The Knowledge of Being

Abstract

This article explores a crucial question: does human reason know the real as it is or just the universal abstract obtaind from it? To analyze this, I utilize various sources that refer to Thomas Aquinas, specifically to his distinction between conversio ad phantasmata (a mode of kmnowing the universal in the particular) and separatio (a way of knowing the real as real, proper to metaphysics). I then connect this to Leonardo Polo's methodical proposal: abandonment of the thought-object's limit. The first dimension of the abandonment is the intellect's innate openness to being: the innate habit of the first principle, as a method that adverts the being of the universe as persistence, as non-contradiction, and the being of the Origin as persistence's origin.