Distinction réelle, identité réelle, et addition. Note sur l'ontologie d'Hervé de Nédellec

In the early years of the fourteenth century, Hervaeus Natalis sought to resolve a number of ontological issues : whether the whole is more than the sum of its parts, what relations are, what the status of the last six Aristotelian categories is, and how to account for the intensification and remission of qualities. He approached these issues by juxtaposing propositions that appear mutually incompatible. Thus, the whole is really distinct from its parts, yet, apart from the whole itself, there is no entity in the world to help grasp this distinction. Relations and the last six Aristotelian categories are really distinct from items belonging to all other categories, yet they introduce no new things into the ontological furniture of the world. A quality that becomes more intense remains numerically the same, and yet it somehow possesses something more than it previously had. This article argues that the continual stretching of concepts like identity, difference, and addition is a distinctive and remarkable feature of Hervaeus Natalis's thought.