Act and fact: on a disputed question in recent Thomistic metaphysics.

Thomism seems to be different in every one of its proponents who is thinking authentically on the philosophical level.--Joseph Owens (1)

I WOULD LIKE TO DRAW ATTENTION to a question that has arisen in Thomistic metaphysics in recent decades, in a thread of discussion winding through remarks in three articles published in The Review of Metaphysics. The discussion began in 1974, when Cornelio Fabro said, not for the first time, that there is, according to Aquinas, a difference between "esse as act" and "existence which is the fact of being." (2) In 1976, Joseph Owens said, in response to Fabro's distinction, that, for Aquinas, it is the same existence (esse) that is conceptualized both as an "actuality" and as a fact. (3) In 1989, John F. Wippel, differing from Owens, said that there is a distinction in Aquinas's writings between "esse as facticity" and "esse as intrinsic actus essendi." (4) As may be seen, there are variations in the way in which these authors describe the distinction, whether to affirm or deny it. But Owens and Wippel evidently consider themselves to be concerned with the same question, the question raised by Fabro's claim. It is a question that would seem to be of no small importance for understanding what Aquinas means by esse, or to be. Perhaps, then, it will be useful to bring the differences between these interpreters on the question into sharper focus.

I

Fabro's La nozione metafisica di partecipazione secondo s. Tommaso d'Aquino (1939) includes a section, recently singled out for discussion by Wippel, on the participation of beings in the act of being. (5) Early in the section, Fabro introduces the notion of esse as actus essendi, calling it a simpler but more mysterious notion than that of essence. Our intellect, he says, directly comprehends only essence; it does not reach the existence that enters into an essence. Existence cannot be defined by us, not only because of its maximum generality or logical transcendence, but also because, of its nature, it has no distinctive way (modo proprio) of presenting itself to our intellect outside of the essence of which it is act. Aquinas "contents himself," Fabro says, with presenting descriptions of existence or esse, descriptions that give notably greater importance to the act of esse than to essence. (6)

We might wonder about the sense in which esse "enters into" (entro') and cannot present itself "outside of" (all'infuori dell') essence. The metaphorical "interiority and exteriority" evidently involves a likewise metaphorical "invisibility and visibility" to our intellect: the suggestion is that our intellect can "see" an essence, which is, as it were, "on the surface," "out in the open," in intelligible "space," but that it cannot "see" an esse hidden "deeply within" an essence, although it can try to describe it.

Fabro begins his discussion of Aquinas's descriptions of esse by making the distinction in which we are interested. He says that esse as act of being (atto di essere, "act of to be"), is not just the fact of existing, or "that by which something is constituted outside its causes."' This fact is rather the external effect of the act of being, which is of a deeper nature (e di natura piu prof onda)" The act of being is "that by which" (quo) every formality can be indicated as real, that is, as distinct from every other formality, and not just as notionally distinct, but as really separate in the nature of things. The act of being (atto di essere) is the act of the essence (l'atto dell'essenza). (9) "Act of being" here seems to be an appositional genitive, meaning the act that is being. "Act of the essence," on the other hand, is clearly a genitive of possession, meaning the act belonging to the essence, by which the essence is actual. Again, an "interiority and exteriority" is spoken of: the fact of existing is an "external" (and therefore evident) effect of the "deeper" (and therefore hidden) act of being. Facts, like essences, are apparently "visible" to our intellect in a sense in which the act of being is not.

For confirmation of this distinction between act of being and fact of existing, Fabro cites one of Aquinas's descriptions of the act of being. As it happens, this is Aquinas's explanation of the second of two senses of esse that he himself distinguishes in Quodlibeta 9, q. 2, a. 2 [3]. (10) The first sense, unmentioned in the passage by Fabro that we are considering, is the sense in which, Aquinas says, the word esse ("to be") is the verbal copula that signifies the composition of any enunciation produced by the soul--or, perhaps better, the verbal copula that signifies the composing of any enunciating performed by the soul (compositionem cuiuslibet enunciationis quam anima facit). This seems to be another genitive of apposition: what is meant is the composition that is an enunciation, the composing that is an enunciating. Enunciatio, propositio, and praedicatio are interchangeable terms in Aquinas's vocabulary, all of them signifying the combining of a predicate with a subject in a proposition. Enunciation, he says, follows apprehension: inasmuch as we understand things, we must enunciate them. (11) As we might put it, in order to understand things, we must articulate them.

Esse as copula, Aquinas says in Quodlibeta 9, q. 2, a. 2 [3], is not something in the nature of things; it itself exists only in the soul's act of composing or dividing. As copula, it is attributed to anything about which a proposition can be formed, whether a being (ens) or a privation; we say, for example, that there is blindness, that blindness exists (cecitatem esse), in someone, even though it is nothing positive, but rather lack of entity. Then, Aquinas describes a second sense of esse, in a passage that Fabro quotes as expressing the second sense of the word that he, Fabro, distinguishes. The description evokes Aristotle's characterization of the subject of metaphysics as a being inasmuch as it is a being:

   In another way, esse is said to be the act of a being inasmuch as
   it is a being (actus entis in quantum est ens), that is, that by
   which (quo) something is called a being in act (ens actu), in the
   nature of things. Esse in this sense is attributed only to things
   themselves, which are contained in the ten categories. (12)

Aquinas's distinction in Quodlibeta 9, q. 2, a. 2 [3] is between (1) esse as verbal copula and (2) esse as the act of a being inasmuch as it is a being. Fabro's distinction is between (1) existence as fact and (2) esse as act. Fabro identifies the second members of the two distinctions. (13) Is there any connection between the first members, that is, between the fact of existence that he mentions and the verbal copula signifying the soul's act of composing or enunciating that Aquinas mentions? A fact might be thought to be either an enunciation, that is, a statement, or something about which an enunciation can be made, that is, a state of affairs. (14) In either case, facts are capable of being stated, and so they imply words, notably the verb to be, the copula that is, at least implicitly, the crucial feature of any assertive act of sentence formation, the hinge on which it turns.

Fabro returns to his distinction between act of being and fact of existence in historical discussions at the beginning and at the end of his other major work on participation, Partecipazione e causalita secondo s. Tommaso d'Aquino (1960). (15) This work opens with a brief Heideggerian history of metaphysics. Husserl--as Fabro does not say here--had distinguished two senses of truth: the usual sense of it as correctness of a judgment; and, underlying this "truth of correctness," a deeper sense of truth as actuality, a "truth of being" or "truth of disclosure." (16) Applying this distinction to the history of philosophy, Heidegger had described a long decline in the understanding of truth, from "the original essence of truth, aletheia (unconcealment)" to the understanding of truth as mere correctness. (17) Fabro paraphrases Heidegger's account of this decline, summing it up as a substitution of act by fact. (18) Quoting Heidegger, he says that that a thing exists, or that a thing is such or such, is what we usually call a fact, "a charming but deceitful word," one in which the very notion of truth, in its original sense, is compromised. (19) Along with Heidegger, then, Fabro insists on what we might call the thatness of facts.

