ABSTRACT
A crucial angle of approach for understanding the change of perspective brought about by Duns concerns the new status of possibility. For Aristotle and Aquinas, everything begins from the actual, but Scotus, like Plato, hypothesizes possibilities as essences preceding actual existence and standing even quite apart from it. Duns's predecessor Henry of Ghent considers such possibility as a necessary presupposition for everything that is actual. Scotus, building on his predecessors, invents a knowledge of determinate possibilities that effectively sweeps away the vast unchartable realm of indeterminate potential by focusing attention on determinate possibilities that can be reflectively defined and thenceforth calculated. Duns’s modal logic discerns a realm in which he can treat the possible as a kind of actuality. The difference from Duns is that Dante invents this new realm of self-reflexively created possibility not as a substitute for any higher order of reality, but rather as its expression.
