The Reality of the Transcendentals

ARLYN CULWICK

2 SEPTEMBER 2019, HOTEL SVETI KRIŽ, TROGIR, CROATIA

P RESENTED AT THE H UMANE P HILOSOPHY P ROJECT ’ S 2019 CONFERENCE ,

“T RANSCENDENTALS IN THE T WENTY -F IRST C ENTURY ”
ABSTRACT
The transcendentals entered Western intellectual discourse as “vagrants” (ens vagans 1) – which
roamed Aristotle’s categories, impervious to univocal abstraction. To traditional realists with an
interest in distinguishing the mind-dependent from the real, these properties carried the
unwelcome implication that it is not possible to state univocally how individuals exist in their own
right, independently of how we think about them. Instead, properties like “thing,” “otherness,”
“unity,” “goodness,” and “truth” pervade every category.

As a result, it is perhaps unsurprising that thinkers in the Western realist tradition have usually
accorded transcendentals merely mind-dependent status for one reason or another – even though
Aquinas also attributes to God the transcendentals in a mind-independent subsistent mode
unavailable to our experience. 2 However, in the philosophies of Aquinas, John Poinsot, and Ralph
Austin Powell, there are also reasons to consider the opposing view, and not only when the “natural
knowledge” of Thomism is understood to emerge from experience of ens primum cognitum 3 (the
first and undifferentiated experience of being), 4 which secures a terminus in the real for experience
of the transcendentals.

In my view, what decisively resolves both the old problem of describing beings independently of
how we think about them, and the perplexing nature of the transcendentals themselves, is to
consider the implications of Poinsot’s work on real relation, 5 the significance of which Powell
rediscovered in the 20th century, 6 and which John Deely later realised resolves a pivotal difficulty
with the Aristotelian category of relation, namely that relatio rationis have “as their positive
essence exactly the same positive structure as their mind-independent counterparts,” 7 making the
mind-independence of categorial relation a mere accident, not something essential to relations.
This paper articulates the respect in which this development implies that transcendentals are real,
contra the traditional views of the foregoing authors upon whom my argument relies.

Autobiographical note
Arlyn Culwick is an independent researcher in analytical and scholastic philosophy. His principal
object of study is sign action or “semiosis,” the mechanism by which anything observable or
thought-of comes to be in relation to anything else. Research interests include the ontology of
relations, the nature of experience, teleology, and their implications for the nature of being.
Drawing principally upon the work of John Poinsot, Charles Peirce, John Deely, and Ralph Austin
Powell, Arlyn is developing an empirically falsifiable metaphysical theory of how things come to be
and continue to have being.

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PREFACE
Those of you accustomed to my short papers may breathe a sigh of relief. Instead of indulging my
usual proclivity for distilling complex philosophical ideas to a density rivalling the efforts of those
in the business of enriching plutonium, I’ve decided to try a bit of restraint. What follows is breezy
foray into territory that can quickly become a formidably technical scholastic thicket i which I think
very few of you would independently take an interest in being abandoned in (but if you are
interested, I have piled high into the footnotes of this paper the hacked swathes of perplexity in
the source material.) The downside of this approach is that today I shall not offer you something
disruptive like scientific proof of the reality of the transcendentals, ii but I do hope to shine a ray of
light with adequate precision upon a real aspect of the transcendentals.

THE TRADITIONAL UNDERSTANDING OF THE TRANSCENDENTALS

In the middle ages, philosophers with an interest in distinguishing the mind-dependent from the
real noted the unwelcome presence of properties that could not be confined to any one Aristotelian
category, and neither could they be excluded from any experience of being. We hear from John
Deely that they were termed ens vagans, that is, “vagrants” that roamed the categories freely and
transgressed medieval philosophical boundaries with impunity. 8, iii It is this sense that the term
“transcendental implies – that they transcend the categories. The medievals’ problem with
transcendentals is firstly that their generality and vagueness flouted attempts to classify in
determinate univocal terms how individuals exist mind-independently. Secondly, it was far from
clear whether transcendentals are mind-dependent or real. If they are real, then the categorial
scheme fails to capture their nature, and as a result, not all beings can be understood univocally;
if they are unreal, it remains the case that no real thing can be experienced or understood without
them, and so no beings can be understood univocally. Either way, the transcendentals make a bit
of a mess.

