ABSTRACT
Not the Thomistic metaphysical way of analogy, but rather Scotus's refashioning of metaphysics as a transcendental science, opens the path that is followed by modern metaphysics and generally by the modern scientific enterprise. Heidegger, who worked early and intensively on Scotus’s type of thinking, emphasizes the continuity between metaphysics and empirical science. The early Heidegger developed his thesis about being in his 1916 Habilitationsschrift on a text believed at the time to be authored by Scotus but subsequently identified as the Grammatica speculativa of Thomas of Erfurt. Scotus eliminates the work of attempting to build understanding through similitude and assimilation to the divine-in other words, knowledge by analogy. For Scotus, metaphysics is possible only as a formal, modal science of transcendent being, without objective intuition. There is, however, a transcendental knowledge of the conditions of possibility of experience, and this is what Kant’s critical philosophy works out in depth and detail.
