Content area
The medieval notion of “beings of reason” has commonly been interpreted as referring to intentional objects with a certain “diminished” but irreducible type of being. In recent years, however, several prominent scholars (particularly of Scotus and Suarez) have advanced interpretations that can be described as “reductive” – that is, interpretations according to which the predicate ‘being’ in such cases amounts to a mere façon de parler that ought to be analyzed in other terms. Thomas Aquinas’s approach to the general subject area has received as much treatment as anyone’s, but no one has yet developed a reductive interpretation of him, despite brief gestures by some well-known interpreters in that direction. This dissertation aims to fill that lacuna. I argue that in order to understand Aquinas, we should look to his well-known doctrine of the “nature absolutely considered” for a model: he holds that we can abstract the content or “ratio” of a common nature from all being. In the case of mere beings of reason, not only can we abstract or distinguish the content (ratio) from its being, but the ratio can even occur in things without any being at all. The ratio of “blindness” is already in Homer before anyone thinks about it, and when it comes to be thought about, it acquires nothing new except an extrinsic denomination only, which is not any literal type of new being but only a way of thinking and speaking about the ratio in Homer as if it were a being. Therefore, if there are irreducible beings of reason, they do not occur literally in the external things of which they are (sometimes) predicated. I argue further that we need no abstract “mere thought objects” to account for Aquinas’s “beings of reason” besides concepts formally in the intellect, which are real beings. These real beings are themselves extrinsically denominated as “the diminished or intentional existence in the intellect of the things represented,” but that again is merely an extrinsic denomination and adds no literal being above the concepts’ real being as accidents of the intellect.