From Duns Scotus to Early Modern Scottish Philosophy. A History of Unexpected Legacies and Flourishing Convergences

This essay deals with Scottish intellectual history, beginning with John Duns Scotus (d. 1308) and ending on the threshold of the early Scottish Enlightenment. The essay is structured through the prism of three perspectives that complement each other. The first level is the foundational idea that Scottish intellectual life between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth centuries was given a certain unity and continuity by the early impulse of Duns Scotus’ work. The crucial and tragic intersections of the ecclesiastical history played a major role in the development of a cultural uniqueness. The second level is that Scottish thought in this period was distinctively open to continental European influence, much more so than England, and certainly in the area of the law. Finally, there is a more implicit and submerged level according to which the specific features of the Enlightenment in Scotland were owing to this distinctively Scotist intellectual tradition and in particular to an entirely local evolution of a (reformed) scholastic orientation which - integrated with the theological novelties of Humanism and the Reformation as well as challenged by the breach of Cartesianism - ventures towards very original epistemological forms, which lay the foundations for the flowering of an exceptional period for Scotland.