Identity of knower and known

In the area of human cognition, confrontationism, or transferred empiricism, was flourishing. Its principal axiom was that an object is prior to an act concerning that object. (Aristotle and Aquinas distinguished between the sensible, the intelligible, sense, intellect, in potency, in act; they asserted the identity of the knower in act and the known in act; but Scotus and his predecessors and followers taught the identity of the known in potency and the known in act.)
From this there can be no 'intelligible in sensible data,' no 'quiddity in corporeal matter'; and if there is understanding [of the intelligible in the sensible], it is an illusion." (Supplementary Notes on Sanctifying Grace CWL 19:567)

Secularism, the Scotist notion of being, and India

Milbank's bete noire - as, interestingly, also Lonergan's - is Duns Scotus and his equivocal notion of being, applicable equally to both God and creatures. It is this notion of being that made possible an account of the world as apart from God, and provided the basis for the concepts of pure nature and the secular in Western modernity.

Certainly Sankara's understanding of Being / Sat is not equivocal: even the most extreme monist interpreters would admit that, to the point of actually regarding the world as maya understood as illusion.

So: where are we?

What do we need to do as Christian thinkers in India? What kind of reading of the Western and Indian tradition? Our complexity, which is largely unknown to the West except for people like Clooney, is the new post-inculturation opposition between Brahmanic Hinduism and the subaltern / Dalit sensibility. Yet perhaps we cannot simply jettison the past. I am for engagement with it - even the Brahmanic past.

Money and the univocity of being

“Money, in modernity, is the institutionalization of univocity of being that Scotus thought necessary to ensure the unmediated knowledge of God.” [S. Hauerwas, "The Christian Difference" 149.] See the whole brilliant article for an explanation of this. Who would have thought that metaphysics might have such historical consequences?


What a claim! Did this perspective find representation in the ACPI meeting on money? 

Hauerwas and Blond on Scotus

Stanley Hauerwas is one more who, with Philip Blond, identifies Scotus as responsible for modernity and, eventually, postmodernity, with his insistence on the univocity of being, and his exaltation of being over and above God. (See his "The Christian Difference, or Surviving Postmodernism," The Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology, ed. Graham Ward [Oxford: Blackwell, 2001] 147-8.) (Earlier I found Caputo doing a similar thing... See his Philosophy and Theology, and my paper at Yercaud.)

Strangely, it is the Franciscan Sidney Mascarenhas who is now insisting on the pluriverse, accusing Thomas of uni-versity.