Structure and Being of the Ens Rationis in the Conception of Dionicio Blasco

Abstract

The article is devoted to the concept of ens rationis (mental being) in metaphysics of Dionicio
Blasco, a scholastic philosopher of the 17th century. Blasco belonged to the Order of Carmelites,
the intellectual tradition of which is extremely poorly studied by historical and philosophical science.
We consider in the article three important points of Blasco's teaching about mental essence:
first, the descriptive definition and classification of ens rationis; second, the internal structure of
mental being; third, its existence in the intellect. Blasco distinguishes between two types of ens rationis.
To the first type belong logical mental entities that have a foundation in reality: those concepts
which were known as the second intentions (the concepts of species, genus, substance, causality,
etc.). The second type includes chimeric entities (goat-stags, centaurs, etc.), which are mental compositions
of real parts, chimerically identified or connected with each other. According to Blasco,
each mental being possesses three types of existence in the intellect: 1) a produced existence,
2) a modal existence, and 3) a formal and transcendental existence. The first is identified with
the cognitive act that ens rationis is produced by, the second with the way of being of the ens rationis
in the mind, namely with the objective being; the third with the formal essence of ens rationis, for
which the internal necessary predicate is the impossibility to exist in physical reality. Besides, this
formal essence of ens rationis is transcendental, because the mental being is included in an adequate
subject of metaphysics along with the real being and shares with the real being its transcendental attributes:
one, true, good. In general, the Blasco's conception is a non-trivial variant of the scholastic
teaching on ens rationis.