On the Borders of Being and Knowing: Late Scholastic Theory of Supertranscendental Being

Introduction

introduction Beginning with Antisthenes (d. ca. 365 BC) and Plato (d. 348 BC), the essays comprising this volume trace a passage that begins with a distinction between “being” and “something” and ends with the late Scholastic doctrine of supertranscendental being that will offer a bridge over this distinction. In the first essay, I begin with Aristotle (d. 322 BC) and note, first, his distinguishing between “being as being” and “being as true” and, then, his exclusion of the latter from the subject matter of metaphysics. I then mark the Stoic reprise of “something” as the widest object of human cognition, especially as this was summarized by Seneca (d. 65 Ad). The second essay leaps up over fifteen centuries and observes the extension of “being as true” to so-called “beings of reason” (entia rationis), which are treated explicitly in the fifty-fourth Disputation of the Disputationes metaphysicae of Francisco Suárez, S.J. (1548-1617). In Suárez’s treatment, and having basic importance for the theme of this volume, is the identification of such beings at their core with impossible objects. Additionally in this second essay, the point, actually going back to the Greek Stoics, is made that terms expressing impossible objects are more than mere nonsense syllables. The third essay witnesses the successors of Suárez confront the question of how such objects may be knowable with a division between “intrinsic” and “extrinsic” knowability. Intrinsic knowability would be a property of actual or possible things, based upon their real being and their own aptitude through their own intelligible species to terminate knowledge. Such knowability would be anterior to the operations of human minds. In contrast, extrinsic knowability, which would extend to impossible items not found in reality anterior to such operation, would arise through the mind’s use of “alien species,” not generated by, but borrowed from, actual or possible things. Such extrinsic knowability, at least as denominated from a possible intellect, would be found equally in real beings and in beings of reason. It would thus be supertranscendent. The fourth essay follows the seventeenth-century controversy over impossible objects. Two ways of conceiving such objects and their knowability are opposed to one another. One way, already adumbrated by Averroes (d. 1198), is that of Thomas Compton Carleton (1591-1666), who explicitly accepts truly impossible objects and the extrinsic knowability at their root. The opposite way, going back at least to Alexander of Aphrodisias (fl. ca. 200 Ad) and afterwards embraced by St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) as well as Duns Scotus (1266-1308), is followed by Carleton’s fellow Jesuit, John Morawski (1633-1700), who regards impossibles as accidental and ultimately false conjunctions of possible objects. XIV INtroduCtIoN Against the background of a distinction between volitional and intellectual intentionality, the fifth essay raises the question of the teleology of purely impossible objects. Granted that such can be known in some way, can there be any final causality or purpose in knowing them? The best answer, with early suggestions in the Protestant Scholastic, Clemens Timpler (1567-1624) and the Jesuit Professor, Sylvester Mauro (1619-1687), would be echoed at the beginning of the twentieth century in debate between Alexius Meinong (1853-1920) and Bertrand Russell (1872-1970). Essentially, the answer is that impossible objects cannot be avoided if one is to understand the first principles of human reason, starting with the principle of non-contradiction, which states that it is impossible that the same thing both be and not be at the same time in the same way. The next essay concerns beings of reason and imagination. In it I address the central question of the fundamental nature of a being of reason – more pointedly , what exactly does one mean by “an impossible object.” Here again, the basic positions of Alexander and Averroes are head to head in combat. If a so-called impossible object, such as the Greek τραγέλαφος, or the “goat-stag” (with special attention drawn to the hyphen), is nothing more than a conjunction of possible objects, that is, a goat and a stag, then it seems acceptable to say that such can be externally joined together by a sense power, especially by the imagination. If on the contrary we are talking about a “goatstag” (with no hyphen to separate its components),1 then what is called for is more than sensation; it is in fact some intellectual fusion of two essences to produce a tertium quid. The seventh essay goes into the division of theoretical...