The Metaphysic of Creation of Duns Scotus: The Intellectus Divine as Locus of the Possibile

Abstract

The extensive bibliography about Duns Scotus from Tobias Hoffman shows a few comparative studios between Scotus and Leibniz establishing the exiguous character of the contemporary background on works that develop this line of investigation.

Our interest consists in laying the foundations of a research that evidences the argumentative strategies put into play in the configuration of the metaphysics of creation proposed by both thinkers.

In this context and as a first approximation, our article focuses on Scotus and describes the analytics of creation with the different mediations suggested in the field of intelligence and will. Firstly, we consider the phenomenology of divine knowledge that gives rise to the possibles. Scotus distinguishes two orders of possibility: the formal and the ontological. The first comes from the relationship of compatibility and non-contradiction between the constitutive formalities of the possible. The ontological recognizes as a cause, the divinus intellectus as it is the beginning of the esse inteligibile. The divine intellect appears as a region of the possibles to which existence does not belong or is essentially repugnant to them.

Secondly, the passage to the existence of the possibles is analyzed as effects of the free and contingent action of the omnipotent will of God under the modality of a synchronic causality.