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My original training as a philosopher, at Uppsala and at Oxford, was ruggedly analytical. Also the notion of an analytic judgement, or "proposition', or "sentence', or "statement', (one did not overly distinguish these notions) was repeatedly treated of by excellent teachers and colleagues. There were aficionados of Quine and experts on Kant among them, but no names, no pack-drill! If there was one central topic in traditional epistemology on which I felt philosophically at ease, it was that of analyticity. In the early 1980s, I entered for the first time a pluralist philosophical environment in the Philosophy Department of the Catholic University at Nijmegen, with ample representation in phenomenology, Hegelian idealism, and (neo)Thomism. To my considerable surprise, I discovered that it could be enjoyable as well as instructive talking to such rare birds in the philosophical aviary. A colleague drew my attention to Thomas Aquinas' Five Ways, which I had never read, having adopted, from the exposition in Anders Wedberg's History of Philosophy, the opinion that, like Kant's transcendental deduction, Aquinas' demonstrations were "worthless'. However, the Summa Theologica was readily available on open shelves in the library at Nijmegen, and my curiosity got the better of me. Upon consultation of its second question, my shock was great. In a discussion of whether the judgement Deus est admits of demonstration, Aquinas introduces the notion of a propositio per se nota, that is, an S is P judgement known in, or—perhaps better—from itself: The explanation offered is that the predicate P is included, or contained, in the notion (= concept) of the subject S. Needless to say, in view of my previous deep and thorough (as I misguidedly thought) exposure to analyticity, I had a powerful déjà lu experience, pertaining to Kant, four centuries later. Clearly, I had been choused. What was the hidden tale behind this, and why had my eminent teachers not told me that the notion of an analytic judgement was known long before Kant?

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-5137-8_3

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