Fabro's summary of Heidegger's history of metaphysics is in the service of establishing the originality of the Thomistic doctrine of esse. He wants to show that Heidegger's charge that there has been a progressive Vergessenheit des Seins in Western metaphysics does not apply to the Thomistic doctrine of esse in its original meaning. (20) On the other hand, he also wants to show that the general forgetfulness of being in Western metaphysics as a whole recurs on a smaller scale (fractal-like, one might say), in an offuscamento dell'esse in the Thomistic school, between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. (21) He discusses this obfuscation of esse in the section of Partecipazione e causalita just before the conclusion. In this school and during these centuries, he argues, there was again a replacement of act by fact, as Aquinas's original doctrine of the act of esse came to be understood as referring to the simple fact of existentia, in the sense of "that by which something is constituted outside its own causes." (22) Esse ut actus, an act deeply hidden in things, was confused with esse in actu, an immediate, experienced fact that can be pointed to. (23) Surface was mistaken for depth.

In 1974, Fabro published "The Intensive Hermeneutics of Thomistic Philosophy: The Notion of Participation," a summary of his work on participation addressed, via a translator, to the English-speaking readership of The Review of Metaphysics. (24) Midway through the article, he returns to the distinction between act and fact, now calling the fact of being not an effect, but a result, of esse as act:

   Thus the authentic notion of Thomistic participation calls for
   distinguishing esse as act not only from essence which is its
   potency, but also from existence which is the fact of being and
   hence a "result" rather than a metaphysical principle." (25)

Fabro suggests that it is the failure of transcendental and existential Thomists to make a distinction between esse as act and the fact of being that explains what he calls the confusion of these Thomists. Both groups, according to him, erroneously think that esse as act is grasped in a judgment. They do not see that judgment grasps merely the fact of existing. Nor do they see that "the metaphysical determination of esse as actus essendi" can be discovered only by "the strictly metaphysical method" of resolutio or reductio, whether by resolution of accidental and substantial acts to the act of esse, or by resolution of the act of esse by participation to esse per esssentiam. (26) These two resolutions correspond, respectively, to the two viewpoints from which Fabro argues that the notion of participation is "the ultimate point of reference" in Thomistic metaphysics: the static viewpoint of the creature's "structure" (the viewpoint of La nozione metafisica di partecipazione), and the dynamic viewpoint of the creature's dependence on God (the viewpoint of Partecipazione e causalita). (27) Fabro implies that the same Thomists who think that the act of esse is grasped in a judgment, and who ignore the metaphysical method of resolution, also neglect this important theme of participation in Aquinas's metaphysical thought. "We must ... stay with the notion of participation and avoid all equivocations and confusions," he says, and for confirmation he quotes the following remark by George Lindbeck: "I believe that the participationist motifs unquestionably present in the thought of Aquinas are a more likely source for the metaphysical theory of actus essendi than is the judgmental knowledge of existence emphasized by Gilson." (28) Perhaps not surprisingly, then, Fabro's article soon provoked a response from Gilson's former student, Joseph Owens. (29)

II

How, according to Aquinas, does the human mind know the existence of things, which Aquinas calls esse? In "Aquinas on Knowing Existence" (1976), Owens considers answers to this question by representative existential, participationist, and transcendental Thomists. Maritain and Gilson, his representative existential Thomists, each have different answers; Fabro, his representative participationist Thomist, and Donceel, his representative transcendental Thomist, have still others. Owens proposes to test all these answers against the text of Aquinas, focusing on a brief passage that he extracts from In I Sent., d. 38, q. 1, a. 3. (30)

Nowhere in "Aquinas on Knowing Existence" does Owens mention the context of this passage, that is, the question Aquinas is determining in this article, which is whether God has knowledge of enuntiabilia. Like its cognate enuntiatio, enuntiabile refers to the enunciation or articulation that occurs in a composing of subject and predicate, whether in the mind or in speech. (31) Aquinas places enuntiabile in apposition with complexum, which refers to the complex of thoughts or words we form when we enunciate or articulate. (32) Materially, he says, an enuntiabile is a thing of reason, composed of subject and predicate; signitively, it designates an esse of a thing together with its circumstances (conditiones), notably the time connoted by the verb. (33) All this implies that an enuntiabile is a statement, that is, the verbal expression of a proposition formed in an act of judgment.

When he gives examples of enuntiabilia, however, Aquinas speaks as if the word refers to states of affairs. Two of his examples are that God foretold through the prophets that a virgin would give birth (virginem parituram, with esse understood), and that it was known by God that Christ would die (Christum esse moriturum). (34) The grammatical form of these accusative plus infinitive phrases is called oratio infinitiva, standard scholastic examples being Socratem currere and Socratem cucurisse, "that Socrates is running," and "that Socrates has run." (35) The oratio infinitiva is the Latin way of presenting facts in their thatness, so to speak. When Aquinas says that God knows enuntiabilia, he means, not just that God knows all statements that we form, or even all true statements that we could form, but that he knows the esse or to be, the objective correlative or state of affairs, signified by every true statement we could form, along with the temporal aspect of each such esse or to be that is conditioned by time.

In In I Sent., d. 38, q. 1, a. 3, Aquinas argues that God has complete knowledge of particulars, knowing them in their particularity with respect to all individual circumstances (conditiones) that are in them. That is, he knows not only things, but also enuntiabilia. Enuntiabilia are complexa, but God knows them by simple awareness, in a manner of his own. In any thing, we may distinguish between the thing's quiddity or nature and its esse. In God's unique case, nature and esse are really the same, but we may still distinguish between them in our thought and speech. Doing so, we may say that his nature is cause and exemplar of every nature, his esse cause and exemplar of every esse. (36) In knowing his essence, he knows every thing; in knowing his esse, he knows every esse of every thing, and therefore all enuntiabilia, by which all instances of esse are signified. But because his essence and his esse are the same, it is one and the same act by which he knows things, every esse of things, and the enuntiabilia signifying every esse of things. His knowing all this is a simple act, not requiring any composing or assembly on his part.

Aquinas presents this conclusion of In I Sent., d. 38, q. 1, a. 3, immediately after giving a contrasting description of the human knowing of esse, which is by way of a composing or assembly. This description is the passage that Owens analyzes in "Aquinas on Knowing Existence." In it, Aquinas says that there are two acts of the human intellect, corresponding to the duality of quiddity and esse in things. The human intellect grasps quiddity in an act called "formation" (formatio) by some philosophers and "thinking of indivisibles" (indivisibilium intelligentia) by Aristotle. It grasps esse in an act of "composing an affirmation" (componendo affirmationem), because esse itself consists in a composition (consistit in quadam compositione), whether of form with matter, or of accident with subject. Aquinas thus suggests that the human intellect grasps esse by imitating it, putting together compositions in thought and speech that mirror compositions in esse.

In his analysis of this passage in "Aquinas on Knowing Existence," Owens presents his own answer to the question how, according to Aquinas, the human mind knows esse, which is that it does so in two stages, first apprehending it in an act of judgment, and then conceptualizing it. With slight variations in emphasis and terminology, Owens develops this same answer in other writings, and I draw on some of these in what follows.

