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The purpose of this article is to compare the Thomist and the Scotist theory of relations. The main feature of the Thomist theory is an effort to minimize the ontological import of the specific essential ratio of relation as such, called esse ad, and to reduce the ontological import of its other aspect, the esse in or inherence understood as a common feature of all accidents, to the esse in of its foundation. The Scotists, on the other hand, have no tendency to deflate the esse ad of a relation. Moreover, according to Malafossa of Barge’s theory (adopted by B. Mastri and B. Belluto), a relation involves two different instances of esse in. The one, called esse in velut in subiecto, is that generic inherence common to all accidents (which, therefore, does not occur in the substantial relations of divine persons). The other, esse in velut in fundamento, belongs specifically to relation as such and reflects the fact that very relation, even a substantial one, is not only a relation towards something, but necessarily also a relation of something towards something else. In spite of the fact, therefore, that the Thomist and Scotist doctrines are usually grouped together as mere subvariants of anti-reductive realism, they must be regarded as substantially different.

IntroductionThe present investigation examined the stability of the twofold multidimensional structure of academic self-concepts (ASCs) in three domains, namely Chinese, math, and general school using four-wave data collected over 2 years among 552 Chinese secondary school students.MethodAdopting both a within-network and a between-network approach, confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) and factor correlations were performed in Mplus 8.2.ResultsThe within-network results showed that CFA models wherein competence and affect dimensions were conflated generated unacceptable fit. In contrast, the CFAs in which competence and affect were modeled as separate latent factors consistently produced superior fit to the data. The between-network results demonstrated that in the Chinese and math domains and across the four-time waves, the competence components were more strongly related to the achievements in matching domains than the affect components were. Furthermore, both the competence and affect components of ASCs and achievements were positively correlated in the non-matching domains, which were somewhat contradictory to the internal/external frame of reference model predicting zero or negative relations.DiscussionSuch results seem to suggest more involvement in social comparison than in dimensional comparison of Chinese students, which might be attributed to the collectivistic Chinese culture and the common phenomenon of academic social comparisons among Chinese adolescents in schools.

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