The Concept of "Moral Entity" in Baroque Scholasticism

This work is devoted to the analysis of the ontology of “moral being” in the scholastic works of the Baroque era. Baroque scholasticism is currently one of the least studied phenomena in the history of philosophy. But, despite the relatively little attention paid to it in modern research, Baroque scholasticism was one of the main phenomena of the intellectual culture of the early modern period and had a huge influence on the development of European thought as a whole. “Moral being” (“ens morale”) is a concept used by scholastics in the 16th–17th centuries to designate a being that is devoid of corporeality and physical existence, but is recognized as really existing by some community of people. Paradigmatic examples of such beings are laws, language, the value of money, and other phenomena that arise and receive their meaning in the social interaction of people. In the scholasticism of the Baroque period, these various social, cultural, political, etc. phenomena formed in the authors' view an ontologically autonomous region that is not completely dependent on physical reality, but at the same time cannot be reduced to purely intellectual products, fictions of the human soul. The fundamental ontological unit of this region is precisely the moral being. As the starting point of my study, I take scholastic semiotics as the discursive field of origin of this concept. I further reconstruct the ontological status of the moral being by analyzing the various concepts and examples used to explicate the term, as well as the contexts in which the scholastics resorted to it. In addition, I also reconstruct and summarize their ideas about how this ontological region constituted by moral beings can be understood and studied in the field of scientific (or, to be precise, “as if” scientific) knowledge.