The Semantics of "esse" in the late medieval philosophy

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This project is an attempt to re-examine the meaning of "esse" in Western medieval philosophical tradition from such a new viewpoint as one of the contemporary analytical ontology, the phenomenological ontology, and the cognitive semantics.Masato Kato, having analyzed relevant medieval texts and various modern studies and thus deepened his idea in discussion with some Japanese and overseas scholars, arrived at the following conclusion. The traditional ontology in the Western medieval philosophy should be re-examined in the new philosophical context after the "linguistic turn" in the 20^<th> century. This was begun by the pioneering works by P.T.Geach and A.Kenny in the 1960s. Their works have had great influences on many modern scholars, of whom T.Veres and H.Weidemann are two most important ones. Kato's "Thomas Aquinas on the Semantics of Being" argues against them and concluded that the fundamental semantic view of Aquinas is derived from the dichotomy of being found in the formulation "esse dupliciter dicitur", that is, the two semantic dimensions of being: significatum and res significata. Also his "Semantics of Being according to Henry of Ghent" made clear the fact that the focal meaning of being according to Henry of Ghent is, unlike Aquinas, the essential being rather than the existential being.Ikuo Yamamoto, having made a study on the distinction and unity of being and the problem of nothingness from the viewpoint of modern philosophy, came to the conclusion that the problem of being in modern philosophy should be developed as the distinction and unity between human being and other being against the traditional distinction "existentia" and "essentia". And he made clear the necessity to rethink about this traditional problem from the modern viewpoint.Takefumi Hayashi made an experimental research on the function of perception in the grasp of physical object from a viewpoint of cognitive psychology.