Duns Scotus

Duns Scotus earned his nickname honestly: few thinkers reward and punish attention so equally. Against Aquinas he argued that being is said univocally, in one sense, of God and creatures, or else we could not so much as speak of God. He gave the will a primacy over the intellect, and coined haecceity, thisness, the individuating principle that makes a thing not merely a member of a kind but uniquely itself. His razor-fine distinctions shaped late medieval thought so deeply that centuries later his name, in the mouths of his mockers, gave English the word dunce.