On December 19th 1513, the papal bull Apostolici regiminis sanctioned the dogma of the immortality of the soul, imposing the defence of the Christian doctrine during the courses in philosophy. In their lectures, the Christian teachers had to contrast some unorthodox topics such as the mortality of the individual soul, the unity of the intellect and the eternity of the world. All of their arguments should be based on the principle of the unity of truth, according to which philosophical truths (...) cannot deny or contradict truths of the faith. The paper aims to trace the history of the reception of the adagio verum vero minime contradicit, starting from the promulgation of the bull and the debate on the Aristotelian psychology up to the Age of Galileo and Scientific Revolution, showing the important role Benet Perera played in this debate. (shrink)

A well-established historiography has pointed out the distinction between first philosophy and theology, proposed by Benet Perera in his De communibus, as the “birth” of modern ontology. Ontology is often defined as an independent or neutral science by modern authors as well as contemporary scholars.This paper aims to show the way in which Perera comes to this distinction, after a long reflection on the status of mathematics and abstractions of theoretical sciences matured during his lectures at the Collegio Romano.Interestingly, it (...) appears that after the subject of ontology is removed from its relationship with God and rational theology, ontology does not seem to acquire the status of neutral and universal science that Perera sought. Ontology becomes, in fact, a science dependent on the definitions provided by other disciplines and sciences, such as logic and mathematics.Following these recent findings, the paper also provides a renewed confrontation b.. (shrink)

The bibliographical history offers an interesting point of view for a better understanding of the rise and development of ontology, as an autonomous discipline, in early modern thought. After Luther’s interdict, the metaphysics was neglected in many protestant academies and excluded from the disciplinary classifications. The return of metaphysics, at the end of the 16thcentury, coincided, in many cases, with the affirmation of the new scholastic paradigm of ontology. An illustrious precedent of this paradigm was constituted by the Jesuit Francisco (...) Suárez and his Disputationes metaphysicae. The Jesuit models - not only that by Suárez, but also those by Benet Perera and Pedro da Fonseca - represented the standard on which Calvinists and Lutherans built their own metaphysics in an ontological way. This paper provides a conspicuous number of case studies in which the passage from metaphysics to ontology becomes definitively clear: this debate takes place throughout the first handbooks, treatises, magisterial and doctoral disputations proposed by the Calvinist and Lutheran authors. (shrink)

The article provides a survey of texts on the debates concerning the concept of ‘thing/res’ in German and Swiss scholastic metaphysics during the early modern age. Even in the vernacular of today, ‘thing’ is a key concept for thinking about reality. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ‘thing’ was the most extensive concept within ontology: everything is a ‘thing’. Protestant Reformed universities inherited the debates of the medieval schools, and brought a similar status quaestionis to Kant, who defines God (...) as a ‘thing in itself’, as something that can be thought, but not (more) known. From “avant-garde,” the concept of ‘thing’ passed to rear-guard. (shrink)

À proprement parler, la première « ontologie » de l’histoire fut publiée en 1606 par Jacob Lorhard, recteur du Gymnasium réformé de Saint-Gall. L’article examine l’ontologie de Lorhard en la replaçant dans son contexte suisse, celui d’une « municipalisation » de la théologie qui concerna aussi la métaphysique. Nous proposons d’abord une caractérisation « macrologique » de l’ontologie scolastique moderne par différence d’avec les voies différentes empruntées par les métaphysiques jésuites du xvi e siècle. Au niveau « micrologique » ensuite, (...) le cas de Saint-Gall permet de comparer les modèles métaphysiques des réformés et ceux des moines de l’Abbaye bénédictine. Les métaphysiques monastiques offrent de nouvelles perspectives à la recherche sur la naissance de l’ontologie à l’époque moderne. (shrink)