Abstract

This study is aimed to investigate Peter Auriol’s theory of the distinction between being and essence. Late medieval Realists considered being and essence as two constitutive principles of the singular things; the former concerned the actual existence of the thing, the latter its nature or quiddity and was expressed by the definition of the thing. Auriol denies that the distinction between being and essence is a distinction between two ontological elements that taken together give rise to the singular things. Instead, for him this distinction is a distinction between two notions (concrete and abstract) of the same singular thing. These two notions derive from our mind’s two different ways of considering the same thing: through intuitive and abstractive cognitions. The combination in the mind of the two notions gives rise to the epistemological truths expressed by propositions. As a consequence, Auriol elaborates a new version of the theory of meaning and truth of both the existential and essential propositions, such as ‘Rosa est’ and ‘Sortes est homo’ respectively, where the abstract terms of our language do not signify pre-existing essences of things, but only their abstract concepts. Thus, in the first case, our mind derives the notion of the actual existence of a thing (ex-pressed by ‘est’) from its abstract general notion (in our example the notion of rose). In the second, our mind combines two different notions of Socrates linked to the different ways of conceiving (modi concipiendi) him, intuitively and abstractively. Since these notions are not subjective modifications of the mind, but they coincide with the thing itself (the whole reality of Socrates) insofar as it is known, they refer to Socrates and to a state of affairs connected with him.