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Antonius Andreas was a student of John Duns Scotus. The reason he is mentioned only once in known literature is because he is totally insignificant, and never produced anything noteworthy except this proposal which pissed off Suarez enough to write about it in Disputation III. Peikoff's attribution of the law of identity to this man is totally spurious. Prima sententia est non esse primum illud quod ex Aristotele retulimus, sed hoc, omne ens est ens. Ita tenet Antonius Andreas, IV Metaph., q. 5. Et ad Aristotelem respondet vocasse illud aliud primum principium inter ea quae circumferuntur ut generalia, ut sunt illa: Omne totum est maius sua parte, etc. Sed hic auctor etiam in suis principiis non recte loquitur, quia illa propositio est identica et nugatoria; et ideo in nulla scientia sumitur ut principium demonstrationis, sed est extra omnem artem. I'll give you as much of a translation as is pertinent, though it is written in very poor Latin. The first judgment should not be Aristotle's first which we usually talk about, but another one: every being is a being. So maintains Antonius Andreas... Blah blah blah. I stopped translating here because it's already apparent that this is not, in fact, a precursor to the law of identity, and means something totally different. In terms of objectivist metaphysics, this is the axiom of existence, not identity. The objectivist axiom of identity cannot be said to have a basis in Aristotle. It simply doesn't. IV Metaphysics is of course the law of non-contradiction. Non-contradiction is "Aristotle's first" (primum illud quod ex Aristotele retulimus, lit. "the first which from Aristotle we refer"). Basically, Suarez is saying that Andreas is arguing that the first law of thought should not be non-contradiction (because it's non-affirmative: how things can't be) but rather omne ens est ens, an affirmative rule for what existence is. Both Andreas and Suarez understand that this contradicts Aristotle, and that's why Suarez doesn't like it. Nor are Suarez or Andreas sources that Rand was likely to have ever heard of. You could probably count the Scholastics she was able to quote a single sentence from on zero hands. She was, after all, profoundly ignorant, not well-read, not classically educated, and generally faked everything she claimed, including an understanding of Aristotle and of laissez-faire capitalism itself. Locke and Leibniz are pretty much the contemporaneous inventors of "A is A", and the understanding of it as a "law of identity". This idea can't be coherently placed before the Enlightenment. Aristotle does not deserve ultimate credit for this, by any stretch of the imagination. Calling it "congruent with Aristotle" shifts the issue from whether Aristotle did say it -- by which criterion Rand was indisputably wrong -- to whether Aristotle would have agreed with it -- by which criterion Rand was still giving a false source, but it looks less ridiculous. Aristotle, in fact, never proposed a principle of identity, never said "A is A" or even a Koine Greek equivalent, and certainly cannot be supported as the originator of such a principle to any greater extent than that he is the originator of most Western philosophy. Suarez here can even be read to imply that Aristotle only set down two "laws of thought", non-contradiction and excluded-middle. He chastises Andreas for proposing a third, which Andreas even has the audacity to place first. It is patently obvious that Rand never once read Aristotle, and got her info on him from some other source. And incidentally, the parallels between the cult surrounding Ayn Rand and Scientology astound me. Leonard Peikoff is to Ayn Rand as David Miscavidge is to L. Ron Hubbard. PS - Apparently this forum is being hosted on a walkie-talkie located on Mars, if the server lag is any indication. Either that or by someone who doesn't know how to run a webserver. This just proves my point: http://208.67.212.59/ My advice: get a colo.