Haecceitas and the Question of Being: Heidegger and Duns Scotus

Abstract

Over the thirty years since his death Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) hasemerged as one of the key philosophers of the 20th Century. Yet he claimed to be moved throughout the entirety of his work by a single question: the question of the meaning of being. According to Heidegger the ancient Greek thinkers experienced being with a sense of wonder that has been lost in modernity. There has never been a satisfactory answer to this question and philosophers are no longer even perplexed by their inability to answer it. It was the question of being (Seinsfrage) that Heidegger set out to confront in his unfinished master work Being and Time (1927). The young Heidegger years before the publication of that work had been afforded an insight to an aspect of what would become his central concern from what at first might seem an unlikely source: the medieval philosopher and theologian John Duns Scotus.Scotus inspired Heidegger in so far as his thought was in proximity to “real life,” and while he would later move decisively away from the position he took in his ‘scotus Book,” in a move that has been referred to as the first “turn” in his thought from the ‘system of Catholicism” to liberal Protestantism, Scotus provided the young scholar with an insight into human individuality that would prove decisive in his mature work. Despite this move away from any kind of “onto-logic,” there is an element of Heidegger’s thought that is influenced by Scotus (1265/6-1308), one of the brightest stars of medieval philosophy. So, while my investigation is conducted with the fact of this turn in mind, my aim is to explore this element.

Keywords

• Martin Heidegger
• John Dun Scotus
• the question of Being