Apprehension of esse in judgment. According to Owens, we first grasp esse in the material things we perceive. (37) We grasp it in an act of judgment, which involves production of a proposition that can be expressed in a sentence. Owens closely associates the apprehending of esse with the act of predicating. He speaks of "the existential character of all predication," and he says that "[w]hat is originally meant by existence ... can be communicated only through a sentence." (38) Like a predication, any instance of esse grasped by the human mind in an immediate judgment is itself an occurrent combination of elements. In the judgment that Cleon is pale, a composition of subject and accident is apprehended; in the judgment that the man exists, a composition of form and matter is apprehended. (39) Although composition and compose are unmistakably cognate with Aquinas's terms compositio and 37 32 componere, Owens prefers the semantically parallel but Greek-based terms synthesis and synthesize. (40)

Owens stresses that the esse apprehended in human judgment is diverse in every instance and at every instant of every instance. He particularly insists on the time-ridden character of the esse that we immediately apprehend, a circumstance that we connote in our verbs. The existence of sensible things, he says, is "fugitive," "a flux," "a temporal continuum, spread out in parts and consisting of parts." (41) He even suggests that the existing of a thing appears, on first consideration, to be simply the thing's lasting for a while. "Spontaneously, when the question is faced for the first time, a thing and its existing may appear to be really the same. The expression 'existing' would seem to add merely a reference to duration between beginning and end, but imply no real content besides the thing itself." (42) Existence, at first sight, appears as not just a being there, but, still more basically, a being then, for however short or long a time.

Conceptualization of esse. After grasping esse in acts of judgment, Owens says, the human mind forms concepts of it, none of which, however, expresses anything proper to esse, for no proper concept of esse is naturally available to the human mind. (43) Any noun expressing a concept of esse that we form is given an extended sense that goes beyond quiddities and categories. Owens thus strongly implies--although he never, as far as I know, says this--that our conceptualizing and naming of esse inevitably involve a resort to metaphor. Among the nouns to which we give a nonproper or extended sense, in order to name esse, are fact and act.

Fact. Owens says that "what is known through judgment is naturally conceptualized as ... a 'fact,'" (45) but he expresses several reservations about this "natural" way of conceiving esse, that is, existence. From the point of view of etymology, fact "means something made or done," a notion whose content "does not go outside the ambit of the categories." From the point of view of use, "the term 'fact' is regularly limited to what is observed, in contrast to inferences and conclusions," and so prematurely precludes inference to the existence of anything unobservable. From the point of view of twentieth-century logic, to make the difficult terms facticity or factuality synonymous with existence would be to leave the latter empty of intelligible content. Finally, fact "is not enough just by itself to convey the message that something does exist. One has to assert that the existence of the thing in question is a fact." (46) One has to return to the dimension of judgments, propositions, and sentences, in order to see what the concept and the word fact are referring to.

Act. If we naturally conceptualize esse as a fact, we technically conceptualize it, according to Owens, as an act or actuality. (47) Act and actuality translate actus, which in turn translates Aristotle's neologism energeia. Aristotle coined energeia for his analysis of motion as act of the potentially existing qua existing potentially. In considering the subject of motion, material substance, he equated form with actuality and matter with potentiality. Going beyond the material, he reasoned to the pure actuality of separate substance or immaterial form. Going beyond even immaterial form, Aquinas pushed the notion of actuality still further. As Owens says, "Form, which for Aristotle coincided with actuality, became potential to the existence that was 'the actuality of every form or nature.'" (48) Aquinas also called existence "the actuality of all acts," (49) a superlative genitive formulation that, according to Owens, "describes existence accurately in the sense of distinguishing it sharply from all else," but still does not "succeed in bringing any new and characteristic content into the concept of existence," for, once again, we have no proper concept of existence, that is, of esse. (50)

Owens concludes "Aquinas on Knowing Existence" by assessing the interpretations he is examining. He finds that Gilson's view that existence is apprehended in acts of judgment passes the test of fidelity to the Thomistic text most successfully, although he also notes a difference in emphasis between Aquinas's doctrine and Gilson's presentation of it: "Gilson clearly attributes the cognitive grasp of existence to judgment, even though he signalizes the asserting, positing, affirming character of the act rather than the apprehending and comprehending aspect used to describe it in the text of Aquinas." (51) Fabro's interpretation comes off less well in Owens's assessment:

   Fabro concludes that Thomistic participation distinguishes
   existence as actuality from its result, the existence as fact.
   Apparently the participationist model of an object shared by way of
   formal causality allows existence to be known basically in the
   concept of the actuality of being, with its result that a thing
   thereby exists. The texts of Aquinas seem rather to make what is
   grasped through judgment basic, allowing the existence thereby
   known to be conceptualized subsequently as the actuality of an
   essence. Where the notion of resulting is introduced in this
   context, the existence is regarded as resulting from the principles
   of the thing's essence, and as actuality seems in no way
   distinguished from the fact that the thing exists. (52)

Owens, we have seen, does differentiate between esse conceptualized as fact and esse conceptualized as act or actuality. His point here is that the fact and the actuality are, in reality, the same "thing," namely, the esse or existence.

Owens and Fabro each describe a two-step process. In Fabro's case, it is a move, by the method of resolutio, (1) from perception of an external, visible effect or result, (2) to inference to an invisible, inner source of this effect or result. In Owens's case, it is a move, by means of conceptualization, (1) from a synthesis occurring in things in time, as immediately grasped in a synthesizing action of intellect, (2) to conceptual representation of that synthesis, naturally and at first, as a "fact," and then, more technically, as the "actuality" of an essence. For Fabro, the heart of the matter is reached only in his second step, in a transcending of what is given first and immediately; the second step, the resolution to actus essendi, is a discovery. For Owens, the heart of the matter is reached in his first step, in what is given first and immediately; the second step, the conceptualization of esse, is retrospective and resumptive. Fabro, Owens seems to say, misses the richness of the esse given in what is obvious. Owens, Fabro might reply, fails to get beyond the obvious to a deeper dimension of esse.

III

In "Truth in Thomas Aquinas" (1989), John F. Wippel at one point asks what Aquinas means by esse when, in In I Sent., d. 19, q. 5, a. I, (53) he says that truth is founded more on the esse of a thing than on its quiddity. He concludes that he must mean what, in a discussion of senses of the word esse in In I Sent., d. 33, q. 1, a. 1, ad 1, (54) he calls act of essence (actus essentiae), which, Wippel suggests, might be paraphrased as actual existence. Act of essence and actual existence, Wippel explains, are similarly ambiguous. Both may refer either to "simple facticity, the fact that something exists," or to "a thing's intrinsic act of being (actus essendi) which is the ultimate intrinsic explanation for that fact." (55) Wippel mentions the difference between Fabro and Owens on whether there is a distinction between fact of existing and act of being, then says: "As will be evident from what follows, it seems to me that such a distinction is present in Thomas's writings, although it is sometimes difficult to determine in which sense he is using esse." (56)

Wippel makes a similar remark in The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas (2000). (57) Here the question is what Aquinas means by esse in a passage of Super Boetium De Trinitate q. 5, a. 3 (58) in which (as in the passage of In I Sent., d. 38, q. 1, a. 3 discussed by Owens in "Aquinas on Knowing Existence") Aquinas distinguishes two operations of intellect: on the one hand, the thinking of indivisibles; on the other hand, the act by which the intellect composes and divides, forming affirmative or negative enunciations. The first operation, Aquinas says, regards the nature of a thing. The second regards the esse of a thing, which results from congregation of the principles of the nature in a composite thing, but is concomitant with the nature in a simple thing. Like Fabro and Owens, Wippel calls this second operation "judgment." (59)