With Aquinas and the scholastics, things turned around for the transcendentals. Properties like
“thing,” “otherness,” “unity,” “goodness,” “truth,” and “beauty” were given pride of place as both
the divine names and as among the first properties of being to emerge from the formal object of the
intellect, which came to be known as ens primum cognitum. iv or “being-as-first-known.” I follow
Deely and Kemple in understanding this as the first, entirely vague, unanalysed experience of
being in general, before any determinate characteristics of being-as-such emerge. v To sketch the
key idea here: intelligent experience begins unanalysed and entirely general; then, the mind
distinguishes it into parts, vi from which initially come the so-called “primitive concepts of being,”

i The entrance to the thicket in question is, to my mind, that the traditional understanding of the transcendentals depends in part upon the
nature of analogy. Between Aquinas’s divine names, through Cajetan’s analogy of proper proportionality,” Poinsot’s extensive work on the
subject, and on to the Neothomist commentary on analogy, there is no consensus of views, and formidable complexity. The thicket extends
further too, because the matter of whether analogy is always a way of speaking about things, or is at least sometimes a proportion between
real attributes of things – and also whether the former could be the case even under a Thomistic realist view like Poinsot’s – does not
appear decidable on grounds internal to the discussion of analogy. It seems to me to demand a systematic and properly metaphysical
treatment, which of course is far beyond the course of this paper.
ii This is not said (entirely) in jest. I fully intend to provide such a proof when opportunity presents itself, and, now that Powell has shown
the way, I think that it should be done for any question of philosophical interest. C.f. (Culwick 2019).
iii Deely writes that “[i]n the middle ages, the philosophers were mainly concerned with understanding and classifying the ways in which an
individual could be said to be able to exist in its own right independent of our knowledge of that existence as a matter of individual or
actual fact. They were disconcerted to find that certain aspects of even possible existence could not be reduced to a determinate
classification, but invaded every possible determinate classification. To their credit, they did not simply trivialize or brush aside these
discoveries, despite the fact that they were unwelcome in terms of their theoretical goal and anomalous to it. Instead, they established a
rudimentary systematization of these vagrant aspects of being (ens vagans, they said, a rather colorful phrase) by assigning them the name
of "transcendentals", that is, characteristics transcending any one determinate mode of possible existence in the physical order of being.”
iv A concept supportable in Aquinas by, for example, (Summa Theologia 1947 (1266-68), Ia q.5 a.2 c), and developed in various ways by
Cajetan, Poinsot, Gilson, and Maritain (Kemple 2017, 336).
v This is the thesis of Deely (Four Ages of Understanding 2001, 341) and of his former student, Brian Kemple (Ens Primum Cognitum in
Thomas Aquinas and the Tradition: The Philosophy of Being as First Known 2017).
vi Note that the mind does not accomplish this by a process of abstraction, because this is not an area where distinguishing one thing from
another involves the reduction of potency to act. Rather, the transcendentals are vaguely and analogously their parts, distinguished merely

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namely being, nonbeing, distinction, contradiction, plurality, and identity, alongside the
transcendentals: unity, truth, goodness, and beauty. From this come the categories and so forth, vii
providing the “intellectual infrastructure” 9 of experience.

MAJOR REALISTS HOLD THAT TRANSCENDENTALS ARE UNREAL

Given that the transcendentals are present in every experience, that they emerge from being-as-
first-known, and, in a subsistent mode, are said to be attributes of God, it may come as a surprise
that the Western realist tradition has taken them to be merely mind-dependent. Aquinas, for
example, does not accord the transcendentals reality, making of them merely mind-dependent
“seeds of knowledge,” rather than actual knowledge 10 – never mind attributes of real beings. In
his view, they result only from the mind making formal distinctions, which does not result in
knowledge of existing things. Transcendentals “add to something in concept only.” 11

In the seventeenth century, this position is maintained by John Poinsot on grounds that universals,
along with transcendentals and other generals, are “not consequent on being as it is taken in itself
absolutely, but comparatively to a knowing power” 12 – which is to say that they only have being
relative to a mind, not in their own right.

