In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:AQUINAS ON THE PRELIMINARY GRASP OF BEING I IN NUMEROUS PASSAGES, which are to be found scattered throughout his works, Aquinas repeatedly insists that that which is first apprehended or conceived by the intellect is being (ens).1 But from these statements an initial problem immediately arises. When Aquinas affirms that being is that which is first apprehended or conceived by the intellect is he talking about a priority which (...) concerns the logical order or the psychological order? I shall first of all explain what I mean by these two expressions. By the " logical order " I intend to refer to the order of priority and posteriority which holds between different concepts on the basis of the relations of necessary inclusion and exclusion that hold between the contents of these concepts: between the rationcs that these concepts express. Certain concepts contain as a necessary part of their content the contents of other concepts which therefore need to be understood before they themselves can be understood: these other concepts which precede them in this manner are prior to them in the logical order.2 1 See In I Sent., d. 8, q. 1, a. 3 c. and ad 3; In I Sent., d. 19, q. 5, a. 1, ad 2 and ad ult.; De Ver., q. 1, a. l; De Pot., q. 9, a. 7, ad 15; S.T., Ia, q. 5, a. 2; S.T., q. 16, a. 4, ad 2; S.T., Ia-Hae, q. 55, a. 4, ad 1; S.T., Ia-Hae, q. 92, a. 2; In I Met., 1. 2, n. 46; In IV Met., 1. 3, n. 566; In IV Met., 1. 6, n. 605; In X Met., 1. 4, n. 1998; In XI Met., I. 5, n. 2211; Sup. De Causis, Pr. VI, I. 6, n. 174. 2 "Dupliciter enim dicitur aliquid non possit intelligi sine altero. Aut ita quod non possit intelligi si non ponatur alterum esse... Sive ita quod quandocumque intelligitur unum, intelligitur alterum, sicut quicumque intelligit hominem intelligit animal. Et hoc modo "esse" potest intelligi sine vero, sed non e converso: quia verum non est in ratione entis, sed ens in ratione veri... sed numquam potest intelligi intelligibile, secundum hanc rationem, nisi intelligatur ens. Unde etiam patet quod ens est prima conceptio intellectus." In I Sent., d. 19, q. 5, a. 1, ad 2., 555 556 MICHAEL TAVUZZI, O.P. By the " psychological order " I do not intend to refer to the order of the temporal genesis within individual consciousnesses of particular concepts-as it might be studied, for example, by the developmental psychologist. This is a purely empirical matter and one which might well vary greatly from individual to individual. As such, I do not consider this perspective, whilst of great interest in itself,3 to be of direct relevance to the present consideration. Rather, by the "psychological order " I intend to refer to the order of priority and posteriority which necessarily holds between the various intentional conditions of possibility which must be realized if an act of understanding or intellectual cognition, considered in general, is to be carried out at all. If we now return to the initial problem its import will be immediately evident. After all, Aquinas would hardly identify the logical and the psychological orders, as I have characteried them, and what holds a certain position in one order might well turn out to hold a wholly different position in the other. Nevertheless, as will be seen in the course of this discussion, it seems that for Aquinas being is that which must be attained first in both the logical order and the psychological order. It must be noticed, though, that this primacy or priority which is attributed by Aquinas to our attainment of being in both the logical order and the psychological order only rarely seems to be discussed by him within the one and the same context. Each context where Aquinas affirms that being is that which is first attained by the intellect needs to be considered separately and to be closely scrutinized if one is to arrive at a correct determination of whether the cognitional priority of being which is affirmed in that particular context... (shrink)

Etude de la théorie de la supposition développée par Saint Thomas d'Aquin dans le cadre de ses réflexions sur les universaux. Distinguant les différents types de supposition et leur relation avec la signification, l'A. montre que la théorie thomiste de la supposition illustre la position théologique et métaphysique de Saint Thomas concernant l'unité du divin.

