Some Transcendentals

Being, the topic of metaphysics, is the melting pot in which it and other so-called transcendentals, for example the good, truth and unity are ingredients in one another. But unity or oneness can be taken either numerically or less than numerically. Without this possibility Scotus cannot appeal to the notion of common nature as distinguished from universality and to the idea of a contraction of nature toward the non-numerical singularity in terms of which he defines distinctio formalis following the hint Avicenna gives when he says ‘horseness is horseness’. More than a hint toward phenomenological ontology is given by Scotus himself in so far as he recognises that the sphere of logic is the sphere of intentionality and that intentionality is intrinsic to the work of the categories and transcendentals in signifying judgement. So what is analogical in the field of reality is univocal in the ‘reduced’ field of logic. It remains to be seen whether this emphasis on intentionality conceals the need to be more attentive to attentionality.