So Scotus relegates concerns about happiness to the affectio commodi (affection advantage-profit) and assigns whatever is properly moral to the other affection, the affectio iustitiae (affection for justice). It’s also that he rejects the idea that moral norms are intimately bound up with human nature and human happiness. It’s not merely that he thinks there can be no genuine freedom in mere intellectual appetite. And just as Aquinas’s conception of the will was tailor-made to suit his eudaimonistic conception of morality, Scotus’s conception of the will is tailor-made to suit his anti-eudaimonistic conception of morality. Morality is not tied to human flourishing at all. Scotus rejects the idea that will is merely intellectual appetite, he is saying that there is something fundamentally wrong with eudaimonistic ethics. That’s why Aquinas can understand the will as an intellectual appetite for happiness. But intellectual appetite is free because the intellect deals with universals, not particulars.Īquinas held a eudaimonistic theory of ethics: the point of the moral life is happiness. Sense appetite is not free because the senses provide only particulars as objects of appetite. Intellectual appetite is aimed at objects as presented by the intellect and sense appetite at objects as presented by the senses. According to Aquinas, freedom comes in simply because the will is intellectual appetite rather than mere sense appetite. Scotus quite self-consciously puts forward his understanding of freedom as an alternative to Aquinas’s. Of course he wasn’t alone in this, but he did bring much of this thought to a head and formulated the beginnings of a set of propositions, concepts, and thought that would shape the historical drift of philosophical speculation on Free Will and Universals up to our time. So from him we get all those thinkers who have reputiated the whole Augustinian tradition of Free Will. He also affirmed that natural law in the strict sense does not depend on God’s will. Of course there are gradations and battlelines to be drawn along the way in this sordid history. Scotus believed there are actual universals existing outside the mind and thereby can be called realist, and he opposed those who deny extra-mental universals and are called nominalists, and whose descendents in our time became the anti-realists of the postmodern turn. Known as the “the Subtle Doctor,” he left a mark on discussions of such disparate topics as the semantics of religious language, the problem of universals, divine illumination, and the nature of human freedom. Dons Scotus is probably one of the more important philosophers you’ve never heard of (unless you’re an academic or specialist in the field of philosophy).
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