ABSTRACT
A thorough treatment of the issues in the title is not the task of an essay with special limitations but one of a monograph; the purpose of this text is thus not to present the historical dynamics and serious conceptual implications of the issues being considered. At most, we can offer viewpoints and propositions, if you will, that might help to create a theoretical frame of reference, which, though it still cannot be found in the literature, is crucial. Methodologically, theoretical and historical analysis mutually condition each other. That we begin here with a purely conceptual analysis and the historical research follows in a separate part is because reconstruction of the medieval phenomenological world does not in itself offer a sufficiently robust basis to situate such phenomena within our current classification framework.
