"Quidditas" and "Anitas" after Frege
-
Anthony Kenny [1]
-
[1] British Academy
British Academy
Reino Unido
-
- Localización: Giornale di Metafisica: revista bimestrale di filosofia, ISSN 0017-0372, Vol. 38, Nº. 1, 2016 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Dio come essere? / coord. por Giuseppe Nicolaci, Giovanni Ventimiglia), págs. 109-118
- Idioma: italiano
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
-
Resumen
Aquinas made use of a distinction between two questions: the question quid est and the question an est. There are two ways of answering the question “Quid est X”. One way is to explain the meaning of the word “X”; the second is to give the essence or nature of X – a much more substantial task.
Either answer may be called “The quiddity of X”, for that is what a quiddity is, the answer to the question “quid est”. A positive answer to the an question always takes the form “est”, but that word does not always have the same meaning. St Thomas makes a distinction between two kinds of esse. esse in one sense signifies something belonging to one of the ten categories, in another it is the kind of esse that answers the question “an est?” (is there...?). For esse in this sense there existed the Latin word anitas. Having compared Aquinas’ teaching on anitas with Frege’s use of the quantifier to express existence, I turn to consider the relation of being to essence. Is it the case that in creatures the two are distinct whereas in God they are the same? The life of creatures is a history of succession between powers and their actualisations. Nothing similar can be said about the life of God. But it does not necessarily follow that in God essence and being are identical: it may simply be that the distinction is inapplicable.
