The texts
INTRODUCTION
xv Given that the Paris lectures were later than the Oxford lectures, one would expect that the Reportatio represents Scotus's most mature thought. But in fact Scotus was still revising the Ordinatio while at Paris—a task he never completed—and there is reason to think that Books III and IV of the Ordinatio are actually later than the corresponding texts of the Reportatio. Both the Reportatio and the Ordinatio exist in various manuscript traditions that transmit competing annotations, additions, cancellations, and corrections, as do the Quodibetal Questions.
The other work from which I have translated material for this collection, the Questions on the Metaphysics, cannot be dated as a whole to any particular point in Scotus's career, but Book IX is at least later than 1300.10
The texts Happily, the critical edition of the Questions on Aristotle's Metaphysics is excellent, and I have translated directly from it, without adopting so much as a single variant reading.
After that, things get more difficult. There is no critical edition yet of the Quodlibetal Questions, so for Quodlibet 18 I have used the editions of both Alluntis and Frank, along with three manuscripts from the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek: Clm 8717
(consulted by both Alluntis and Frank), Clm 23572, and Clm 26309 (consulted by Frank). I am very grateful to Tobias Hoffmann for providing me with scans of the Frank edition and of these manuscripts. I have resolved discrepancies between Alluntis and Frank by appeal to the manuscripts and by a consideration of the sense.
For Reportatio IA I have used the edition of Wolter and Bychkov. Although I have adopted a few variant readings in the complete translation that appears on the website, I have not done so in the excerpt presented here. I have not included any texts from Reportatio II, III, or IV; the lack of a modern edition and the confused state of the texts made this decision seem the only responsible one.
As for the Ordinatio, there is a critical edition, completed at last in 2014; but it is not without problems. The editors' punctuation and paragraphing is unreliable, and one sometimes cannot help but draw the conclusion that they do not understand the argument at hand. As Richard Cross has noted, the editors so privilege Codex
A (Assisi, Biblioteca communale 137) that they will print nonsense from A when other manuscripts—sometimes even all the other manuscripts—give a sensible reading.11 And this privileging of A continues even after Ordinatio III, d. 7, the point at which the editors themselves admit that A becomes unreliable. Since about half the material translated in this volume comes from the Ordinatio after Book III,
10 Quaestiones Super Libros Metaphysicorum Aristotelis I–V, ed. R. Andrews, G. Etzkorn, G. Gal,
R. Green, F. Kelley, G. Marcil, T. Noone, R. Wood (St. Bonaventure: The Franciscan Institute, 1997), xlii–xlvi.
11 Cross, Duns Scotus on God, 218–19 n. 37.
xvi
INTRODUCTION
d. 7, it is important for me to elaborate on the deficiencies of the edition and to justify my frequent recourse to the readings of other manuscripts, among which Codex
Q (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, cod. lat. 15854) is paramount.12
In their prefatory matter for volume X, which contains their edition of Book III, dd. 26–40, the editors note that after the first seven distinctions in Book III, the scribe of Codex A apparently no longer had access to the Liber Duns or Liber Scoti by which he had, up to that point, been able to correct the text before him. Instead, he relied on some other manuscript. And that he does not fully trust either the text before him or this other (unidentified) exemplar is evidenced by the fact that the scribe "frequently manifests his hesitation either in the margin or in the text itself." After offering twenty-something examples of this phenomenon, the editors go on to say that the scribe's uncertainty and (to a certain extent) his lesser degree of faithfulness in transmitting a text that he has compared not with the Liber Scoti but with some other exemplar is also evident from the rather frequent errors or incongruities, such as omissions of words, changes, additions, substitutions, clarifications, repetitions, incorrect interpretations of abbreviations, etc., as can be readily seen by looking at the apparatus of variants.
Note the oddity of this argument. The fact that there are "frequent errors or incongruities" in the text of A is supposed to be evidence that the scribe grew uneasy with his text, and less faithful to it, in the absence of the Liber Scoti with which to compare it. Surely, though, what the errors and incongruities tell us about the scribe's text—namely, that it wasn't very good—is more important than what they tell us about the scribe's state of mind.
In any event, the editors acknowledge that the text of A after III, d. 7, is marred by "frequent errors or incongruities." And yet the very next thing they say is this:
"Be that as it may, Codex A, on account of its origin and authority, always remains the foremost leader and guide in discovering the text of Scotus." This is an exceedingly strange statement. By the editors' own lights, the text of A from III, d. 8, on is full of mistakes, it was transmitted in the absence of the very thing that made the earlier parts of A reliable and authoritative—the availability of the Liber Scoti as a source by which to correct the text at hand—and the scribe of A himself knew he had a bad text on his hands. It is therefore irresponsible for them to insist, in spite of all these things, on continuing to privilege A over all the other manuscripts.
After the passage just quoted, the editors turn to "the text of Scotus in other codices." They first note three kinds of involuntary scribal errors: misinterpretations of abbreviations (because the scribes are either bad at theology or bad at paleography), doubleor even triple-barreled renderings of over-abbreviated abbreviations (just to be safe), and the omissions and repetitions occasioned by homoioteleuton, linejumpings, and the like. That brings us to Codex Q:
12 I have written about this at much greater length, with an analysis of a number of examples, at http:// ethicascoti.com/edition.pdf.