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IN September of 2002, Oxford University Press pubUshed a book by Anthony Kenny entitled Aquinas on Being. In the preface, Kenny declares St. Thomas to be one of the greatest of all philosophers. The book's aim, however, is not to explain this judgment. In fact it is to show that on the topic of being, Thomas "was thoroughly confused."2 Kenny surveys works spanning Thomas's entire career, finding therein neither a unified nor even a coherent conception of the nature of being. His diagnosis of the confusion is complex, but there is one factor that stands out as the gravest and most pervasive. He caUs it "platonism."
Kenny's is not an isolated voice. Indeed, for more than a quarter of a century, the eminent Italian philosopher and student of Aristotle, Enrico Berti, has been raising similar doubts about Thomas's ontology.3 Berti is less severe than Kenny in his judgments. But his worry is essentially the same: an infection of "platonism."
The complaint, of course, is not simply that (neo)platonic thought is an important source for Thomas's doctrine of being. For some time now, followers of Thomas have been stressing this very fact. They often use it to help explain why Thomas was able, as they say, to "go beyond" the ontology of Aristotle. But what concerns Berti and Kenny is a line of thought that Aristotle himself, associating it with Plato, lays out carefully and vigorously rejects-and that Thomas joins him in rejecting. It is this very line that they find insinuating itself at crucial points in Thomas's own thought on being. So the problem is not just that the line is mistaken (though they clearly think it is). It is also that insofar as he adopts it, Thomas is being incoherent.
It seems to me that Berti's concerns have received far too little attention.4 Oddly, not even Kenny mentions him. In what follows, I shall refer more to Berti than to Kenny. Berti offers a much fuller analysis of the pertinent Aristotelian doctrines, and this enables him to formulate the issues in a correspondingly sharper way. Here I can address only some of them. I lay these out in sections I and II. My chief aim in the rest of the paper will be...