Again with reference to In I Sent., d. 33, q. 1, a. 1, ad 1, Wippel concludes that esse, in Super Boetium De Trinitate q. 5, a. 3, must mean act of essence, that is, actual existence. (60) Again, he finds an ambiguity: does esse as actual existence refer simply to "the fact that something exists (its facticity)," or does it refer also to "the thing's distinct intrinsic act of being (actus essendi)?" (61) Again, he mentions the difference between Fabro and Owens, and then he restates his own opinion, but now more forcefully: "As will be clear from what follows, and without endorsing Fabro's way of presenting it, I regard the distinction as extremely important." (62)

In both "Truth in Thomas Aquinas" and The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas, Wippel goes on to say that, in texts in which Aquinas correlates the operation of judgment with esse as object of this operation, (63) esse should be read as meaning, and as explicitly referring only to, the fact of existence, not the actus essendi that is the ultimate intrinsic explanation of this fact. Such texts, according to Wippel, may presuppose knowledge of actus essendi from a prior discovery of the distinction between, and composition of, essence and actus essendi in finite beings; such texts may implicitly refer to actus essendi; but such texts need not be read as having this presupposition or this implicit reference. (64) From such texts, we need only conclude that "according to Thomas it is through judgment that we come to know things as actually existing." (65) Establishment of a distinction between, and a composition of, essence and actus essendi in finite beings can come only later, after one has discovered the subject of metaphysics, being as being. (66)

Aquinas, according to Wippel, closely associates esse with actuality, but distinguishes between esse as actuality and esse as act of being: esse as actuality is known before esse as act of being. "While this understanding of esse as actuality takes on its fullest meaning only when it is considered in light of Thomas's theory of composition and distinction of essence and esse (act of being) within finite substances," Wippel says, "it seems to be available to him prior to his demonstration of that conclusion." (67) Esse as actuality, on Wippel's account, is available, not just prior to discovery of actus essendi, but prior to philosophy itself. "Even at this primitive or prephilosophical level in our understanding of being or of reality, we must understand something as actual if we are to grasp it as existing or as real." (68) Actual, existing, and real seem to be interchangeable, if not quite equivalent, terms in Wippel's discussions.

In "Truth in Thomas Aquinas," Wippel says that "it is sometimes difficult to determine" whether Aquinas is using esse to mean fact of existence or act of being. (69) In The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas, he describes this distinction as "one which Thomas does not always bring out explicitly." (70) Thomas never, it seems, explicitly states the distinction as such. (How would he speak of esse as "fact?") But Wippel's point is that, if it is not always clear whether Aquinas is using the word esse to mean act of being or facticity, it sometimes is clear. For illustration, he cites a passage in De ente et essentia 4 (71) in which, he says, the word esse at one point shifts from meaning existence to meaning act of being, and then later shifts back to meaning existence.

In this passage, Aquinas argues for his claim (72) that, in everything except God, esse or to be is other than essence, quiddity, or nature. God, uniquely, is simply esse; his esse is subsistent; he is cause of esse in all other things; and all other things receive esse from him per modum actus--as an act, actuality, or actuation.

Commenting on this argument, Wippel divides it into three phases. Phase 1 (lines 94-103) consists of the following syllogism. Whatever does not belong to the understanding of an essence comes to it from without. But every essence or quiddity can be understood without anything being understood about its esse; for I can understand what a man or a phoenix is, and not know whether it has esse in reality (in rerum natura). These two occurrences of the word esse, according to Wippel, refer to "existence in the sense of facticity, the fact that something exists." But then the syllogism concludes that, in beings such as a man and a phoenix, esse differs from essence or quiddity, and at this point, according to Wippel, the meaning of esse changes.

   Here esse seems to refer not to mere facticity but to an intrinsic
   principle, an act of being as we have rendered it, present in all
   such beings. That it must be taken in this sense is confirmed, in
   my judgment, by the very next lines, which initiate what I shall
   describe as phase two of the argument: "Unless, perhaps, there is
   some thing whose quiddity is esse itself." (73)

Wippel does not say why the meaning of esse seems to shift in the conclusion of Phase 1, or why the first sentence of Phase 2 confirms that it must have done so. Perhaps he might elaborate as follows. The esse in Aquinas's claim that every essence or quiddity can be understood without anything being understood about its esse evidently refers to existence, that is, to the being there, as it were, of, say, a man or a phoenix, on the great stage of the world (in rerum natura). But the esse of his conclusion seems rather to refer to an intrinsic principle in things, because there esse is being distinguished from, and is therefore, apparently, being considered on a par with, what obviously is an intrinsic principle, namely, essence or quiddity. That this indeed must be the sense of esse in the conclusion is confirmed by the first sentence in Phase 2, which introduces the hypothesis of a thing in which esse would be the intrinsic principle that is essence or quiddity. (74)

Phase 2 of the argument establishes that there could only be one thing whose quiddity is its esse (lines 103-26). Throughout Phase 2, Wippel says, esse continues to mean act of being, not existence. Phase 3 begins with another syllogism (lines 127-37), one in which the word esse occurs four times, twice in the minor premise and twice in the conclusion:

   Everything that belongs to something either is caused by principles
   of its nature ... or comes to it from some extrinsic principle....
   But it cannot be that esse itself is caused by the form or quiddity
   itself of a thing--I mean, as by an efficient cause--because thus a
   thing would be cause of itself, and a thing would bring itself into
   esse. Therefore it must be that every such thing, whose esse is
   other than its nature, has its esse from something else.

The first esse in the minor premise, according to Wippel, means act of being, but the second esse means existence; and in the conclusion, both instances of esse mean both act of being and facticity. Wippel thinks that this shift in meaning, unlike the shift in Phase 1, is clearly legitimate:

   At this point in the argument, this shift in usage is legitimate.
   Because Thomas has already shown that within any such being essence
   and esse (intrinsic principle) are distinct, he can conclude that
   its esse (taken as intrinsic act of being) and its existence
   (facticity) must be given to it from without. Were this not so, it
   would then be the efficient cause of its own esse (existence). This
   is so because, as he sees things, esse taken as the act of being
   also accounts for the fact that the thing exists. (75)

We might ask why the text itself does not advert to the shift in meaning. Wippel might say that it does do so, implicitly, as follows. The minor premise begins by speaking of "esse itself" (ipsum esse), which must mean the intrinsic principle introduced at the end of Phase 1 and discussed throughout Phase 2; but it ends by speaking of a thing, per impossibile, "bringing itself into esse," which can only mean bringing itself into existence, that is, bringing itself to be there, in reality. The conclusion can then use the word esse to refer simultaneously both to existence and to the act of being that accounts for existence, because both their being (their actus essendi) and their being there (the existence that follows from their actus essendi) are given to the things that have them by something else.

Owens, presumably, would resist any suggestion that the meaning of esse changes back and forth in the three-phase argument of De ente et essentia 4. Rather, he would maintain that Aquinas regards every occurrence in this passage of the verb esse, in all its forms, as having the meaning it always has in sentences expressing judgments; and that "existence" is a conceptualization of "something" that we originally apprehend in a complex way in an act of judgment, something that, under other conceptualizations, we also call a "fact" and an "act." (76)

Wippel distinguishes between (1) esse as meaning actus essendi and (2) esse as meaning facticity. Aquinas, in Summa theologiae 1, q. 3. a.4, ad 2, (77) distinguishes between (1) esse as meaning actus essendi and (2) esse as meaning the composition of a proposition that the soul discovers in joining a predicate to a subject. Since the first members of Wippel's and Aquinas's distinctions coincide, are the second members also somehow related? Perhaps they are, along the lines I suggested when discussing a similar question in connection with Fabro: whatever else it may be, a fact is something that can be stated, and that, when stated, leans heavily, whether explicitly or implicitly, on the copula, the verb esse or to be.

