ABSTRACT
The history of self-reflection, at its crucial turning point in the Middle Ages, has been the object of voluminous and acute scholarly study. Boulnois's genealogy of modern metaphysics in age of John Duns Scotus, following Etienne Gilson, shows that structures of self-reflection are the backbone of knowledge as it was conceived in the Middle Ages. Self-reflection thus bears centrally on the status of metaphysics as purportedly foundational knowledge. In the new, proto-modern outlook, verifiable knowledge is no longer founded in the heavens, nor even in the world, but rather in the self and its own self-reflection. Duns gives metaphysics an autonomous, rational foundation, and this becomes the basis of a modern understanding of self-reflection such as Descartes will eventually erect. There is already a kind of foundational discourse based on philosophical self-reflection in Duns. The transcendent “beyond” remains accessible through revelation, or else through the practical action of willing, but in any case not as an object of theoretical knowing.