Perhaps more surprisingly, this position is even maintained in the 20th century by the semiotic
Thomist Ralph Austin Powell, whose argument implies that he must accept viii Aquinas’s doctrine
that the “additions [to reality] made by the transcendentals add to something in concept only…
[whereas] the categories of substance and accidents add something from reality to the naturally
known concept of being.” 13

The underlying reason for these views seems to be that the transcendentals result from purely
mental activity acting upon being-as-first-known. Deely sketches this activity as follows:

“out of this primitive awareness [of being-as-first-known…] there arises, in the

course of [sensory] changes experienced, […] the idea of non-being. […] The
polarity from experience of “what is” and “what is not” provides the
understanding with the first materials for a judgement: that “being is not non-

formally and not materially. As Poinsot says, “the distinction of one divine attribute from the others is not effected by abstracting a thing
from other and different things; it is effected through a contrast between areas of greater clarity and areas of greater confusion within one
and the same concept.” (Poinsot, The Material Logic 1955, 172 [202]). Transcendentals are arrived at through – to use Aquinas’s term –
formal distinction, not abstraction. After all, if they were abstractions, then they would be “related to another attribute as potency to act
and the perfectible to its perfection” (ibid.). Yet “a divine attribute is pure act without admixture of potentiality”, and in nondivine contexts,
analogues equally do not relate to one another or to being by an order of potency to act, but by “nondeclaration” (ibid.). For example, the
“concept of being in general cannot be separated from something which would be foreign to being in the way in which animal is separated
from rational as from something extraneous to it,” since nothing real is foreign to being. Hence, transcendentals cannot be arrived at by
abstraction, because they do “not exclude the other attributes in the sense in which such exclusion would imply potency,” but rather, the
“concept of being is separated from the factors of its contraction inasmuch as it reveals but confusedly and inexplicitly things that are
divided from each other in its inferiors. This is what St. Thomas teaches when he says that being is not contracted by addition but by
modes each of which unfolds and sets forth something that is not set forth by the word 'being.' See On Truth 1. l.j Com. on the Sent. i. dist.
22. q. 1. a. 3 ad 2.” (ibid.)
vii The structure as understood by Poinsot is given in the following: “the cognizable in general, like the true and the good and the coincident

properties of being, is analogous to this or that [particular] knowable, in the manner of any essence predicable by a predicability of the
second predicable [namely, species] or of the first predicable [namely, genus]; that is to say, it is predicated transcendentally in all univocal
categories. Moreover, we say that this or that determinate knowable can be univocal in respect of the subjects or beings to which it belongs
denominatively in the manner of the fourth predicable [namely, property] or of the fifth predicable [namely, accident], even though those
beings are not univocal entitatively, for the reason that the determinate knowable in question is not consequent on being as it is taken in
itself absolutely, but comparatively to a knowing power, and there can be a same way of relating in things not univocally coincident
according to themselves and entitatively” (Poinsot, Tractatus de Signis 1985 (1632), 190; Question 4, Book 1), square brackets added by
the editor.
viii Specifically, Powell’s doctrine is that the human capacity to discern the real involves immediately experiencing distinctions between

directly-experienced real and unreal relations. In order to make this claim, he requires that we are acquainted directly with unrealities in
the objects of experience – that is, not merely as pure abstractions – or else discerning the real would be a trivial matter (and we can learn
from the long history of scientific discoveries that this is certainly not the case!). Hence, he must commit to distinguishing between, in
objects of experience, what is naturally known and what is a mere conceptual addition to the naturally known.

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 being.” […] In this very act of comparison, the understanding grasps […]
distinction. 14

The mind is said to proceed to other primitive concepts in the same fashion – that is, merely
through mental acts – the salient ideas here being that we know by knowing what is not. Now
there is obviously nothing real about a mental act of negation; if an act of negation produces the
concept “distinction,” then it can plausibly be thought to be unreal. After all, for this process to
occur, no addition or subtraction from the things observed is required, and nothing new is signified
that is not already signified in being-as-first-known. Hence, transcendentals are held to be unreal
– even if, as Powell notes, naturally known reality [becomes] progressively better understood
thanks to their additions.” 15

REASONS WHY MAJOR REALISTS MIGHT BE MISTAKEN

Now these views came as a shock to me, and not only because I set great personal store in
experiencing God embodied in the world (chiefly through the transcendentals). In addition to this,
these views seemed theoretically ill-fitting.

In Aquinas’s case, the transcendental properties of being are not like Kantian a priori intuitions,
imposed by the mind onto experience. Rather, their development is grounded in the experience of
being-as-first-known, and from there they enjoy unbroken continuity down to every object of
experience. That they are generated by the intellect seems a specious reason to deny their reality.
It would seem the same if we denied the reality of the chairs we are sitting on, on grounds that
they require the operation of the intellect to recognise them as such.

