two sisters. The history of what the survivors 'really pretended did happen' to those toy soldiers carries the intensity of a story won, in part, from the harsh facts of childhood bereavement. Both a writing network and an imaginative safety net, the sagas of Angria and Gondal were the product of a collaborative sibling creativity which also included, like a ghostly memory, the ones who were dead. The poetry of the four Brontë children took root in those narratives.