Lucas Carroll

Part one of this two-part paper described the historically problematic status of multiplicity per se within the order of being throughout the tradition of classical metaphysics, as framed by Ferdinand Ulrich’s Homo Abyssus (HA). The present part of this paper introduces Ulrich’s interpretation of Aquinas into the ongoing debate among contemporary Thomists over the reality of essence as existential limit. Against the background of the parameters for a possible solution set out in the paper’s first part (focused on history), this second part engages in a critical reconstruction of the opposed extant positions on existential limit defended by John Wippel (“thick essence”) and William Carlo (“thin essence”). After reviewing the place of transcendental aliquid and multitudo for Aquinas, and after tracing Aquinas’s doctrine of the ultimate formal principles of diversity in being, the account offered in HA is compared and contrasted with the competing views of Wippel and Carlo. Rereading this debate through the lens of HA demonstrates the dialectical superiority of Ulrich’s conception of existential limit as a reading of Aquinas, and as an available and attractive metaphysical approach to the problem of multiplicity in being.

Ferdinand Ulrich’s Homo Abyssus: The Drama of the Question of Being (HA) offers a systematic reconstruction of the metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas, at the heart of which is a retrieval of the uniquely positive status Aquinas affords to created multiplicity per se within the order of being. Ulrich’s interpretation of Aquinas is rich and difficult, and its significance for contemporary Thomism is only now being explored. This paper provides an introduction into one key aspect of Ulrich’s Aquinas. The first part of this two-part article outlines the historical background of the problem of the relation of perfection and multiplication. This first part traces dialectically the changing thought on the ontological status of multiplicity within the tradition of classical metaphysics. Particular emphasis is placed on the battery of alternative construals attempted by Thomas’s high scholastic contemporaries and immediate successors (Giles of Rome, Meister Eckhart, and Henry of Ghent). The aporetic conclusion of this historical dialectic of perfection and multiplication in the non-Thomistic strains of classical metaphysics opens up then, in part two, a reconsideration of this problem pursued through a conversation between Ulrich’s HA and contemporary Thomistic interpretations of existential limit.

This article presents an interpretation of Deleuze’s concept of difference-in-itself. I argue that this is best understood as an ad(o/a)ption of Duns Scotus’s concept of ultimate difference. After suggesting that the influence of Scotus on Deleuze extends beyond their shared commitment to the univocity of being, I turn to briefly review Deleuze’s notion of absolute difference. I proceed from there to explain Scotus’s accounts of univocity and ultimate difference, throughout noting the many stark parallels with Deleuze. On the basis of this Scotistic reading of Deleuzian difference, I then show how Deleuze’s synthesis of univocal being and difference-in-itself can be uniquely situated within the fourteenth-century Scotistic disputations on the predicability of univocal being to ultimate difference. I conclude with some suggestions on possible further connections between Deleuze and medieval metaphysics which are opened up through this association of Deleuze with Scotus and the Scotistic tradition.