In response to scholarship which has shown that seventeenth-century Scottish scholasticism was influenced by John Duns Scotus (1265/66–1308), Jean-Pascal Anfray has argued that Scottish scholasticism was only indirectly influenced by Scotism, especially by Jesuit thinkers like Francisco Suárez (1548–1618), using the Aberdeen Doctor James Sibbald (1595–1647) and his theory of the body-soul composite as a litmus test. In reply to Anfray’s claims, this article undertakes three interconnected tasks. First, it renews calls for philosophical Scotism to be defined according to a (...) principles-based approach focusing on Scotus’s metaphysics of essence in contrast to a quasi-falsificationist approach. Second, it shows how Sibbald adopts the Scotist metaphysics of essence over the very different Suárezian metaphysics of essence. Third, it demonstrates how Sibbald endorses Scotus’s qualified pluralism in accounting for the body-soul composite. Sibbald thus turns out to be more directly Scotist (and less Suárezian) than first thought. (shrink)

One classical version of cosmological argument, defended famously by Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, deduces the existence of a First Cause from the existence of a particular sort of causal series: one that is ‘essentially ordered’. This argument has received renewed defence in recent work by Feser, Cohoe, and Kerr. I agree with these philosophers that the argument is sound. I believe, however, that the standard defence given of the ECA in these philosophers can be complemented by a formulation that (...) appeals to the powers theory of possibility. This approach to possibility has been defended in recent years by, for example, Pruss, Jacobs, and Vetter. In this article, I show how this modal theory allows us to defend the ECA in a way that is dialectically advantageous as well as clarifying. (shrink)

This is the first special issue of the British Journal of the History of Philosophy to be devoted to the thought of the Middle Ages. Its topic is relations. The articles have been chosen to give an...

In his Paris Reportatio John Duns Scotus challenges ordinary views of identity and distinction. I argue that Scotus affirms that there is more than one type of identity: some forms of identity are...