In Poinsot’s case, my perplexity is greater, because on the subject of universals, he holds for both
their reality and their conceptual nature. 16 Simultaneously, he also holds that transcendentals
contract to particulars in the same way that knowability in general (including universals) contracts
to particulars – namely, by being analogous to particular knowable things. 17 He explains that
particular things are knowable not merely because they are things, but rather because they are
beings, and that things are only beings in relation to a knowing power. 18 Now since being,
universals and transcendentals are knowables, and since they all contract to particular knowables,
this leaves his exceptionalism about transcendentals to be explained.

POINSOT’S ARGUMENT FOR THE REALITY (AND ONENESS) OF

UNIVERSALS
To get to the bottom of this, let us look closely at Poinsot’s position on universals. Poinsot holds
that universals are both real and one (that is, not several), and in making the case for this, he
surmounts a double conundrum: firstly, universals are merely conceptually one, but when
instantiated in their species they are multiplied, rather than one (for example, the universal “man”
contracts to many existing men). Secondly, universals appear to be real only when multiplied in
their species, but, as concepts, remain unreal. How then can the term “universal,” said of the same
thing in the same sense, signify something both real and one – and, moreover, how can “universal”
refer to a single thing, rather than many things? Here is his answer (note especially his
employment of a distinction between “material” and “formal”):

The objective concept [of the universal, e.g. “man,”] is one, not according to a real
unity, but according to a unity of reason and abstraction. [Yet…] what is
described as one is something real if it is understood materially as subject of
unity; but it is not something real if it is understood formally as the very unity of
abstraction and the relation of universality. Thus, although it does not exist in

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 the real in this state of abstract unity, the nature does exist [in the real] in another
state [that is, in its quiddity 19]. This is a sufficient ground for [the universal] to
be called a real being capable of existence absolutely and in itself, though not in
every state. 20

In other words, universals are relations 21 between a concept and real things. These relations
terminate in real attributes of things and are founded in the mental concept of these attributes.
The concept is one, and the attribute is real. Now the relation between them simply is the
universal. What makes the relation real is that the attribute terminating it describes something
true about the intrinsic nature of the subject, which is known as its “quiddity.” From this it follows
that the universal includes both the reality of its terminus and the oneness of its fundament.
Therefore, it is false to deny that universals, understood as relations, are both one and real.

Why would Poinsot hold for the reality of universals, but deny this of something of greater
generality, namely transcendentals – especially when he holds that transcendentals are analogues
and that analogues are universals? ix Why would transcendentals not also be real in virtue of the
quiddities of their terminating subjects?

COMPARISON OF UNIVERSALS WITH TRANSCENDENTALS

Let us compare Poinsot’s treatment of universals and transcendentals. Perhaps the details can
reveal something to us. Poinsot argues firstly that transcendentals contract to particulars, just as
universals do. x And as we know, both transcendentals and universals are generals. He also holds
that transcendentals, like universals, have a merely conceptual, mind-dependent foundation. The
only difference between the two, in his view, is their “rationale” or formal nature of these relations:
that is, while both universals and transcendentals contract to their termini, with universals, the
fundament abstracts from its terminus, whereas transcendentals are merely formally
distinguished from their termini. This is to say that the termini of universals add to reality
something not contained in the universal, namely all their other attributes which are not caught
up in the relation. In contrast, the termini of transcendentals do not add anything new, since
transcendentals are analogues of being-as-first known, not component parts, and being is already
present and known. All that is added, in experiencing a transcendental, is “some mode which is
not expressed by the name of being[;] the mode is a matter of expression [that is, of words], not a
matter of addition [in the real]. 22

A COUNTERARGUMENT
To play devil’s advocate, one might conclude from this that transcendentals are not real because
they are mere constructs of the mind, revealing modes not expressed by the name “being,” and so
in reality are nothing in their own right. They are mental activity only.

In response, I say that this counterargument would amount to claiming that transcendentals aren’t
real relations, because a relation with an unreal terminus is just a figment of the imagination.

But they surely are real relations. When signifying a transcendental, the mind founds a relation
to being in general, formally distinguished (i.e. merely mentally) by the concept of the
transcendental. Yet the relation is really formed, because being is real.

ix Specifically,”the analogue is universal in a relative sense, just as it is relatively one and relatively abstract. It does not exclude its inferiors
but merely fails to unfold them; it contains them, but confusedly and imperfectly. Thus it is, in its own way, one in many, and it has
inferiors and is superior, in a qualified sense and according as the analogates are declared or left in confusion, as we said.” (Poinsot, The
Material Logic 1955, 177-8)
x He does so in the context of discussion of analogies, which he holds transcendentals to be. His thesis on page 183 (The Material Logic 1955)
is that in the case of analogies, “that which contracts being is not superadded to being, but contained in it” (italics added for emphasis).

