Duns Scotus gave philosophy a word for what makes you uniquely you: thisness
The medieval friar known as the Subtle Doctor proposed that every individual thing carries a property called haecceity, its thisness, that makes it that one thing and no other. Scotus was expelled from Paris for backing the pope against the French king, later vanished from the city on sudden orders, and died unexpectedly in Cologne.
Almost nothing is known of John Duns Scotus beyond his work. He was probably born between December 1265 and March 1266 into a leading family, likely at Duns in Berwickshire, since contemporaries called him Johannes Duns. A cairn raised by Franciscans in 1966 marks the supposed spot near Duns Castle. He took the Franciscan habit at Dumfries, where his uncle Elias Duns was guardian, and his ordination at Northampton on 17 March 1291 is the first secure date of his life.
Tradition says he studied at the Franciscan house behind St Ebbe's Church in Oxford, and he was there by 1300. Late in 1302 he began lecturing in Paris on Peter Lombard's Sentences, but was thrown out during that academic year for supporting Pope Boniface VIII in his quarrel with Philip IV over taxing church property. Back by 1304, he taught until about October 1307, when, according to William Vorilong writing in the fifteenth century, orders from the Franciscan Minister General reached him while he chatted with students in an open field on the Left Bank, and he left at once with barely any belongings. He died in Cologne in November 1308.
His commentary on the Sentences, best known in its revised Oxford version, the Ordinatio, holds nearly all his signature ideas. Univocity of being claims existence is our most abstract concept and applies to everything in the same sense. The formal distinction separates different aspects of a single thing. He also built an intricate proof of God's existence and defended the Immaculate Conception of Mary.
Ranked alongside Aquinas, Bonaventure and Ockham among late medieval thinkers, he inspired a school called Scotism and was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1993. A grim tale that he was buried alive during a coma, repeated even by Francis Bacon, first surfaced around 1400 and is probably a myth.
Source: Duns Scotus
