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    Comments on Daniel Novotny’s Book (2013) Ens Rationis from Suarez to Caramuel
    Comments on Daniel Novotny’s Book (2013) Ens Rationis from Suarez to Caramuel
    Comments on Daniel Novotny’s Book (2013) Ens Rationis from Suarez to Caramuel
    Ebook106 pages53 minutes

    Comments on Daniel Novotny’s Book (2013) Ens Rationis from Suarez to Caramuel

    By Razie Mah

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    Daniel Novotny aims to demonstrate that the Baroque scholastics should no longer be ignored. This happens to also be the thesis of another philosopher, John Deely in a separate book, New Beginnings: Early Modern Philosophy and Postmodern Thought (1994).
    In these comments on Novotny’s text, the category-based nested form is used to model the ideas of the Baroque schoolmen. The models clarify the way of abstraction practiced by our current Lebenswelt in contrast to the Lebenswelt that we evolved in. They also re-articulate Novotny’s narrative, thereby accounting for the various twists and turns in the development (and abandonment) of ens rationis in the early decades of the Age of Ideas.
    These comments, along with Novotny’s excellent text constitute a home-schooling course at the high school and college levels. John Deely’s book supplements this course. The title of the course is “Implicit and Explicit Abstraction”.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRazie Mah
    Release dateApr 23, 2016
    ISBN9781942824169
    Comments on Daniel Novotny’s Book (2013) Ens Rationis from Suarez to Caramuel
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    Razie Mah

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      Comments on Daniel Novotny’s Book (2013) Ens Rationis from Suarez to Caramuel - Razie Mah

      Comments on Daniel Novotny’s Book (2013)

      Ens Rationis from Suarez to Caramuel

      By Razie Mah

      Published for Smashwords.com

      2016

      Abstract

      This 14,900 word essay comments on a recent book on baroque scholasticism by Daniel Novotny, a Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Bohemia in the Czech Republic. The title of the work is Ens rationis from Suarez to Caramuel: A Study in the Scholasticism of the Baroque Era (Fordham University, 2013). Please have this book at hand for the full story.

      This essay is not a close reading. Rather, it is a curious association of postmodern and semiotic models to Novotny’s writing. These models come from my own works, How to Define the Word Religion as well as An Archaeology of the Fall.

      I regard Novotny’s work as both insightful and prophetic. By insightful, I mean seeing through the highly nuanced Latin text in order to grasp the core. He plainly condenses each nuanced argument into one or two sentences. By prophetic, I mean that he quests for truth. In chapter 9, paragraph 3, Novotny admits that his initial aim was to show that, even today, Baroque scholastic culture could produce philosophical illumination.

      As the following comments will show, he is on target, but not in the way he expected.

      These comments and Novotny’s book may be used as an independent home school or college course of study. Student instructions are colored in burgundy.

      Table of Contents

      Introduction

      That Nonbeing Stuff

      Three Motivations

      The Thought Experiment

      The Relevance of This Nonbeing Stuff

      The Story of Beings of Reason

      Implicit Abstraction and Hand Talk

      What is an Implicit Abstraction?

      Indivisible Beings of Reason

      Hurtado’s Dilemma: Round One

      Hurtado’s Dilemma: Round Two

      First Summary

      The Next Stop

      Caramuel and Langauge

      Fixing What’s Baroque

      The End is A Beginning

      Introduction

      0001 Why consider baroque scholasticism?

      John Deely wrote the first postmodern survey of the history of philosophy, from the ancient Greeks to the 21st, or should I say, 79th century. His book is entitled, Four Ages of Understanding (2001, University of Toronto Press).

      0002 Deely locates Baroque scholasticism (7400 to 7480 U0’; 1600 to 1680 AD) at the start of the Age of Ideas and the end of the Latin Age. He focuses on this time - right around the promulgation of the Peace of Westphalia (1648 AD) - as paradigmatic. Two figures stand out.

      In France, Rene Descartes wrestled with the philosophical implications of the new mechanical philosophy. Note, the word philosophy appears twice. One philosophy became modernism and postmodernism. The other ended as science.

      In Spain, John Poinsot arrived at the definition of a sign. A sign is a triadic relation. The relation was classified as ‘a being of reason’ (ens rationis) by Suarez, the first philosopher covered by Novotny. Almost 300 years after Suarez, the sign as a triadic relation was independently discovered by Charles Sanders Peirce. Peirce marks a new turning. He is the first philosopher of the upcoming Age of Semiotics.

      0003 Both John Deely and Daniel Novotny aim to understand the critical juncture where the Latin Age gave way to our current Age of Ideas.

      The origin of the Age of Ideas is wrapped in modern mythology. Descartes is lionized. Poinsot is ignored. The Age of Ideas goes with the shining castle of the modern university. To me, state-supported multiversities look like palaces. Mechanical philosophy is taught to some. Analytic philosophy is taught to others.

      Outside the palaces of big government liberalism lays a moat of resentment, filled with materialistic philosophies, political theologies and television. Even further away, the forgotten remnants of the Latin Age slowly convert an apparently dead civilization into a living soil. For centuries, moderns were warned about going into the dark forest of scholasticism.

      Yet, that is where John Deely and Daniel Novotny have wandered.

      0004 A crucial difference arises between Deely and Novotny. Deely has Peirce’s definition of the sign to guide him. He has a lantern. Novotny does not have the advantage of a postmodern source of light. Novotny only has his intuition.

      John Kronen, of the University of St. Thomas, captured Novotny’s lack of an illuminated path in his review, writing, If one agrees with Aristotle that opposites are treated in the same science (e.g. medicine treats both health and sickness) ... then one should agree that metaphysics (the study of being) ought to study nonbeing.

      Indeed, Novotny bravely said, OK, I will look into that nonbeing stuff. I will go into that dark forest of scholasticism and see what happens.

      0005 From these labors, he came up with

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