Duns Scotus

There's some debates in the medieval ages, and some reformers side with certain individuals in these debates.

So you have someone like Thomas Aquinas who's going to say, this is maybe a helpful test case where he'll say something like all the precepts of the decalogue are immutable and indispensable you have someone like john duns scotus who will come along and say I think just the first table is immutable and indispensable.

I don't think that God could have created a world where he said, hate me, blaspheme, those kinds of things.

But the second table, those all seem to be changeable.

Lovely Dominican there.

On the 8th, we have Blessed John Duns Scotus.

November 9th is the Martyrs of Constantinople, who defended Catholic, well, actually at the time it was just Christian artwork from Iconoclasm.

November 10th is Pope St. Leo the Great.

And yet if God is omniscient and omnipotent, then I couldn't have done otherwise.

And so how do we square that circle was an enormous focus of conversation of people like Aquinas and Anselm and Augustine or Boethius or Duns Scotus.

It occupied centuries of really deep thinkers.

And so what we're doing is trying to take some of those concepts and ideas and bring them to bear on questions of AI responsibility to see if we might be able to make sense of what it would mean to actually hold designed agents responsible just as they worried about it.

It's not rooted in real life.

But if you read Thomas Aquinas or you read Bonaventure, you read Duns Scotus, that's the farthest thing from the truth.

And also remember, it was Pope Leo XIII, predecessor to Pope Leo XIV.

In 1879, he wrote an encyclical restoring and calling people to Thomas Aquinas and the principles of philosophy and theology as taught by Thomas Aquinas.

And I thought, you know, it's crazy that I've never, I've never, I've, you know, read a number of treatments of this issue in the 13th century, have never seen gross test come up, you know, in a substantive way.

I did later learn I went and started reading some of the more recent literature on the superlapsarian thesis and learned that, you know, Grossetest comes up as a kind of precursor, usually, very briefly, to John Duns Scotus, who's the more famous representative of this position, you know, in the theological tradition, particularly from the Middle Ages.

But I realized, too, in the process of that reading, that Scotus himself got I almost certainly, to my mind, got his versions of these arguments from Grossetest as well.

So there's not been a book-length treatment of Grossetest on this question.

The other thing, the last thing I'll mention, which I think is in a way the most historically has been the most important argument for the superlapsarian position.

is what's sometimes called the argument for Christ's absolute predestination.

This is what you find in John Duns Scotus, and it's carried forward in a variety of ways, like down to Barth.

And it's the idea, and you do find this in Grossetest as well.

That's terrible now.

But in the library of that college, it's said to be haunted by the ghost of a 14th century friar and also philosopher called John Duns Scotus.

Now, whenever he would have been there in Oxford...

The library didn't exist at all.

From the very beginning the Dominicans and the Franciscans, the one eagerly, the other a little reluctantly, threw themselves into the intellectual movement, with the result that before long the greatest theologians of the age belonged either to the one order or the other.

Alexander of Hales, St. Bonaventure, Duns Scotus among the Franciscans, Albert the Great and St. Thomas Aquinas among the Dominicans.

What theology and philosophy owe to these, what, indeed, learning in general owes to them, can hardly be appreciated even yet, but beyond all doubt, it is to them that one must turn to seek the foundations of modern theological method.

Their very greatness was the immediate cause of the downfall of scholasticism in the succeeding ages, for no one dared to imagine that he could equal, much less surpass, the teaching of these masters.

So there's essentially a hill, and that hill was an indigenous place of worship, and the Catholics came and built a church right on top of it.

Um, so it's an incredible place, and actually, um, Trent, they have a, a fresco in the cupola of Duns Scotus, um, which I can't remember [laughs] if I told you last time I went there.

But, uh, anyway.

All right.