  An important aspect of the transcendentals is that they are the first in a cognitive respect. Medieval authors frequently indicate the whole group of transcendental concepts as first conceptions, although in a strict sense only the concept of ‘being’ is the first known, to which the other transcendental determinations add their proper characteristics. As already Ibn Sina remarked – to whom the theoreticians of the doctrine of the transcendentals owed the very idea of first conceptions – these notions cannot be defined by some higher genus and must, therefore, be self-evident. They are made known by a conceptual analysis (resolutio) that leads to the most common as first known, which the synthetical construction of knowledge takes as its starting point. What is uncovered in this way is something implicitly present in all cognition, as the formal condition of all knowledge.