Book Reviews by Tobias Hoffmann
Theological Studies, 2014
The 700th anniversary of the death of John Duns Scotus (1265/66-1308) was celebrated by a monumen... more The 700th anniversary of the death of John Duns Scotus (1265/66-1308) was celebrated by a monumental "Quadruple Congress"-four major conferences in different North American and European cities. The present volume publishes 18 papers in English, French, and German, most of which were presented at the fourth conference (Strasbourg 2009), dedicated to Duns Scotus's legacy. Some later medieval thinkers are discussed (e.g., Durandus of Saint-Pourçain, William of Alnwick, Walter of Chatton, John Buridan, Peter of Candia), but the weight of the book lies more in the postmedieval period. My review focuses on the book's treatment of the early modern period, where Scotus's influence was mostly indirect or unacknowledged and therefore difficult to assess. Volker Leppin examines Scotus's influence on Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin. Luther, who had only indirect knowledge of Scotus, rejected his teaching on free will (liberum arbitrium), according to which a sinner does not need grace to abandon his sinful path (94). Scotus's impact on Zwingli (by way of fourteenth-fifteenthcentury Scotism) is much stronger: God is infinite being, and hence there is an infinite distance between him and creatures. (But does not Scotus also teach that "being" is univocal, thus bridging this distance? We do not learn about Zwingli's take on this.) The emphasis on God as infinite being and as infinitely remote from creatures has three important implications for Zwingli: (1) divine providence leaves no place for human freedom; (2) the eucharistic bread cannot contain God himself but can only signify God; and (3) the Chalcedonian formula of the unity of Christ's human and divine nature is only figurative speech, which implies a Nestorian tendency in Zwingli (95-99). Zwingli in turn is behind Calvin's idea that "finitum non est capax infiniti," which leads Calvin to deny, as Zwingli did, God's real presence in the Eucharist (99-100). Two papers discuss Scotus's or Scotists' influence on Descartes. Francesco Marrone convincingly traces Descartes's distinction between realitas formalis and realitas obiectiva to John the Canon (Ioannes Canonicus), a fourteenth-century Scotist, who had received it from Scotus himself. Realitas formalis (or subiectiva for John) refers to a thing's real existence, whereas realitas obiectiva is a thing's "being" as the object of thought. Recall that Descartes uses this distinction in the Third Meditation to prove God's existence: he argues that the objective reality of one's idea of God-the infinite being it represents-could only have been caused by an infinite formal reality, that is, by God himself. As Marrone shows, John the Canon uses the distinction to show that the concept of "being," as to its realitas obiectiva (the representational content of "being"), can be univocal, that is, common to God and creatures, without implying that God and creatures have anything common in reality (i.e., without a common realitas subiectiva) (110-16). The theme of Mehl's investigation is Descartes's reaction against a Scotist tradition that Descartes might have found in Mersenne. For Scotus, the possibles are formally
Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 2001
Philosophisches Jahrbuch, 2021
Philosophisches Jahrbuch, 2001
Theologie und Philosophie, 1999
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Book Reviews by Tobias Hoffmann