Scotus Roboticus: John Duns Scotus’s Doctrine of Scientia as the Origin of Technological Modernity

Of realty the rarest-veind unraveller; a not/Rivalled insight, be rival Italy or Greece;/Who fired France for Mary without spot."So goes the closing stanza of Gerald Manley Hopkins's "Duns Scotus's Oxford" (1879), the first line of which foreshadows my thesis: that the metaphysics of John Duns Scotus (1265/66-1308), by rethinking the fundamental unit of both thought and being as the possible individual, marks the moment in Western intellectual history when contemplating existing reality -"realty," Hopkins poetizes -and its order ceases to characterize knowledge, scientia.This latter term lies at the center of this exploratory, even expeditionary paper, which presents some conclusions from a detailed study I am writing on the relationship between God's attributes and Creation in 13 th -and 14 th -century Latinate university theology.In this tradition, which centered on reading and commenting upon Aristotle (384-322 b.c.) and other figures of the "new science" -the glut of Greek and Arabic sources that were received in western Europe in the 12 th century and, in the 13 th , placed at its nascent universities' curricular center -scientia unites three discourses.It is, first, a psychological concept.Via the 'facultative' interpretation of the imago Dei, scientia is a rational, Crossing: The INPR Journal Crossing: The INPR Journal.Special