Title
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Freedom, contingency and self-gift: from Duns Scotus to humanae vitae
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Author
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Abstract
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This paper explores the prospects of a kind of Scotistic personalism. It does so by tying Scotus’s key notion of synchronic contingency to the metaphysics of marriage. Scotus’s voluntarism often enjoys a dubious reputation in the history of philosophy, standing at the origin of a typically “modern” conception of freedom. Pope Benedict’s remarks in his Regensburg address are used as a historical foil, in a balancing act with the 1277 condemnations, and it is suggested that Scotus was precisely aiming at a careful and valuable balance. This paper subsequently explores whether it can also be understood as a personalist metaphysics of self-gift that can ground one of the Church’s most contentious moral teachings: Humanae Vitae. A rudimentary framework of a ‘scotistic’ metaphysics of institutions and personhood is presented and a metaphysics of marriage is built on top of that. In the last section this is complemented with some wider theological, especially mariological considerations. |
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Language
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English
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Source (journal)
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Philosophical News
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Publication
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2018
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Volume/pages
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16
(2018)
, p. 19-28
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Full text (publisher's version - intranet only)
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