IV

The most important contribution that can be made to a philosophical conversation is to define the issues and to bring them forward in a way that lets them be fairly discussed.--Robert Sokolowski (78)

Whether or not Fabro was the first to raise the question of the relation between what Aquinas calls an actus essendi and what we call a fact of existence, his claim that the two are not the same opened up the question in a distinctive way for twentieth-century Thomistic metaphysics. By disagreeing with Fabro's claim, Owens took the question in one direction; by restating the claim in a different way, Wippel took it in another. It remains to be seen whether all possible developments of the question have been explored, but the question itself is now, evidently, an important one for Thomistic metaphysics. It is also a fundamental question, in the sense that it is one to be raised early in a Thomistic discussion of the meaning of esse or to be. And, as I have been concerned to show here, it is a disputed question. I conclude with two remarks about the dispute, one concerning its language, the other its pedagogical value.

My review of interpretations may have left the impression that the dispute, originating as it does in Fabro's Heideggerian-Thomistic reflections on esse, fact, and act, has an essentially Heideggerian aspect. But although Owens occasionally refers to Heidegger, and although Wippel uses the word facticity, a word associated with Heidegger, (79) neither shows any interest in bringing Heidegger's reflections on fact to bear on their interpretations of Aquinas. Both, apparently, take up fact as a common English word, one they find useful in their respective expositions of the Thomistic doctrine of esse.

Act and fact make an odd couple in the vocabulary of contemporary English-speaking Thomistic metaphysics. (80) Act, which both derives from and translates actus, seems as much a transliteration as a translation, not just because of its near-identity to its Latin original, but also because of the unusual and highly formalized sense given to it by Thomistic metaphysicians. Act, of course, ordinarily means an action. But then actus, too, ordinarily meant an action, and reference to action is not inappropriate in a Latin or English word the purpose of which is to convey the sense of Aristotle's energeia, which literally meant being in action, but which Aristotle extended to mean something like actuation or actuality.

In sound and appearance, then, as well as in its ordinary and metaphysical senses, act clearly reflects its original, actus. Fact, on the other hand, which has an equally audible and visible scholastic Latin pedigree, has moved farther away from the meaning of its original. Factum, for Aquinas, had the classical sense of something done--indeed, an action (81)--or something made. At first, fact meant an action in English, too, but in the seventeenth century, it settled into its modern meaning, or rather complex of meanings, as described in the first nonobsolete sense of the word given in the Oxford English Dictionary.

   Something that has really occurred or is actually the case;
   something certainly known to be of this character; hence, a
   particular truth known by actual observation or authentic
   testimony, as opposed to what is merely inferred, or to a
   conjecture or fiction; a datum of experience, as distinguished from
   the conclusions that may be based upon it. (82)

The combination of the notions of certainty, observation, authenticity, and "datum of experience" in this description brings out a distinctively modern and empiricist flavor in our word fact. Despite Owens's claim that what is known through judgment is naturally conceptualized as a fact, (83) the word fact, as it is used today, seems to convey not a natural, but a peculiarly modern, sense of being, knowledge, and truth. Facts, we might say, are the modern way, or one of the modern ways, in which instances of esse or to be appear. (84)

My first remark, then, is that, in addressing the question of the relation between esse as act and esse as fact, whether to distinguish or identify them, interpreters speak in a way that Aquinas did not. (85) This is not to say that they thereby distort what he said, but rather that they complicate it. Their doing so illustrates what would seem to be a general truth about interpretation: that it can never be merely replication of the thought of another. Complication as well as simplification must at some point enter into the interpretative process. As I hope the foregoing has shown, interpretative complication can be of great philosophic interest. This leads to my second remark.

The kind of dispute I have been discussing, reminiscent as it is of the scholastic quaestio disputata in its combination of authority--here, that of Aquinas--and philosophic reason, is perhaps an ideal tool for introducing students to contemporary Thomistic metaphysics. In following the dispute, and simultaneously reading the text of Aquinas, one sees how philosophy proceeds by way of conversation, conversation between interpreters and their texts, and of interpreters with one another. (86) One also sees how, in such conversation, interpreters must labor to use words with care, as they move between Aquinas's Latin and our contemporary speech, and, within our contemporary speech, between ordinary language and a more formal register, seeking both "the common word exact without vulgarity" and "the formal word precise but not pedantic." (87) One is drawn into the conversation, occasionally venturing to agree or disagree. One begins to have thoughts of one's own, and the thought of Aquinas begins to live in one's own thought. Through the double lens of the dispute and the Thomistic text, one begins to make out the landscape, at once strange and familiar, that Aquinas is describing when he speaks of esse and of actus essendi.

The Catholic University of America

(1) Joseph Owens, An Interpretation of Existence (Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing Company, 1968; reprint, Houston: Center for Thomistic Studies, 1985), 27 n. 6.

(2) Cornelio Fabro, "The Intensive Hermeneutics of Thomistic Philosophy: The Notion of Participation," trans. B. M. Bonansea, The Review of Metaphysics 27 (1974): 470.

(3) Joseph Owens, "Aquinas on Knowing Existence," The Review of Metaphysics 29 (1976): 689. Reprinted in St. Thomas Aquinas on the Existence of God: The Collected Papers of Joseph Owens, ed. J. R. Catan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1980), 32-33.

(4) John F. Wippel, "Truth in Thomas Aquinas," The Review of Metaphysics 43 (1990): 552 n. 20. Reprinted in Wippel, Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas II (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2007), 99 n. 79.

(5) Cornelio Fabro, Opere Complete (1939; Segni, Italy: Editrice della Verbo Incarnato, 2005), 3:183-260; Wippel, "Fabro sulla distinzione e composizione di essenza ed esse nella metafisica di Tommaso d'Aquino," in Crisi e destino della filosofia: Studi su Cornelio Fabro, ed. Ariberto Acerbi (Rome: EDUSC, 2012), 139-56. For a good account of Aquinas's doctrine of participation, and of interpretations of it by Fabro, Wippel, and Louis B. Geiger, see Gregory T. Doolan, Aquinas on the Divine Ideas as Exemplar Causes (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2008), chap. 6, "Participation and the Divine Exemplars", 199-243.

(6) Fabro, La nozione metafisica, 194-95.

(7) "Id per quod aliquid constituitur extra suas causas." This phrase is post-Thomistic. With reference to Fabro's article, "L'Obscurcissement de Tesse' dans l'ecole thomiste" (Revue Thomiste 58 [1958]: 446), Owens says: "The Scholastic formula that existence places a thing outside nothing and outside causes may or may not be understood against a background that preserves the doctrine of St. Thomas." Joseph Owens, An Elementary Christian Metaphysics (Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing Company, 1963; reprint, Houston: Center for Thomistic Studies, 1985), 60 n. 5.

