ers. But his career plan is to acquire the chair in Catholic theology, and in
return for support by a church grant, he gives up a Habilitationsschrift on the
logical essence of number—which would have made him a parallel to Carnap
studying in these same years under Frege (1910–1914), or even to Wittgenstein,
beginning work with Russell. Heidegger shifts instead to a topic from the
Scotists of the late 1300s, whose technical acumen enables him in safe anti-
modernist guise to engage the issues of the early 1900s. This medieval cultural
capital fits the modern context, for it comes from the apex of reflexive argu-
ment that culminated the old academic networks. Scholasticism had long since
become ignored in the attention space, reviled alike by Humanists, scientists,
Protestants, and liberals. Now it reappears as a hidden treasure, at the time
when modern university recruitment had expanded to take in even its enemies
from the Catholic backwaters. The network of the 1300s could hold its own
with the technicalities of 1900. Heidegger has no need to set aside his concern
for the mathematical foundations crisis, and he depicts his task in Sein und
Zeit ([1927] 1953: 9–10) as dealing with a foundational issue cross-cutting
sciences as widely as the mathematics of formalists and intuitionists, as well
as relativity physics, biology, and theology.
Brentano, the most famous and controversial of modern German Catholics,
would inevitably become part of a young Catholic intellectual’s reading; for
an anti-modernist, Brentano’s later psychology would be suspect, but Bren-
tano’s early work On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle (1862) was safe,
and the text had been given to Heidegger in his school days. In this work
Brentano had put the cultural capital of medieval scholasticism back into play
in the context of contemporary debate started by his own teacher Trendelen-
burg with late Hegelian historians and Kantians. Aquinas and Duns Scotus
had raised the issue of the univocality of being, and Brentano had worked out
this issue, using the tools of modern textual scholarship. Aristotle had taken
being in various senses: as accident (copula), as being true, as potential versus
actual being, and in the being of the categories (quality, quantity, relation, and
so on). Brentano ([1862] 1975: 66–68) had held that the categories, as the
most general predicates of first substance, are the highest genera of being.
Heidegger is critical of Brentano’s solution, but the question lingers and even-
tually is resurrected when Heidegger formulates his own philosophical project.
The problem of the meaning of being, in the full sense raised by Duns Scotus
and, according to Heidegger, forgotten since then, is to characterize the being
which underlies God as well as creation. For Heidegger, the question raises
again the wonder of being among the pre-Socratics, and subsumes the most
profound modern questions: the reality of higher mathematical abstractions
and of Meinong’s impossible Golden Mountain or square circle which find a
place in the intentionality of consciousness and which troubled Russell in the
early 1900s.^38
744 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths