DUNS SCOTUS: HIS HISTORICAL AND CONTEMPORARY SIGNIFICANCE

Abstract

This essay offers an attempt to explore the relation of Duns Scotus’ philosophy to modernity and post-modernity. The latter seems but an advanced version of the former, in which the inseparability of univocity, representation and flattened causal interaction along a single plane becomes more fully realised. One might also contend that according to a post-Scotist perspective, there is no “modern” phase at all, and so also no “pre-modern” to which one might nostalgically appeal. Instead, there is a certain middle ages which has never ceased to be dominant. Where, in the midst of all these epochs, which turn out not to be epochs at all, is one to look?