Start with the notion that metaphysics is the study of being qua being. There are at least two components to the study of beings, namely, determining how or the manner in which a being exists and determining what that being is. We will return to the former after a few sections touching upon the latter.
In the broadest terms, we determine what something is by locating it among the types of beings. This avenue leads to the discussion of the categories (see next section). But it was also felt that there were some properties of a being, which are predicable of that being merely because it is a being. The most common among these ‘‘transcenden-tals’’ - so named because these predicates applied across the categories and, in some sense, were prior to the differentiation of being into one of the general kinds of being - were ‘‘good’’ (bonum), ‘‘one’’ (unum), and ‘‘true’’ (verum). But there were several other candidates for transcendentals mentioned in the literature. Saint Bonaventure, for example, added ‘‘beauty’’ (pulchrum), and Aquinas added ‘‘thing’’ (res) and ‘‘something’’ (aliquid).
The medieval discussion of the transcendentals is by and large confined to the Latin Scholastic period, but there were some notable predecessors among the Arabs and in the writings of Boethius (see, especially, his Quomodo substantiae). (For an overview of the study of transcen-dentals, see Gracia 1992, and the other articles in Topoi, vol 11, pt 2.) No Scholastic philosopher assumed prima facie that the discussion of the transcendentals was merely a discussion about the status of words or concepts, and many assumed that the transcendentals had some sort of ontological status.
The transcendentals were widely believed to be ‘‘convertible’’ - that is, x is one only insofar as x is true, and only insofar as x is good, and only insofar as x is a being. It was a matter of debate whether the transcendentals were merely co-extensional, or whether they were in reality one and the same thing (idem secundum rem).
(Rationality and being capable of laughter are co-exten-sional, but different secundum rem.) But while there was disagreement over whether the transcendentals were the same secundum rem, there was near unanimous assent that the intensions of the transcendentals were not equivalent.
The transcendentals had a special appeal to Scholastics. It did not escape their notice, for example, that the transcendentals corresponded to some of the fundamental names of God. The transcendentals and their status also had clear implications for other theological and philosophical topics. For example, there was the problem of the metaphysical status of evil. For if x is a being only to the extent that x is good, then it seems that evil (or at least pure evil) is unreal.
It was often felt that there was an ordering among the transcendentals, and that ‘‘being’’ (ens) was first in the hierarchy. In general, however, medieval thinkers were careful not to treat ens as the highest kind, for they were mindful of the Aristotelian doctrine that being is not a genus. According to the orthodox Aristotelian line, the range of ways that something could be a being was too diverse for all beings to share some real element in common. Moreover, there was one being who, for both philosophical and theological reasons, could not have anything in common with all other beings. This transcendent being was God. This consensus and the weight of the authorities behind it should be noted in order to fully appreciate John Duns Scotus’ idiosyncratic and controversial doctrine of the univocity of ens.
Scotus took the unusual step of asserting that metaphysics was the study of a univocal conception of being (Ordinatio I, d. 3, q. 3; translation in Scotus 1987:5-8). In particular, Scotus asserted that there is one notion ofbeing underlying both the notion of infinite being (i. e., God) and finite being (i. e., creation). Most of Scotus’ contemporaries asserted the absolute transcendence of God. There was not one notion of being, but rather two: one proper to God and one proper to creatures. But Scotus thought that this doctrine entailed intractable epistemological difficulties. God could not be naturally known by us unless being were univocal with respect to both the uncreated and the created. Scotus’ predecessors tried to avoid the conclusion that being is an equivocal concept and, hence, the epistemological difficulties that Scotus identified by asserting some form of the doctrine of analogy. The notion of being proper to creatures is secondary to and derived from the notion of being proper to God. Scotus thought that the analogical account of being was incoherent; it either resolved into a commitment to equivocity or into a commitment to a univocal, common conception of being.
To many of his contemporaries, Scotus seemed to be asserting that being was a genus and, even worse, denying the transcendence of God. It seems that Scotus did not fully convince even his own followers, for they tended to divide into those who accepted that there was some sort of real community between God and creatures and those who thought that the unity of the concept of being that was applicable to both God and creatures was merely logical and not real (Dumont 1992:140-146).
