METAPHYSICS The Metaphysics of Duns Scotus In the system of Duns Scotus, metaphysics occupies a fundamental place It is a metaphysics stated in Aristotelian terms, but given a very personal interpretation Like Aristotle, Scotus deWnes metaphysics as the science that studies being qua being; but whereas in Aristotle, to study something qua being was a special way of studying, in Scotus, being qua being is a special object for study Being qua being is indeed the broadest possible object of study, including Wnite and inWnite being, actual and possible being In Scotus as in Aquinas it is a principal concern of metaphysics to establish the existence and attributes of God, so that natural theology is a branch of the discipline But for Scotus the scope of natural theology, and therefore of metaphysics, is both broader and narrower than it is for Aquinas It is broader, because Scotus believed that the terms that signify the fundamental properties of being qua being—such as ‘good’, ‘true’, ‘one’, and so on—applied not just analogously, but univocally to God as well as to creatures But it is narrower, because many truths about God that Aquinas had treated as accessible to natural reason are regarded by Scotus as graspable only by faith Aquinas had thought that reason could prove that God was omnipotent, immense, omnipresent, and so on Scotus, on the contrary, thought that reason was impotent to prove that God was omnipotent A Christian, he argued, knows that among the powers of an omnipotent God is the power to beget a Son; but this is not a power that pure reason can show God to possess Thus many topics that, for Aquinas, were within the scope of the metaphysician are by Scotus assigned to the dogmatic theologian It was commonplace among scholastics to say that ‘being’ was a transcendental term that applied across the Aristotelian categories, and to say further that every being of every kind had properties like goodness and unity Scotus’ innovation in this respect was the claim that transcendental predicates such as ‘being’ and ‘good’ were univocal, not analogical.6 But there is a diVerent kind of transcendental to which Scotus attached great importance: the transcendental disjunction He drew up a list of pairs of terms of which one or other must apply to whatever there is: every being must be either actual or potential, Wnite or inWnite, necessary or contingent See Ch above 201