(8) With respect to the "depth" and "inwardness" of esse, Fabro (La nozione metafisica, 195) cites Aquinas: "Inter omnia, esse est illud quod immediatius et intimius convenit rebus, ut dicitur in libro De causis" (Quaestiones disputatae De anima, q. 9 [Opera Omnia, Leonine ed. 24.1:79,11. 139-41]); "Esse est illud quod est magis intimum cuilibet et profundius inest, cum sit formale respectu omnium quae in re sunt" (Summa theologiae I, q. 8, a. 1 [Ottawa ed. 1:41b]).

(9) Fabro, La nozione metafisica, 195.

(10) Leonine ed. 25.1:94, ll. 31-46.

(11) "... enunciatio sequitur apprehensionem. Unde secundum quod intelligimus aliqua, oportet quod enuntiemus ilia." In 1 Sententiarum, d. 4, q. 2, a. 1 (ed. Mandonnet 1:139).

(12) Quodlibeta 9, q. 2, a. 2 [3], 11. 41-45.

(13) Fabro, La nozione metafisica, 195.

(14) Compare: "[O]ne view about facts is that to be a fact is to be a true proposition. On another, incompatible view, facts are what make true propositions true, or more generally, account for their truth. The search for what accounts for the truth of propositions is ... actually one main rationale for the introduction of facts.... By 'proposition' we shall mean truth-bearer, and remain neutral as to whether truth-bearers are sentences, statements, beliefs or abstract objects expressed by sentences." "Facts," section 2.4, "Facts and Propositions," in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/facts/).

I note Barry Smith's suggestion that Aquinas's term dispositio rei is a forerunner of the modern logical term Sachverhalt or "state of affairs." Barry Smith, "Logic and the Sachverhalt," The Monist 72 (1989): 52-69, at 53 and 67 n. 5. Smith refers to Aquinas's remark in In IX Metaph., lect. 11 (Cathala no. 1897): "Dispositio rei est causa veritatis in opinione et oratione."

(15) Cornelio Fabro, Partecipazione e causalita secondo s. Tommaso d'Aquino (Turin: Societa Editrice Internazionale, 1960).

(16) Edmund Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1969), #46, pp. 127-29. See Robert Sokolowski, Husserlian Meditations: How Words Present Things (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 233, 281; and Introduction to Phenomenology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 158-59.

(17) Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (Garden City, N.Y.: Yale University Press, 1959), 159.

(18) "Si tratta della sostituzione dell'atto' al 'fatto' od anche, e forse meglio, della differenza fra la verita dell'essere colta nel suo 'farsi' ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) e la constatazione del fatto supposto gia realizzato, onde appunto resta obliato quell'atto del farsi in cui si manifesta l'essere dell'essente, ed il risultato dello scambio e stato determinante nello svillupo del pensiero." Fabro, Partecipazione e causalita, 15. Compare Cornelio Fabro, "Actualite et originalite de Hesse' thomiste," Revue Thomiste 56 (1956): 248.

(19) "'Fatto,' per Heidegger, seeun termine bello e anche insidioso e n'e rimasta compromessa la stessa nozione di verita...." Fabro, Partecipazione e causalita, 15. "'Fait,' pour Heidegger, est un terme beau sans doute, mais captieux aussi, et la notion meme de verite s'en est trouvee compromise...." Fabro, "Actualite et originalite de Hesse' thomiste," 248. "'Tatsache' ist ein schones und ein verfangliches Wort." Martin Heidegger, Was Heisst Denken? 2d ed. (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1961), 162.

(20) Fabro, Partecipazione e causalita, 58-66; compare Fabro, "Actualite et originalite de Hesse' thomiste," 498-507. "Les considerations suivantes font partie d'une etude plus ample sur les caracteres fondamentaux de la metaphysique thomiste. Je puis ajouter que j'ai ete fortement incite a cette etude par l'accusation de Vergessenheit des Seins faite par Heidegger a la metaphysique occidentale, mais qui ne s'applique pas a la doctrine thomiste des qu'on entend celle-ci dans son sens original." Fabro, "L'obscurcissement de Hesse,'" 443 n. 1.

(21) Fabro, Partecipazione e causalita, 603-29.

(22) Ibid., 606-07. See n. 7 above.

(23) Ibid., 609; compare "L'obscurcissement de Fesse,'" 450.

(24) See n. 2 above.

(25) Fabro, "The Intensive Hermeneutics of Thomistic Philosophy," 470.

(26) Ibid., 486; compare 470. See Jesus Villagrassa, "La resolutio come metodo della metafisica secondo Comelio Fabro," Alpha Omega 4 (2001): 35-66; and Eileen C. Sweeney, "Three Notions of Resolutio and the Structure of Reasoning in Aquinas," The Thomist 58 (1994): 197-243.

(27) Fabro, "The Intensive Hermeneutics of Thomistic Philosophy," 450 nn. 2-3; 469-70.

(28) Ibid., 470-71. See George Lindbeck, "Participation and Existence in Interpretation of St. Thomas," Franciscan Studies 17 (1957): 107 (not 102, as Fabro says).

(29) For another response to Fabro's article, from a position with affinities to that of Owens, see Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, "Existence and Esse," The New Scholasticism 50 (1976): 20-45.

(30) Ed. Mandonnet 1:903-04. See Owens, "Aquinas on Knowing Existence," 670-74 (St. Thomas Aquinas on the Existence of God, 20-23).

(31) "Enuntiabile enim et est in intellectu, et est in voce." Summa theologiae I, q. 16, a. 7 (Ottawa ed. 1:119a). For historical context, see Gabriel Nuchelmans, Theories of the Proposition: Ancient and Medieval Conceptions of the Bearers of Truth and Falsity (London: North-Holland Publishing Company, 1973), 188.

Irmingard Habbel discusses Aquinas's notions dispositio rei (compare above n. 14) and enuntiabile with reference to the modern notion Sachverhalt ("state of affairs"), arguing that "[d]er Sachverhalt als 'dispositio rei' ist das Objekt des intellectus dividens," and that "[d]er Sachverhalt als 'enuntiabile' ist das Objekt des 'intellectus componens.'" Irmingard Habbel, Die Sachverhaltsproblematik in dev Phanomenologie und bei Thomas von Aquin (Regensburg: Josef Habbel, 1960), 121-25.

(32) "... ideo dicendum est, quod Deus non solum cognoscit ipsas res, sed etiam enuntiabilia et complexa...." In 1 Sent., d. 38, q. 1, a. 3 (ed. Mandonnet 1:903).

(33) "... distinguendum est de enuntiabili. Quia vel potest sumi inquantum est res quaedam rationis quasi materialiter; et sic quodcumque enuntiabile [Deus] scivit, scit: semper enim scit hoc enuntiabile, Socratem currere, habere talem naturam et tales partes. Vel potest sumi significative, prout per ipsum designatur esse rei cum suis conditionibus quae dantur intelligi ex consignificatione verbi; et sic non quodcumque enuntiabile Deus scivit, scit." In 1 Sent., d. 41, q. 1, a. 5 (ed. Mandonnet 1:975).

(34) In 1 Sent., d. 38, q. 1, a. 3; d. 41, q. 1, a. 5 (ed. Mandonnet 1:903, 974-75).

(35) Ibid., d. 41, q. 1, a. 5 (ed. Mandonnet 1:975).

