John Duns Scotus

My current project of mine is on John Duns Scotus's conception of divine simplicity. Scotus’s account of divine simplicity (henceforth DDS) is often characterized as a radical revision and weakening of the doctrine. My assertion is that--by drawing on the insights of contemporary mereology--John Duns Scotus’s account of DDS can plausibly be demonstrated to preclude all forms of mereological complexity, thus circumventing the charge that his account weakens the doctrine.

By drawing on the philosopher AJ Cotnoir's work on the Weak Supplementation Principle, we can articulate the following conditional: if mereological disjointedness (non-overlap) is necessary for proper parthood and certain aspects of a thing are entirely mereologically coincident (i.e. share all of the same parts), then the possession of coincident yet extramentally distinct aspects does entail any real composition. I argue that we have reason from Scotus's own corpus to hold that Scotus at least implicitly holds that mereological disjointedness is a necessary condition for proper parthood and that God has no mereologically disjointed parts. As such, Scotus's account of divine simplicity entails and maintains the absolute mereological non-composition of God. Thus, the popular objection to Scotus's account of simplicity that his account entails real composition fails.