Abstract

The article aims at placing Dietrich of Freiberg’s De origine rerum praedicamentalium in its context, i.e. that of the discussions on the ‘deduction’ of categories and the ontological status of relative predicaments at the end of the 13th century, especially with respect to Henry of Ghent’s position. When Dietrich affirms that some things of first intention are constituted by the intellect, he refers only to the relative categories; as for the natural ‘absolute’ things (res naturae), Dietrich maintains on the contrary that the intellect produces only their quidditative being (i.e. the being they have insofar as they possess a definition). Dietrich’s De origine should therefore be likened more to a new, anti-realistic version of the Liber sex principiorum than to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.