(36) On exemplar causality in Aquinas, see Doolan, Aquinas on the Divine Ideas as Exemplar Causes.

(37) "[E]very act of sensation grasps both thing and existence.... [T]he existence later represented as a distinct object in intellection can be none other than the existence grasped concretely in sensation. All sensation, accordingly, apprehends the existence in its object. The existence is actuating its object, and is grasped as exercising this function. In this way it is apprehended by the sense." Joseph Owens, "Judgment and Truth in Aquinas," Mediaeval Studies 32 (1970): 139-40 (St. Thomas Aquinas on the Existence of God, 35).

(38) Owens, An Interpretation of Existence, 32, 17. My italics in both cases.

(39) Owens, "Aquinas on Knowing Existence," 678 (St. Thomas Aquinas on the Existence of God, 25). In addition to composition of form and matter, and of subject and quality, Owens mentions composition of individual and nature, and of species and genus. In all these kinds of composition, esse is what "results" from the composition. He also mentions composition of esse and the thing that has it. See Owens, An Elementary Christian Metaphysics, 49-50; "Judgment and Truth in Aquinas," 150 (St. Thomas Aquinas on the Existence of God, 44); and "Aquinas on Knowing Existence," 678 n.14 (St. Thomas Aquinas on the Existence of God, 239 n. 14). In the last two of these, Owens refers to In IX Metaph., lect. 11 (Cathala no. 1898).

(40) At one point he expresses disarming diffidence concerning this preference: "[W]hether he [Aquinas] would care to have compositio understood dynamically as 'synthesizing' is open to question. Genuine philosophical thinking is as individual as fingerprints. It is impossible to get into anybody else's thought so thoroughly as to be able to say that it will continue to coincide with one's own development of its principles, especially in regard to a thinker of the status of Aquinas. To go astray is surprisingly easy, and the responsibility is one's own." Joseph Owens, "Material Substance--Temporal or Eviternal?" The New Scholasticism 56 (1982): 460.

(41) Ibid., 448; Joseph Owens, "The Content of Existence," in Logic and Ontology, ed. Milton K. Munitz (New York: New York University Press), 30. Lawrence Dewan, in "St. Thomas, Joseph Owens, and Existence" (The New Scholasticism 56 [1982]: 399-441), criticizes Owens's interpretation of Aquinas with respect to this point concerning being and time. Owens's "Material Substance--Temporal or Eviternal?" is his response to Dewan's critique.

The theme of the temporal character of the being or existence (esse) that we apprehend is a commonplace in Owens's writings. (Is there a Heideggerian influence at work here?) See, for instance, An Elementary Christian Meta-physics, 51-52; An Interpretation of Existence, 26-29; and "Aquinas--Existential Permanence and Flux," Mediaeval Studies 31 (1969): 71-92. A touchstone for his construal of Aquinas's thought on this point is a remark in In 1 Sent., d. 8, q. 1, a. 1 (ed. Mandonnet 1:195): "Esse autem nostrum habet aliquid sui extra se: deest enim aliquid quod jam de ipso praeteriit, et quod futurum est." ("Our existence has something of itself outside itself: for there is lacking something that has already passed away from it, and something that is yet to be.")

(42) Joseph Owens, "Aquinas's Distinction at De ente et essentia 4.119-123," Mediaeval Studies 48 (1986): 280.

(43) Owens, An Elementary Christian Metaphysics, 59; Owens, An Interpretation of Existence, 54.

(44) Others are perfection and occurrence. See Owens, An Elementary Christian Metaphysics, 58-59; and An Interpretation of Existence, 52-53, 55. Even to call esse "something," "it," or "what" ("what is grasped in judgment"), or an "object" or "aspect," is, according to Owens, to use these words in unusual ways, with nonproper, extended meanings. See Owens, An Interpretation of Existence, 46-51; and "Aquinas on Knowing Existence," 680 (St. Thomas Aquinas on the Existence of God, 27). In all these cases, esse, originally grasped as a predicate and expressed in a sentence, is turned into a subject of predication by being given a name, even if an inadequate one; see An Interpretation of Existence, 45.

(45) Owens, "Aquinas on Knowing Existence," 680 (St. Thomas Aquinas on the Existence of God, 27). My italics. I take naturally here to be equivalent to other adverbial expressions Owens uses. "Being, though not originally attained by human cognition through a concept in simple apprehension, is subsequently conceptualized, spontaneously and vaguely as something, technically as an act or perfection" (my italics). Owens, An Elementary Christian Metaphysics, 67. "[T]he ways in which the object of the intellect's synthetic activity can be referred to in ordinary language by single words like 'existence' or 'fact'..." (my italics). Owens, An Interpretation of Existence, 20. In these passages, naturally, spontaneously and vaguely, and in ordinary language all seem to mean, in a word, nontechnically.

(46) Owens, An Interpretation of Existence, 55.

(47) See n. 45 above. Owens uses act and actuality interchangeably. Contrary to Dewan ("St. Thomas, Joseph Owens, and Existence," 419), Owens also maintains that there is no distinction in meaning between actus and actualitas in Aquinas's usage. Owens, "Material Substance--Temporal or Eviternal?" 457. In speaking of the conceptualization of esse as act or actuality, Owens seems to refer to all of Aquinas's expressions that describe esse an actus or actualitas, including: actus essendi, actus essentiae, actus entis, actus entis inquantum est ens, actualitas omnisformae vel naturae, actualitas omnium actuum, actualitas substantiae vel essentiae, and actualitas omnium rerum et etiam ipsarum formarum. Wippel, on the other hand, distinguishes between the meaning of actus essentiae and that of actus essendi; see below, n. 55. On the pre-Thomistic origins of the term actus essendi, see Quodlibeta 9, q. 4, a. 1 [6] (Leonine ed. 25.1:102), 11.119-20, adn.

(48) Owens, "The Notion of Actuality in Aquinas," 20; Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, q. 3, a. 4c (Ottawa ed. 1:19a). See Owens, "Aristotle: Motion as Actuality of the Imperfect," Paideia, special Aristotle issue (1978): 120-32; and "Actuality in Aristotle and Aquinas," in Proceedings of the World Congress on Aristotle, Thessaloniki, August 7-14, 1978 (Athens: Ministry of Culture and Sciences, 1981), 192-96.

(49) Quaestiones disputatae De potentia 7.2, ad 9 (ed. Pession 192).

(50) Owens, An Interpretation of Existence, 53. Aquinas's complete formulation in Quaestiones disputatae De potentia 7.2, ad 9 is in fact a double superlative genitive. He says that "it is obvious that what I call esse is the actuality of all acts, and is, for this reason, the perfection of all perfections." ("Unde patet quod hoc quod dico esse est actualitas omnium actuum, et propter hoc est perfectio omnium perfectionum.") Actualitas and perfectio correspond to Aristotle's energeia and entelecheia, respectively.

(51) Owens, "Aquinas on Knowing Existence," 688 (St. Thomas Aquinas on the Existence of God, 32).

In at least one passage, Gilson seems to urge the very distinction between act and fact that Fabro and Wippel wish to make, and that Owens wishes to deny: "Existence may mean either a state or an act. In the first sense, it means the state in which a thing is posited by the efficacy of an efficient or of a creative cause.... In a second sense, existence (esse, to be) points out the interior act, included in the composition of substance, in virtue of which the essence is 'a being,' and this is the properly Thomistic meaning of the word.... [I]f an actually existing being has been produced by its cause, why should one attribute to it an 'existence' distinct from the fact that it exists? This is the very point that Thomas is anxious to make us understand ..." (my italics). Etienne Gilson, The Elements of Christian Philosophy (New York: Doubleday, 1960), 142-43.