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As such, it seems to me that the worst damage that could be done by this counterargument would
be that the relation is the result of confusion and only vaguely applied, where, in contrast, a non-
confused relation would be founded upon being proper. But there is nothing intrinsic about
confusion that makes a relation unreal. For example, if I mistakenly take a blue object to be red, I
still really signify the object, even though I do so confusedly, and mistakenly signify an unreal
attribute of a real object. xi

As such, it looks to me like this argument cannot stand. To illustrate its falsehood further, it would
be the same as making the claim that my referring to your being a scholar is a mere fiction, while
my referring to your person signifies a real being. Now referring to you as a scholar reveals – as is
claimed – merely in expression what using your name does not, yet it does not follow from this that
you are not really a scholar xii – this is rather an independent matter to be decided upon on the
basis of quiddity. If you are in fact a scholar, this is in virtue not merely of some description on my
part, but due to certain activities, training, and perhaps your temperament. And if you are not in
fact a scholar, then I refer confusedly but really to you. Hence in either case, quiddities of you are
signified, and so the relation is real. xiii

CONCLUSION
To state my thesis, then: the relational structure of universals is common to transcendentals. Like
universals, transcendentals are real in virtue of their “materiality,” not their “form,” that is, they
really accrue to a particular existing thing. They are general in virtue of their “form,” that is, as
they are to some affected subject interpreting them. They are founded in concepts, and are unreal
insofar as they are concepts. They are also unreal insofar as they reveal only in expression aspects
already found in being, yet not revealed in the expression “being.” They are unreal, lastly, in that
they terminate proximally in attributes of subjects, and attributes are not quiddities, but just
relational termini correlated to a knowing power (even if the relations involved are real). Yet none
of these unrealities eliminate the final and crucial respect in which transcendentals are real, which
is that they terminate truly in the being of something.

xi That said, with transcendentals, it is not the case that we signify unreal attributes of real objects. As mentioned above, transcendentals
differ from universals in that universals abstract from their particulars but transcendentals are wholly and vaguely present in their
particulars, and so are only distinguished in concept, not in reality. Hence, we cannot fail to signify transcendentals in any object; we
correctly signify not only some quiddity, but also the attribute too.
xii Moreover, the appropriateness of my analogy – at least in terms of its use of univocal descriptions that do not terminate “entitatively”

(that is, in a material subject) but rather only in an abstraction or aspect of a material subject – is confirmed by Poinsot: “we say that this
or that determinate knowable can be univocal in respect of the subjects or beings to which it belongs denominatively in the manner of the
fourth predicable [namely, property] or of the fifth predicable [namely, accident], even though those beings are not univocal entitatively,
for the reason that the determinate knowable in question is not consequent on being as it is taken in itself absolutely, but comparatively
to a knowing power, and there can be a same way of relating in things not univocally coincident according to themselves and entitatively.”
(Poinsot, Tractatus de Signis 1985 (1632), 190, Book 1, Question 4)
xiii Additional clarification/objection: transcendentals (and analogies) are not [ontological] relations

“Let it be said that, as an effect of confusion, the various analogates are not expressed distinctly, although they are actually present in the
analogous concept. Just as when we look at a multitude from a distance no particular member of this multitude is distinguished, so the
multitude of the analogates, when it is attained confusedly, is the unity of the analogue, and when it is attained explicitly, it is its diversity.
The common concept is not the concept of the proportion itself inasmuch as proportion means relation, for it would then
be the concept of a relation; it is rather the concept of that which constitutes the foundation of a proportion inasmuch as it
is taken confusedly, not explicitly, in diverse things. E.g., bone and shell are taken confusedly if they are known in the notion of 'something
that holds flesh up'” (Poinsot, The Material Logic 1955, 175).
In other words, the definition of a transcendental (and every analogy) does not inhere purely in the proportion (relation) between
concept and thing. Rather, it inheres in the fundament of the relation, specifically a fundament characterised by vagueness or confusedness.
This foundation then is said to have its analogates (termini) “actually present” in it. That is, like universals, transcendentals are a relatio
secundum dici, a transcendental relation: they are a subject with a relation attached (e.g. your being taller than me). They are not
ontological relations, that is purely relative beings with no subject or absolute included (e.g. “taller-than-ness).
Note, however, that this does not change the fact that transcendentals terminate in some thing; or else they would not be relatio
secundum dici.
Note also, since this is an illuminating terminological moment, that the English term for relatio secundum dici is “transcendental
relation,” which signifies how any being is experienced and described not in terms of its quiddities, but in terms of attributes, which, like
being itself, are relative to a knowing power. Now this is the case not only of real beings, but all nonbeing too (e.g. fictions, lies, and dreams).
Hence, transcendental relations are the pattern upon which all things are experienced. This makes them worthy of the term
“transcendental” in virtue of the all-encompassing generality of this pattern being broader than the merely mind-independent categories.

