Scholastic Debates about Beings of Reason and Contemporary Analytical Metaphysics

Prima facie it would seem that the traditional scholastic debates about entia rationis (“beings of reason”) may be easily brought into dialogue with debates about nonexistent objects in contemporary analytical metaphysics. It turns out, however, that the scholastic debates about beings of reason are placed within a very different ontological framework or paradigm, so that bringing scholastic and analytical authors into common discussion about this topic is not trivial. In this paper I make the first step toward establishing such discussion by describing the ontological framework presupposed by the scholastic debates about beings of reason, and by identifying the roles that beings of reason were supposed to play in it.