In the second edition of his Kritik der reinen Vernunft, in the Transcendental Analytic, just after the Table of Categories and just before his Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding, Immanuel Kant added a section which marked at once the deficiency of an older Scholastic doctrine of transcendentals and yet arguably an adumbration of his own doctrine. He expressed his core thought thus.

Prima facie it seems easy to understand what he had in mind when he spoke of accidental being and being as true. Accidental or incidental being, what the Latins would later call ens per accidens, was in fact a juxtaposition of two or more categorical beings. As such it lacked a unified essence and thus it lacked genuine being. It was being "only in name." Being as true, he told us, was in the synthesis of the intellect, that is, the (...) intellect's second operation of judgment. Apparently, it was the being of the copula "is" in a true judgment. Contrasted with this was being as false, or pseudo-being, which strictly is nonbeing, found in the copula of a false judgment. (shrink)

A student of Étienne Gilson and Joseph Owens, John P. Doyle taught medieval and Scholastic philosophy at Saint Louis University for forty years. Of continuing interest to Doyle has been the thought of Francisco Suárez, S.J. On this topic Doyle has published over a dozen articles and four English translations of portions of Suárez's key works. This volume celebrates the life and career of one of those rare kinds of scholars who has mastered an entire field of inquiry and thought.

Darge acknowledges that Suárez does in some manner continue the line of Avicenna and Duns Scotus. But focusing on the theme of the transcendental properties of being, which are reduced to unity, truth, and goodness, or, concretely, the one, the true, and the good, he sees the Suarezian metaphysics as a revival and a revision of pre-Scotist teaching, found especially in St. Thomas Aquinas’s De veritate I, a. 1. For his understanding of such pre-Scotistic doctrine, Darge follows in a thoughtful (...) but not slavish way Prof. Jan Aertsen, under whose direction the present volume first appeared at the Thomas Institut in Köln as its author’s Habilitationschrift. (shrink)