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From this it clear that transcendentals take on a subsistent mode not only in the context of God,
but in every context. In the real, that is, in the intrinsic natures of affecting subjects,
transcendentals are the quiddity of real beings. It is in this sense that transcendentals are real.

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REFERENCES
Aquinas, Thomas. 1953. De Veritate. Edited by O.P. Joseph Kenny. Translated by S.J. James V.
McGlynn. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company.

Aquinas, Thomas. 1947 (1266-68). Summa Theologia. Benziger Bros. edition. Translated by
Fathers of the English Dominican Province.
https://dhspriory.org/thomas/summa/FP/FP005.html#FPQ5A2THEP1.

Culwick, Arlyn. 2019. “An empirically testable causal mechanism for divine action.” Academia.edu.
30 08. Accessed 08 30, 2019. https://academia.edu/.

Deely, John. 2005. Basics of Semiotics. 4. Tartu: Tartu University Press.

—. 2001. Four Ages of Understanding. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Deely, John. 1994. “The Grand Vision.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 371-400.

Kemple, Brian A. 2017. Ens Primum Cognitum in Thomas Aquinas and the Tradition: The
Philosophy of Being as First Known. Leiden: Brill.

Poinsot, John. 1955. The Material Logic of John of St. Thomas: Basic Treatises. Edited by John J.
Glanville, G. Donald Hollenhorst Yves R. Simon. Translated by John J. Glanville, G. Donald
Hollenhorst Yves R. Simon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

—. 1985 (1632). Tractatus de Signis. Edited by John Deely and Ralph Austin Powell. Berkeley:
University of California Press.

Powell, Ralph Austin. 1983. Freely Chosen Reality. Washington D.C.: University Press of America.

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ENDNOTES
1 (Deely, Basics of Semiotics 2005, 57)
2 (Deely, Four Ages of Understanding 2001, 273)
3 A concept supportable in Aquinas by, for example, (Summa Theologia 1947 (1266-68), Ia q.5 a.2 c), and developed in various ways by

Cajetan, Poinsot, Gilson, and Maritain (Kemple 2017, 336).

4 This is the thesis of Deely (Four Ages of Understanding 2001, 341) and of his former student, Brian Kemple (Ens Primum Cognitum in

Thomas Aquinas and the Tradition: The Philosophy of Being as First Known 2017).
5 (Poinsot, Tractatus de Signis 1985 (1632))
6 (Powell 1983)
7 (Deely, Four Ages of Understanding 2001, 229-230)
8 (Deely, Basics of Semiotics 2005, 57)
9 (Deely, Four Ages of Understanding 2001, 356)
10 (Aquinas, De Veritate 1953, q. 11, art. 1)
11 (Aquinas, De Veritate 1953, q. 21 art. 1)
12 (Poinsot, Tractatus de Signis 1985 (1632), 190 (Question 4, Book 1)) and elsewhere in various formulations.
13 (Powell 1983, 23)
14 (Deely, Four Ages of Understanding 2001, 355-356)
15 (Powell 1983, 22)
16 (Poinsot, The Material Logic 1955, 101)
17 (Poinsot, Tractatus de Signis 1985 (1632), 190, Question 1, Book 4)
18 (Poinsot, Tractatus de Signis 1985 (1632), 190, Question 1, Book 4)
19 (Poinsot, The Material Logic 1955, 99)
20 (Poinsot, The Material Logic 1955, 101)
21 Poinsot confirms this interpretation elsewhere, c.f. (Poinsot, The Material Logic 1955, 123-130) – Article 5: On the universal
22 (Poinsot, The Material Logic 1955, 182). Italics added.

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