Introduction

At the close of the thirteenth century, there was no feeling of a fin de siècle in Oxford. The young university flourished and the expanding Franciscan movement led the way in the shadow and light of the weighty Parisian condemnations of 1277, and in the light of the Oxford condemnations of 1277 and 1284. Step by step, Duns Scotus pushed back the boundaries of semantics and logic. Massive theological problems lay ahead and the new lecturer of divinity tried to cast new light upon the dilemmas surrounding individuality. During these remarkable years of the mid-1290s everything changed. The theoretical center of the new way of thought was Duns' theory of synchronic contingency. His is an ontology of individuals, comprising the past, present, and future of the created universe. The theory of individuality is a fine example of how philosophy changed. ‘Because of its theological implications, the problem of individuation in the latter portion of the thirteenth century became one of the more controversial and hotly discussed issues in university circles, especially at Paris and Oxford.’ Nevertheless, true individuality is still a rather neglected issue in philosophy. ‘The purely and pre-eminently philosophical problem concerning the ultimate constitutive element of individual reality is either totally neglected or only partially treated by modern philosophers.’

The principal ontological consequence of far-reaching conceptual shifts is discerned in the theory of individuals. Scientific revolutions are, for the most part, matters of major conceptual shifts, and at the end of the thirteenth century, one such shift took place. In ancient philosophy, the individual poses a problem.