Ontologia w "De ente et essentia" św. Tomasza z Akwinu. Wprowadzenie do przekładu o. I.M. Bocheńskiego OP

In this essay I will shortly present the main characteristics of Joseph M. Bo­cheński’s OP translation of Thomas Aquinas’s treatise De ente et essentia. First of all, I will present the circumstances of the translation. Aquinas’s. De ente et essentia was published in the fall in 1955 in the journal “Seminary Materials for the Use of Students of Christian Philos­ophy”. It was a student magazine creat­ed for the internal use of students of phi­losophy at the Catholic University of Lublin, who thus provided themselves with access to philosophical texts need­ed for individual classes at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Catholic Universi­ty of Lublin. However, the reader should be warned that the presented edition is incomplete: of the 81 paragraphs of Aquinas’s work, which Bocheński an­nounces in his introduction, the type­script contains only the first 41. It should be also emphasized that Bo­cheński perceives De ente et essentia as a ontological work. The interpretation of this treatise can be seen in its entirety, as well as in numerous footnotes that place De ente et essentia within ontology, se­mantics and logic. Finally, I will empha­size the influence of the Lviv-Warsaw school on Neotomism in general, and on the way of studying philosophy by Bo­cheński in particular. Bocheński’s con­tacts with representatives of the Lviv-Warsaw school date back to the 1920s: during this period, Jan Salamu­cha studied theology in Warsaw. During his studies, he met Jan Lukasiewicz, who later became the promoter of his doctor­al dissertation on the concept of Aristo­tle’s modality (he obtained the title in 1927). Then, in 1930, Salamucha wrote an extensive work on the issue of deduc­tion in Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. At first, Bocheński was a critical review­er of this work, but soon he decided that logic should serve the Thomism. The presence of analytical philosophy, logic and semantics are noticeable in the en­tirety of Bocheński’s translation