ABSTRACT
Philosophy was mostly practiced in the Middle Ages as an academic discipline and, consequently, in the milieu of a medieval university. Theology, law, and medicine are very concerned with causality: medicine for obvious reasons, law because much of law has to do with agency, which is a causal notion, and theology because theologians deal with concepts like miracles, and miracles were defined in the Middle Ages in basically causal terms. Duns Scotus’s Treatise on God as First Principle is a work on natural theology, and specifically on the metaphysical priority of God vis-a-vis the world. One of the main normative distinctions was that between natural and violent motions. There are two ways in which something can be ordained or directed towards something as if to an end: by itself, like a man who directs himself to the place where he is going; and by something else, as an arrow is aimed at a definite spot by the archer.
