The purpose of the present study is to undertake a confrontation of the thought of Martin Heidegger and Thomas Aquinas on the question of Being and the problem ...

ABSTRACTA distinction between hard-to-shake but rational convictions, on the one hand, and the rationality that calculates causal and logical consequences, on the other hand, can generate questions for the history of ethics. Most moral thinkers draw some such distinction but the contours of the line differ greatly, and, in drawing the line, past moral thinkers tend to be influenced by their own deeply held principles, which in turn tend to reflect their social world. Questions about where the line between values (...) and instrumental calculation are drawn and about the effect on this of the moral thinkers own social world are applied by way of illustration to Thomas Aquinas and Kant. The paper attempts to use Weberian social theory to elucidate a theme in the history of ethics, making every effort to keep the two kinds of theory distinct. (shrink)

I discuss Thomas Aquinas’ views on being, power, and logic, and show how together they provide rebuttals against certain principal objections to the notion of divine omnipotence. The objections I have in mind can be divided into the two classes. One says that the notion of omnipotence ends up in self-contradiction. The other says that it ends up contradicting certain doctrines of traditional theism. Thomas’ account is frequently misunderstood to be a version of what I call a ‘consistent description’ (...) account of omnipotence, which is a standard contemporary account. That account of omnipotence, however, succumbs to certain contemporary objections. Thomas’ account withstands those objections because of his view of logic and, specifically self-contradiction. Moreover, a certain thesis found in Thomas’ understanding of God, but almost entirely absent from contemporary debates about omnipotence, is that God is not just a being, but the source of being. This thesis, I argue, puts Thomas’ account in a position that differs greatly from many contemporary accounts since the scope of possibility, and specifically the scope of what possible powers there are, is ultimately grounded in God’s being. Further still, many contemporary accounts of omnipotence do not seek to establish substantive account of power itself. Thomas, by contrast, has a robust and independent account of what power is. And that account informs his account of what it is to have all powers, or to be omnipotent, in a way that makes his account resistant to contemporary objections. Against contemporary objections, Thomas’ account of omnipotence can sustain the claim that God can do all things. (shrink)

This study has two goals: first, to show that Avicenna’s account of being and thing significantly influenced Aquinas’s doctrine of the primary notions; second, to establish the value of adopting a mereological construal of these primary notions in the metaphysics of Avicenna and Aquinas. I begin with an explication of the mereological construal of the primary notions that casts these notions in terms of wholes and parts. Being and thing refer to the same entitative whole and have the (...) same extension, but they are distinct in intension according to the different entitative parts they signify. Existence and essence constitute the two most fundamental entitative parts of every entitative whole. Being is taken to mean that which has existence, and thing signifies that which has essence. I then show how this mereological construal of the primary notions clarifies a number of texts in Avicenna and Aquinas. Finally, I address a few arguments against employing this mereological interpretation of the primary notions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Christian Structure of Politics: On the De Regno of Thomas Aquinas by William McCormickD. C. SchindlerMcCORMICK, William. The Christian Structure of Politics: On the De Regno of Thomas Aquinas. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2022. xiii + 272 pp. Cloth, $75.00Challenging general assumptions that, because of its genre as a letter to a king in the speculum principis tradition, Aquinas's De (...) Regno is a minor source for Aquinas's political theory in comparison to the political passages from the Summa and Sentence Commentary, William McCormick, S.J. presents a new interpretation of this somewhat neglected text. Though there exist a few classic articles comparing Aquinas's thought in this letter and elsewhere, and substantial introductions to the De Regno in editions by Eschmann (1949) and Dondaine (1979), The Christian Structure of Politics is the first book-length study of Aquinas's letter to the king of Cyprus. In this respect, the volume makes a very welcome contribution to our understanding of Aquinas's understanding of political order, bringing out a dimension of his thought—its awareness of history and its pedagogical sensitivity—not so apparent in Aquinas's other writings.The book is very much what it presents itself as being, namely, a "close reading" of the text, following the letter's two parts (the second of which [End Page 150] Aquinas left unfinished) paragraph by paragraph, considering various interpretative possibilities and suspending judgment—the words "might" and "perhaps" are no doubt two of the most frequent in the book—until more evidence comes into view, and working up to general principles only at the end. McCormick thus eschews substantial engagement with theoretical issues that would form the backdrop to the discussion (for example, the relation between nature and grace, and between practical and theoretical reason), opting instead to focus on a more immediate engagement with what is presented in the text itself. He also does not make more than passing comments on Aquinas's better-known formulations on political matters from the Summa or Sentences Commentary. On the other hand, the "close reading" does not keep McCormick from discerning a general order in Aquinas's letter, which he divides up thematically according to a proposed schema. His approach shows a sensitivity to the historical context in which Aquinas was writing, even if particular details about Aquinas's addressee and the occasion of composition remain uncertain, but his aim is not simply to produce a historical study. Instead, as the book's title itself already indicates, he investigates the De Regno in order to show that the text offers fundamental principles for a distinctively Christian approach to politics, and thus can shed light even on our contemporary situation.The book is divided into five basic chapters, in addition to a substantial introduction and brief conclusion. The first four chapters follow the order of the De Regno, though the basic lines of division are McCormick's own interpretative proposal. Chapter 1 treats the letter's prooemium and the first two chapters of part one (I.1-2) under the title "The Aristotelian State of Nature," showing that, contrary to ideas found in a certain current of Christian thought, political order is fully natural to man and not simply a practical response to violence. Chapter 2, "The Augustinian Earthly City," treating I.3-6, complements the natural character of politics with the realistic acknowledgment of man's fallen nature. While some commentators have worried that the discussion of tyranny in these and subsequent chapters of the De Regno eclipses the positive account of politics given rather schematically at the start, and so diminishes the interest the text might hold for the political philosopher, McCormick argues that the engagement with the tyrant, and the disorder he generates, represents an essential dimension of Aquinas's political vision. Indeed, one of the principal theses of The Christian Structure of Politics is that Aquinas manages to integrate Aristotelian and Augustinian perspectives in an unusually illuminating way: Christian revelation, which introduces the eschatological horizon and foregrounds the historical narrative of sin and redemption, does not supplant but instead grounds and deepens the integrity of politics and... (shrink)

