Theo Kobusch

“Contemporary Social Ontology and its historical background.” Contemporary social ontology, particularly in the works of J. R. Searle, appeared on the scene with the claim to have opened up a new area of human reality: the one of so-called social or institutional facts. The present paper shows that, and in how far, analytic social ontology in its central assumptions has taken up, and in a certain sense at the same time narrowed down, the traditional doctrine of the entia moralia. It is precisely the mainstay of contemporary social ontology, its theory of speech acts, of performatives, of intentionality - including collective intentionality - and last but not least of institutional facts themselves that has already been prefigured by the medieval and early modern ontological tradition of the entia moralia - this being the case without analytic social ontology having developed an awareness of the historical well it drank from unknowingly.