Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Spell of John Duns Scotus

The early medieval Scottish philosopher and theologian John Duns Scotus shook traditional doctrines of universality and particularity by arguing for a metaphysics of ’formal distinction’. Hundreds of years later, why did the 19th-century poet and self-styled philosopher Gerard Manley Hopkins find this revolutionary teaching so appealing?

John Llewelyn answers this question by casting light on various neologisms introduced by Hopkins and reveals how Hopkins endorses Scotus’ claim that being and existence are grounded in doing and willing.

Drawing on modern responses to Scotus made by Heidegger, Peirce, Arendt, Leibniz, Hume, Reid, Derrida and Deleuze, Llewelyn’s own response shows why it would be a pity to suppose that the rewards of reading Scotus and Hopkins are available only to those who share their theological presuppositions.

John Llewelyn (retired) was Reader in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis and Loyola University Chicago. He was one of the first Anglophone philosophers to engage constructively with Derrida’s thought.
His publications include The Rigor of a Certain Inhumanity: Toward a Wider Suffrage (Indiana University Press, 2012), Margins of Religion: Between Kierkegaard and Derrida (Indiana University Press, 2009), Seeing Through God: A Geophenomenology (Indiana University Press, 2004), Appositions - of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas (Indiana University Press, 2002), The HypoCritical Imagination: Between Kant and Levinas (Routledge, 2000), Emmanuel Levinas: The Geneaology of Ethics (Routledge, 1995), The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience: A Chiasmic Reading of Responsibility in the Neighbourhoos of Levinas, Heidegger and Others (Macmillan, 1991), Derrida on the Threshold of Sense (Macmillan, 1986) and Beyond Metaphysics? The Hermeneutic Circle in Contemporary Continental Philosophy (Macmillan, 1985). His translation of Friedrich Hogemann’s Dimensions of the Logical is forthcoming this year with Peter Lang.