ABSTRACT
Historians of medieval philosophy outline a "second beginning" of metaphysics in the thirteenth century and particularly with Scotus, one that is "ontological" rather than theological. In fact, it enables a whole new dimension of reality to be focused and expressed. The "content of the form," so to speak, opens up to view in a way that was to be differently explored and exploited poetically by Dante. The subjectivity of what Dante presents as nonetheless divine revelation flows from the same source of insight as that from which Duns Scotus draws his recognition of the "formal" character of things as they are accessed through human knowing and experience. Duns’s concept of the univocity of being makes both the finite and the infinite thinkable in a single concept that gives humans apparent conceptual control over the other realm that the Paradiso obsessively recognizes as ineffable.
