John Duns Scotus

Scotus was born at Duns on the Scottish border, joined the Franciscans as a boy, studied and taught at Oxford, and moved to Paris in 1302. The next year he was expelled for refusing to sign the king's petition against the pope; he returned, took his doctorate in theology in 1305, was sent to Cologne in 1307 and died there the following year, only about forty-two. Most of his works are students' reports and unfinished drafts, and the texts are extremely complex.

His arguments were famous for their fineness, and later ages called him the Subtle Doctor. Against Aquinas' doctrine of analogy he held that 'being' means the same when said of God and of creatures; otherwise we could form no concept of God at all. He proposed haecceity, 'thisness': what makes this Socrates this one and not another is not matter but a positive, irreducible individuality.

In ethics he was a voluntarist: the will is not determined by the intellect's judgement but genuinely free, able even to go against reason's advice. God's will is free likewise, and the moral law is good because God wills it, not willed because it is good. He defended the Immaculate Conception, which became Catholic dogma in 1854. Renaissance humanists mocked his followers as 'Dunses', and the word dunce entered English.