Abstract

The title of Vittorio Possenti’s book ‘Nihilism and Metaphysics. The Third Voyage’, does an excellent job of expressing its content. Nihilism – which is interpreted fundamentally as a forgetting of being, as a crisis of the idea of truth and as an abandoning of what is immutable – is contrasted with Metaphysics. The metaphor of the ‘third voyage’ exemplifies a metaphysics seen as speculatively penetrating into the truth of being and as distancing oneself from the forgetting of being. This article describes the main elements of an authentic third metaphysical voyage, accomplished by Thomas Aquinas in his metaphysics of creation and actus essendi. At the same time, it brings to light the power of the metaphysical oppositions and the notion of pure object for a realist metaphysics of the ‘third voyage’.