Abstract

There are many peculiar aspects of Aquinas’s metaphysics that have been explored since the revival of interest in his philosophical thought at the beginning of the twentieth century: his real distinction between essence and existence, his notion of participation and the solution to the problem of the one and the many, his arguments for the existence of God. However, Thomas’s notion of ens commune as the subject of metaphysics remains a relatively neglected field of investigation by contemporary commentators. Thus, my intention in this article is to offer an analysis of the major instances in which Thomas employed the specific term ’ens commune’, and to offer some insight into the nature of what Thomas took to be the starting point of metaphysics