Professor Thomas Williams (University of South Florida, IASH Fellow): The Ethics of John Duns Scotus (1265/66-1308): Some New Directions for Research
John Duns Scotus (1265/66-1308) was a consequential figure in the history of ethics, but understanding of his work has been hampered by the confused state of the texts as well as by scholarly focus on a handful of topics to the exclusion of many others. With the completion in 2013 of a critical edition of Scotus’s central work, the time is right for a systematic investigation of Scotus’s ethics that takes into account the whole range of topics on which he wrote and reveals him as an important transitional figure in the history of ethics. I briefly review the state of scholarship, show how the new texts have rendered much previous discussion of Scotus’s ethics outdated, draw attention to important topics that have been ignored, and sketch the main lines of a new account of Scotus’s ethics.