In Being and Some Twentieth-century Thomists (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), John F. X. Knasas uses this passage from Gilson as a sort of framing device, quoting from it more fully (although not quoting the sentence I have italicized) both near the beginning and near the end (xvi; 311 n. 26). Knasas himself says: "[I]t is not so much that Aquinas disagrees with the fact-sense of the thing's existence, but rather that he insists that the fact-sense be deepened to include the act in virtue of which the thing is a fact. A thing is a fact in virtue of its actus essendi." Ibid., 177-78.

(52) Owens, "Aquinas on Knowing Existence," 689 (St. Thomas Aquinas on the Existence of God, 32-33). The other interpretations under discussion are also found wanting: whereas Maritain proposes that there is an intuition of existence, as well as three distinct concepts of existence, Aquinas indicates that there is just one, analogous concept of it; and Donceel's suggestion that the human intellect has an a priori structure does not seem to be in keeping with Aquinas's Aristotelian approach. "Aquinas on Knowing Existence," 687-88, 689 (St. Thomas Aquinas on the Existence of God, 31-32, 33).

(53) Ed. Mandonnet 1:486.

(54) Ed. Mandonnet 1:766.

(55) Wippel, "Truth in Thomas Aquinas," 551-52 (Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas II, 98-99).

(56) Wippel, "Truth in Thomas Aquinas," 552 n. 20 (Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas II, 99 n. 79).

(57) John Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas: From Finite Being to Uncreated Being (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2000).

(58) Leonine ed. 50:147, 11. 89-105.

(59) Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas, 23-24.

(60) Ibid., 24-25.

(61) Ibid., 31.

(62) Ibid., 31 n. 29.

(63) Texts such as In I Sent., d. 19, q. 5, a. 1; In I Sent., d. 33, q. 1, a. 1, ad 1; and Super Boetium De Trinitate, q. 5, a. 3.

(64) Wippel, "Truth in Thomas Aquinas," 552-54 (Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas II, 99-100); The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas, 32-33.

(65) Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas, 33.

(66) Ibid.

(67) Ibid.

(68) Ibid., 35.

(69) Wippel, "Truth in Thomas Aquinas," 552 n. 20 (Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas II, 99 n. 79).

(70) Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas, 31.

(71) Leonine ed. 43:376-77, 11. 94-146.

(72) Mentioned above in section III, in connection with In I Sent., d. 38, q. 1,

(73) Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas, 142.

(74) Wippel notes that Fernand Van Steenberghen finds the same shift in the meaning of the word esse at the end of Phase 1 of the argument in De ente 4. See Fernand Van Steenberghen, Le probleme de Texistence de Dieu dans les ecrits de s. Thomas d'Aquin (Louvain-1 a-neuve: Editions de l'lnstitut Superieur de Philosophie, 1980), 34-44. As Wippel adds, "For Van Steenberghen this shift in the meaning of esse renders the entire argument invalid." Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas, 142 n. 29. Wippel himself evidently thinks that the shift in the meaning of esse is overly hasty. As he says, speaking of a similar argument in Aquinas's In 2 Sent., d. 3, q. 1, a. 1 (ed. Mandonnet 2:87-88): "As in phase 1 of the argumentation in De ente, c. 4, it moves too quickly from understanding esse as referring to the fact that things exist ... to taking it as signifying the act of being...." The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas, 588. Both Van Steenberghen and Wippel seem to suggest that, when he wrote the end of Phase 1 of the De ente argument, Aquinas, in an unwitting youthful blunder that he later learned to avoid, committed something like a fallacy of equivocation.

(75) Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas, 407.

(76) Owens and Wippel had an interesting exchange on the three-phase argument from the point of view of a question different from, although related to, the one we are considering, namely: At what point in the argument is the distinction between esse and essence presented as a real, and not merely a conceptual, distinction? Owens argues that it is only at the end of Phase 3, after the existence of God has been established positively, that the esse-essence distinction can be taken to be real. Wippel argues that the distinction is already presented as real at the end of Phase 2, at which point the existence of God has been treated merely hypothetically.

See Joseph Owens, "Quiddity and Real Distinction in St. Thomas Aquinas," Mediaeval Studies 27 (1965): 1-22; John Wippel, "Aquinas's Route to the Real Distinction: A Note on De ente et essentia," The Thomist 43 (1979): 279-95, reprinted as "Essence and Existence in the De ente, Ch. 4," in Wippel, Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1984), 107-20; Owens, "Stages and Distinctions in De ente: A Rejoinder," The Thomist 45 (1981): 99-123; Wippel, "A Reply to Fr. Owens," Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas, 120--32; and Owens, "Aquinas's Distinction at De ente et essentia 4.119-123."

(77) Ottawa ed. 1:19a.

(78) Robert Sokolowski, "The Relation of Phenomenology and Thomistic Metaphysics to Religion: A Study of Patrick Masterson's Approaching God: Between Phenomenology and Theology," The Review of Metaphysics 67 (2014): 626.

(79) See Theodore Kisiel, "On the Genesis of Heidegger's Formally Indicative Hermeneutics of Facticity," in Rethinking Facticity, ed. Francois Raffoul and Eric Sean Nelson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 41-67.

(80) Both act and fact seem to have entered the English language in the fourteenth century, in a scholastic context. The first known appearance of act in English is in Chaucer's translation of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy. See James Franklin, "Mental Furniture from the Philosophers," Et cetera 40 (1983): 179-80.

(81) In De veritate, q. 17, a. 1 (Leonine ed. 22.2:516,11. 231, 247), he speaks of an actus that is factus, "a done deed."

(82) Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. "fact" 4a.

(83) See n. 45 above.

(84) "The commonest candidate, in modern versions of what is all too often taken to be the correspondence theory of truth, for that which corresponds to judgment in this way is a fact. But facts, like telescopes and wigs for gentlemen, were a seventeenth-century invention.... It is of course and always was harmless, philosophically and otherwise, to use the word 'fact' of what a judgment states. What is and was not harmless, but highly misleading, was to conceive of a realm of facts independent of judgment or of any other form of linguistic expression, so that judgments or statements or sentences could be paired off with facts, truth or falsity being the alleged relationship between such paired items." Alasdair McIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 357-58.

(85) Existence, to take another common word of the interpreters, is no more a term of Aquinas's than fact is. Aquinas uses existentia rarely; contemporary Thomistic metaphysicians speak of existence as a matter of course. These observations concerning fact and existence suggest that a more comprehensive reflection on the relation between our English and Aquinas's Latin, both taken in their entirety, would be instructive. The relation is a complex web of similarity, apparent similarity, and difference.

(86) On the essentially conversational character of philosophy, see Robert Sokolowski, Phenomenology of the Human Person (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 321-22.

(87) T. S. Eliot, "Little Gidding," V.

Correspondence to: Kevin White, School of Philosophy, The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC 20064.

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Author:	White, Kevin
Publication:	The Review of Metaphysics
Article Type:	Report
Geographic Code:	1USA
Date:	Dec 1, 2014
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