ABSTRACT
There is really something there to be discerned, even though it is not noticed until a certain way of conceiving it brings out a different aspect of the thing. There is really something there to be discerned, even though it is not noticed until a certain way of conceiving it brings out a different aspect of the thing. Scotus’s transcendentals, which consist in formal properties such as unity, goodness, and being, are supplemented or supplanted by Kant’s “pure concepts of the understanding”. The idea of a formal reality of things that is really grounded in things but that is disclosed only by reflection can be traced forward to the semiology of Charles Sanders Peirce, who explicitly links his theory of “general terms” to Duns Scotus’s thought of a formal reality that is different from existence. Still, it is not purely arbitrary fantasy and invention but rather pertains to the reality of things as disclosed through their interaction with the mind.
