Abstract

The book is divided into eight chapters, covering various branches of philosophy, beginning with epistemology and proceeding through metaphysics to psychology and ethics. The book’s first chapter prepares the reader for this philosophical overview by sketching the historical and intellectual context in which Duns Scotus lived and worked. In this chapter the authors walk their reader through the maze of the Scotistic corpus acting as skilled guides. Scotus, they explain, has three different commentaries on the Sentences of Peter Lombard: his earliest commentary, referred to as the Lectura; a later, revised commentary, the Ordinatio; and a third, final commentary done in Paris, the Reportatio Parisiensis. Chapter 2 explains Scotus’s foundational doctrine about the univocity of being. Chapter 3 then shows how this univocal concept works in the science of being, that is, metaphysics. The authors next take up the problem of contingency as Scotus conceives of it in the light of necessitarian views of reality. Scotus argues for a radically contingent universe that is dependent on the divine will, yet has a deep basis for the necessity found in its natures in nothing less than divine knowledge. Ingham and Dreyer carefully discuss how Scotus attempts to remain firmly within the realm of metaphysical realism by his teaching that each common nature possesses a real unity that serves as the basis for the mind’s universal concept, even if this unity is less than the numerical unity of the individual. In itself “horseness” is just “horseness” and thus indifferent to being either universalized in the mind or individuated in the concrete horse. In chapters 5 through 7, Ingham and Dreyer provide a balanced reading of the Scotistic ethics by explicating in some detail his notion of the will as the rational potency within the human soul. The final chapter of the book provides a general appreciation of the significance and enduring value of Scotus’s thought.