The Categories
A being insofar as it is a being has a number of necessary concomitant properties. But this being will also belong to one of the kinds of being. First of all, it will either be a substance or an accident - that is, a dependent property of a substance. If it is an accident, it will fall under one of the nine classes of accidents that Aristotle laid out in his Categories.
The Categories traditionally stands at the beginning of Aristotle’s Organon, or logical corpus. Considered as a logical work, the Categories appears to be about the nature and classification of simple terms. Nevertheless, almost from the beginning, interpreters wondered whether the Categories was about more than the study of simple terms. Scattered remarks in the Categories as well as other parts of Aristotle’s corpus implied that beings were divided into the ten basic categories. It is natural, then, that medieval philosophers would be tempted to read the Categories as a treatise about the classification of beings.
As soon as one takes the Categories to be about the classification of beings, a number of issues quickly arise. First, it appears that Aristotle is committed to the existence of universal things, and not merely universal terms (see below). Second, one might wonder whether each category term picks out a discrete, nonoverlapping collection of entities. (For example, do ‘‘Substance’’ and “Quantity” pick out distinct sets of things?) Third, there is the question whether the ten categories exhaust the basic kinds of beings.
Medieval philosophers answered the second and third of these questions in a variety of ways. Many medieval philosophers thought that there were exactly ten categories and that these categories uniquely picked out nonoverlapping classes of beings. Some even thought that they could ‘‘prove’’ that there were exactly ten categories (Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, the later Walter Burley). John Duns Scotus expressed skepticism about the possibility of proving the sufficiency of the categories, although he believed that there were ten and only ten categories and that each of these categories corresponded to a class of things.
Other philosophers attempted to reduce the categories in one fashion or another. Henry of Ghent observed that there are some accidents where it is not contradictory to conceive of them as existing without their subjects (namely, qualities and quantities), but that for most accidents it would be a contradiction to conceive of them as separate from their subjects (namely, those accidents belonging to the remaining seven categories). The first three categories (Substance, Quantity, and Quality) had not only their own proper mode of being, but also their own proper reality. The remaining categories had their own proper mode of being, but they were not distinct things from the first three kinds of beings (Pini 2005:71-73). Peter of John Olivi took this reductivist program one step further and determined that the categories do not pick out distinct kinds of things (res), but only distinct ways of describing the same things. The categories, hence, were mind-dependent classifications (idem, 74-75).
William of Ockham’s reduction of the categories was also quite radical. He reduced the real categories to two: substance and quality. In a series of arguments, Ockham attempted to demonstrate that entities belonging to one of the other eight categories were either not needed in order to explain semantic phenomena, or the positing of the existence of entities in some category led to a contradiction (for his arguments against quantity and relations, see Adams 1987, vol I, chaps. 6 and 7 respectively). Terms corresponding to the latter eight categories were merely indirect ways of speaking of the two kinds of items that are real, individual substances and individual qualities. It is a curious fact that Ockham did not apply the same reductivist strategy to qualities as well. Adams has suggested some philosophical reasons why quality might be irreducible (1987:277-285). Spade has argued that Ockham never explicitly employs the strategies suggested by Adams. The real motivation behind Ockham’s refusal to reduce away qualities seems to be theological (Spade 1999:105-106).
Medieval thinkers not only worried about whether there were no fewer than ten categories, they also were aware that the categories may not exhaust all of reality. Many noticed that the ten categories did not have an obvious place for a number of important entities. For example, where do matter and the substantial differentiae fall in the categorial scheme? And what about God? In his commentary on the Categories, Boethius espoused a view, which traces back to at least Porphyry, that the Categories is restricted to composites of matter and form. It is not a scheme that can classify matter alone, or form alone, let alone simple, immaterial substances (in
Cat. 183D-184B). In his treatise on the Trinity, Boethius endorsed Saint Augustine’s assertion that God is ‘‘beyond substance’’ (ultra substantiam) (De trin. IV).
World History
