Abstract

In his Quodlibetal Questions and other texts, John Duns Scotus makes the seemingly-startling claim that angels or wayfarers achieve self-knowledge without recognizing God as their exemplar. I will show how this critique of images follows from Scotus’s deeper, more general, rejection of theories of analogy. Despite curtailing the image as a means of understanding God, angels, as well as certain wayfarers, are capable of distinct natural abstractive cognition of God according to Scotus.