The translations
INTRODUCTION
xvii A fourth category of variants comprises all those voluntary changes that certain redactors introduced into the text of Scotus, and especially the redactor of the text that Codex Q and others along with it transmit. They did this, to be sure, with the intention of making certain difficult statements easier to understand, rendering more elegant the occasional awkward manner of expression, correcting errors or infelicitous forms in style or grammar, explaining a rather obscure meaning, or, finally, completing certain expressions.
In other words, the frequent errors of A have been corrected in Q, the frequent infelicities made felicitous. But these changes, the editors tell us, were voluntary: the redactor made them for purposes of his own, and therefore presumably they lead us further away from, rather than toward, the authentic text of Scotus.
So what the editors would have us believe is that the error-ridden text of A presents the authentic text of Scotus—notwithstanding the reasons the editors themselves offer us for concluding that something was amiss in the text(s) the scribe had before him, and that the scribe himself knew this and was bothered by it—and that the far more satisfactory text of Q represents an unauthorized tidying-up that leads us away from the authentic text. But we have absolutely no reason to believe that the text transmitted in A is closer to Scotus's or that the text transmitted in Q departs from Scotus's. We have no reason to believe that the superior readings in Q are the products of an interventionist scribe rather than faithful transmissions of a better text than the one possessed by the dissatisfied scribe of A.
Notice, indeed, what the editors are asking us to believe. They are asking us to believe that an otherwise unknown fourteenth-century scribe was a more capable thinker than John Duns Scotus, better able to supply the right kinds of examples, to complete arguments consequentially, to treat the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions properly. For the Scotus of A is frequently bad at all those things; the Scotus of Q is quite adept. If it were just a matter of grammar and style, the editors' view would not be quite so implausible; all of us who work on Scotus know that his Latin can be pretty rough (though even Scotus knows the difference between enim and autem, between vel and et, which are frequently confused in A). But we are talking about basic philosophical skill here. The Scotus of Codex A is a frequently inept reasoner; the Scotus of Codex Q is a capable philosopher and theologian. And the Subtle Doctor was not a frequently inept reasoner.
For these reasons I have treated the Vatican edition as a tremendously useful point of departure but by no means as a last word, and I have ventured to adopt a fair number of variant readings—especially, though by no means exclusively, in Books III and IV—as indicated in the notes.
The translations I have adopted a few conventions that I should explain here. I have frequently (though not invariably) translated videtur as "evidently," which has a similar semantic range in