Maritain and Aquinas on Our Discovery of Being

Abstract

The author presents and compares Maritain’s and Aquinas’s accounts of our discovery (1) of being as existing; and (2) of being as being (ens inquantum ens or the subject of metaphysics). He finds that especially in his final discussion of how one discovers being as being, Maritain’s account suffers greatly from the absence of any appeal to Aquinas’s negative judgment of separation and also from the omission of reference to the role of judgments of existence in one’s discovery of a premetaphysical notion of being. Wippel finds no evidence in Aquinas’s texts for Maritain’s defense of an intuition of being or of existence.