John Duns Scotus
(1266–1308)
John Duns Scotus was an English/Scotch theologian whose view of the
creation was diametrically opposed to that of his near contemporary predecessor
Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274).
Aquinas thought that God had created all things in accordance with Reason, and thus had no
freedom in his creations, concluding logically that there is only one
possible world. God had also given man the power of reason, enabling man to understand the world.
By contrast, Scotus insisted that God's freedom meant that to learn what exists, one has to study the
actual world, gathering
evidence about reality.
Scotus was thus the archetype of what
Kuno Fischer in 1860 called the empiricist school of philosophy as opposed to the rationalists.
Fischer's rationalist/empiricist division corresponds in science to the distinction between theory and practice.
A famous quip is that, in theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is often a big difference between theory and practice.
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