ARISTOTLE AS A DIALECTICIAN. Tom Nagel once wrote a paper on “What is it like to be a bat?” I am tempted to give this paper the somewhat less outlandish title “What would it be like to be Aristotle?” Notwithstanding the lip service some scholars have paid to the peculiarities of Aristotle’s ways of thinking as compared with ours, I have seldom felt that a commentator has managed to get inside Aristotle’s mind and made us grasp what made Aristotle tick—or, (...) rather, think in the way he did. All too often Aristotle has been treated by twentieth century philosophers as if he were, to borrow an Oxonian phrase, just “a fellow of another college.” The reason for such an alienation is not a lack of any intuitive Einfühlung or intellectual sympathy in the eighteenth-century sense. It is not a Schelerian failure but a Collingwoodean one. It is typically a failure to grasp the problem context of Aristotle’s thought and to grasp his ultimate presuppositions. In my earlier work, I have sought to identify some of his presuppositions and problems. Only some of them are relevant here. One interesting background feature of Aristotle’s thinking about logic, reasoning and the scientific method is that he is considering such matters always in a dialectical context, in the sense of thinking of them on the model of question-answer dialogues not unlike the Socratic elenchus. That this was the model of Aristotle’s methodology in the Topics is of course fairly obvious. Yet what is not usually noted is that Aristotle is still in the two Analytics thinking of the scientific method as an interrogative process. What constitutes the bridge between the overtly dialectical framework of the Topics and the syllogistic framework of the two Analytics is the idea that logical inferences are those answers to questions that are logically implied by the respondent’s earlier answers. (shrink)

DIFFICULTIES about existence have plagued Western thought since the time of Parmenides. The Eleatic sage had concentrated on what was most obvious and most incontrovertible to him, namely, that something exists. He made that tenet the way and the test of truth. From it he drew consequences that succeeding Greek thinkers from Empedocles to Plotinus accepted in part and rejected in part, intrigued by much of what he had stated but repelled by seeming enormities in some of his conclusions. Later, (...) the patristic acceptation of being as the most appropriate name for God gave additional complication to the issue. In modern times the Kantian and linguistic approaches have raised the questions how existence is a predicate and whether there is a concept of it, and if so, what kind of a concept. On the other hand, the impact of Heidegger has inspired renewed and often enthusiastic absorption in the important role played by existence in philosophical thought, and current contacts with Hindu philosophies are furthering this interest. (shrink)

IN HIS COMMENTARY on Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, Garth Hallett records Wittgenstein's extensive reading of Augustine's Confessions. By contrast, he remarks that Wittgenstein never read anything of Aristotle. However, he also reports Rush Rhees as saying that at the time of his death Wittgenstein had in his possession the first two volumes of a German-Latin edition of Aquinas's Summa Theologiae, containing questions 1-26 of the Prima Pars. Question 13 concerns the Divine Names, the first article asking whether a name can be (...) given to God. Aquinas begins his answer by referring to the passage from De Interpretatione quoted above: "Since, according to the Philosopher, words are signs of ideas, and ideas the similitudes of things, it is evident that words function in the signification of things through the conception of the intellect.". (shrink)

Thomas Aquinas gives us many reasons to think that conceptual thought is linguistic in nature. Most notably, he refers to a mental concept as a verbum or word. He further says that such concepts may be either simple or complex, and that complex concepts are formed out of simple ones, through composition or division. These complex concepts may either affirm or deny a predicate of a subject. All of these claims suggest that conceptual thought is somehow language-like. Moreover, Aquinas would (...) have been led in this direction by several venerable traditions. Augustine, for instance, speaks of “the word that we speak in our heart, a word which is not Greek nor Latin nor part of any other language.” And Aristotle, at the beginning of his De interpretatione, says that spoken words are symbols or signs of mental concepts; later generations would take this claim to warrant a treatment of mental concepts as themselves a kind of language. But how exactly should we understand this apparent connection in Aquinas between thought and language? (shrink)

Two persons have been proposed as the author of the Summa Lamberti, a thireenth-century treatise on logic. Franco Alessio takes him to be the Auxerre Dominican Lambert of Ligny-le-Châtel, and he basis his claim on Dominican sources from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Recently, Alain de Libera has presented a counter-proposal: the author was Lambert of Lagny, a secular cleric at the time of the composition, who afterwards became a Dominican. This claim is based on the acta of the (...) counts of Champagne and a document of Pope Urban IV. I conclude that, given the present evidence, de Libera’s case rests on more historically sound data, but that to arrive at this conclusion one must impeach the Dominican sources (not done by de Libera) and take into consideration additional data from the research of Michèle Mulchahey on the introduction of logic into the Dominican curriculum. (shrink)

The latter quality can be cultivated by the metaphysician through considering the intimate link between signification and being. The impossibility of separating the two is highlighted by the fact that even "non-being" is significant as a sign of the simple negative judgment, x is not. For this sign assuredly is. And a "square circle," mathematically and physically nonexistent, has the "being" of an incompatible conjunction of signs severally significant.