  It is easy to miss the significance of what Scotus brought about: in part because it now seems so inevitable, in part because Scotus comes at the end of a gradual trend toward naturalism, and in part because until only recently it was generally supposed that nothing of much philosophical importance happened between Aristotle and Descartes. Yet if one looks at the big picture of our evolving philosophical/scientific understanding of the mind, then it is clear that something important happened at the end of the thirteenth century. 