Abstract

While some recent scholarship has highlighted the remarkable similarities between the accounts of neighborly love in John Duns Scotus and Søren Kierkegaard, the important ways in which Kierkegaard’s account departs from the account of Scotus have not been thoroughly explored. For example, one crucial matter about which they disagree concerns whether the command to love one’s neighbor follows necessarily from the command to love God. This paper examines the ethical dimensions of neighborly love in the works of Søren Kierkegaard and John Duns Scotus, focusing primarily on the distinguishing features of their respective accounts of what it means to love God and, by extension, to love one’s neighbor in a way that adequately fulfills certain moral obligations.