New Essays on Metaphysics as “Scientia Transcendens”
Proceedings of the Second International Conference of Medieval Philosophy, held at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), Porto Alegre/Brazil, 15-18 August 2006
This volume is not an historical study of the origins and
development of medieval approaches to theories of transcendentals.
Its point of departure is rather the role that transcendentals
played in natural theology and metaphysical theories of
the 13th. and 14th. centuries. Accordingly, the effort of John Duns
Scotus (1265/6-1308) to systematize a theory of transcendental
concepts provides the central inspiration for this book. The
theories in focus are not only linked to metaphysical
issues, but come to constitute the understanding of
metaphysics as «First Philosophy». In the wake of the
13th-century reception of Aristotle, Scotus inaugurates a new
beginning for the «science of reality as a whole»,
adumbrating theoretical elements that have exercised a remarkable
influence on the history of philosophy and continue to do so
today.
If Scotus offers a new understanding and a new systematic account
of transcendentals in the form of an original conception of First
Philosophy as the science of transcendentals – a
conception which many believe introduces a «second beginning
of metaphysics» within Western philosophy – the essays
in this volume evaluate the innovations that his work inspired, and
in this sense each of them is itself innovative. They offer a
candid evaluation of the extrinsic and intrinsic merits of the
Scotist interpretation – that is, they examine just how
original the intepretation is within the history of ideas, and
assess its internal consistency. In doing so, they take account of
earlier philosophical attempts to understand both the
interrelationship of transcendentals and the science of
metaphysics. They also offer topical and expanded analyses of
various elements of Scotus’s theory, as well as of its
influence and developments within Scotist circles and the
Franciscan tradition, as well as within Spanish scholasticism and
the philosophical theology of our times.