Despite the puzzles of interpretation it engenders, John Duns Scotus's theory of common natures is widely cited as an example of scholastic "realism." Common natures serve a variety of functions in Scotus's system, providing the "real unity" which serves as the subject for Aristotelian science. The "proper passions" of substances -characteristics which serve to identify substances by type, but do not formally belong to the essence of a subject -are ontologically dependent on common natures

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... ding to kind. And Scotus operates on the assumption that it is the description of created subjects according to their common natures which is the most fundamental description of them. Thus, for Scotus, common natures and their relations determine what we might call the "structure" of reality. But not every "subject of a science" is a common nature. According to Scotus, "being," the subject of "metaphysics," does not have the same real unity as the natural groupings under the ten categories of Aristotle. As a consequence of this, the "transcendental passions of being" include predicates which do not possess the "real unity" of a common nature, because they are too abstract or generic to do so. I will CONTENTS Acknowledgements...................................................................................v