Antonio Pérez (1599-1649) on Intentional Identity: A Revisionism of Peter Auriol’s Thought

This article is aimed to study Antonio Perez’s criticism against Peter Auriol’s theory of intentional identity. Pérez’s theory of cognition is clearly in debt with Auriol’s theory of intentionality. The Spanish Jesuit often uses the same linguistic expressions of Auriol (such as apparent being) and agrees with him about the intentional identity between the cogniser –conciding in act with the act of cognition–, and the cognised object, which is the same thing existing outside the intellect. Both Pérez and Auriol ground their theory of intentional identity on Aristotle’s De anima, but the Spanish Jesuit highlights an inconsistency in Auriol’s doctrine which contradicts what succinctly stated by Aristotle about the identity between the cogniser and the cognised during the act of cognition. By reviewing in-depth Auriol’s theory of intentional identity, conceived as a kind of identity of indistinction, Pérez points out an inconsistency between Auriol’s description of the act of cognition and his conception of the identity of indistinction. Furthermore, Pérez seems to consider insufficient Auriol’s identity of indistinction used to describe the intentional identity characterising the act of cognition. Consequently, he offers a new definition of the identity of indistinction in order to present the apparent being as an undetermined reality which can be determined by any intelligible content. This Perezian review of Auriol’s theory of the apparent being, on the one hand, can be considered as a case of the early modern scholastic revisionism applied to a medieval thinker and, on the other hand, finds a wider application in Pérez’s metaphysics and philosophical anthropology.