SOURCE: Wolter, Allan B. “Scotus on the Divine Origin of Possibility.” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 67, no. 1 (winter 1993): 95-107.

In the following essay, Wolter illuminates a principal element of Scotus's mature metaphysical theory regarding divine knowledge of the potential and the actual.

The Questions on Aristotle's Metaphysics, in the opinion of the Scotistic Commission is a work Duns Scotus composed early in his academic career. Portions of what he wrote there are more fully developed in his Oxford Lectura.¹ According to the editors working on a critical edition at the work at the Franciscan Institute of St. Bonaventure University, however, the original work has been revised, and this may explain the references the Sentence-commentaries.²

Book IX seems to be one of the more mature portions of the work, however, with its masterful analysis of the various meanings of potency and act, but like other portions of this early work...