SOURCE: "The Problem of Being," in The Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian "Metaphysics," Pontifical Institute of Metaphysical Studies, 1957, pp. 35-68.

In the following essay, Owens studies how Medieval metaphysicians interpreted Aristotle's Metaphysics. Owens observes that the two apparently contradictory notions of being identified in Metaphysics (being as either an abstract, empty concept and being as related to the concept of God) were often merged by Medieval Christian thinkers, and he reviews the debate among later critics regarding the possibility of unifying the two concepts.

To determine whether the notion of Being in Alexander of Hales is Aristotelian or Platonic, a recent historian seeks his criterion in "the gradual separation of the Aristotelian views from the essential and fundamental teachings of Plato."¹ He arrives at a clear-cut norm: "Therefore the essential difference between a Platonic and an Aristotelian conception of Being consists in this, that for the former...