In this essay I explore the resources Thomas Aquinas provides for enquiries concerning the psychological abilities of nonhuman animals. I first look to Aquinas’s account of divine, angelic, human, and nonhuman animal naming, to help us articulate the contours of a ‘critical anthropocentrism’ that aims to steer clear of the mistakes of a na¨ıve anthropocentrism and misconceived avowals to entirely eschew anthropocentrism. I then address the need for our critical anthropocentrism both to reject the mental-physical dichotomy endorsed by (...) ‘folk psychology’ and to articulate a more adequate ‘commonsense psychology’ that acknowledges most embodied animal behavior is observable psychological behavior. Next, I argue that we can develop Aquinas’s doctrine of estimation and conation to formulate an account of nonhuman animal action that more adequately characterizes the purposeful behaviors of nonhuman animals. To do so, we first need to recognize a wider range of nonhuman animal behaviors that are captured by Aquinas’s ‘estimative sense’, and that all of these behaviors are specified by a finite variety of particular goods confined to the animals’ environmental niches. But we also need to supplement Aquinas’s account of human and nonhuman animal agency by exploring the ontogeny and ecology of how humans and other animals become attuned to affordances within these different environmental niches. I argue that we should look to Aquinas’s account of nonhuman animal capacities in ST I-II 6-17 for subtle insights that can expand our understanding of how nonhuman animals engage in purposeful behavior by exercising analogous nonrational and imperfectly voluntary forms of intention, deliberation, choice, execution, and enjoyment. I conclude with an outline for how future enquiry can seek to explain the nonrational purposeful problem-solving competencies of chimps, canines, corvids, cetaceans, cephalopods, and other nonhuman animal species. (shrink)

This paper will argue that the order and the unity of St. Thomas Aquinas’s five ways can be elucidated through a consideration of St. Thomas’s appropriation of an Avicennian insight that he used to order and unify the wisdom of the Aristotelian and Abrahamic philosophical traditions towards the existence of God. I will begin with a central aporia from Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Aristotle says that the science of first philosophy has three different theoretical vectors: ontology, aitiology, and theology. But how (...) can all three be united into a single Aristotelian science? In his Metaphysics of the Healing, Avicenna resolved the impasse by taking the ontological vector as the subject of metaphysics. He then integrated the question of the four first causes into the penultimate stage of his demonstration for the existence of God, thereby placing aitiological and theological questions among the ultimate concerns of a unified Aristotelian metaphysics. In the five ways, St. Thomas integrated Avicenna’s Aristotelian search for the first four causes into the last four of his five ways, by showing that each of the four aitiological orders terminate in an ultimate first cause that we call God. Finally, by appending the proof from the Physics to the beginning of the five ways, St. Thomas was able to show that the ultimate aim of both natural philosophy and metaphysics is the divine first principle, which is the beginning and subject of sacra doctrina. (shrink)

Some problems, Aristotle remarks, are so deep it is hard not only to find solutions, but hard even to think out the difficulties well. One such is what we here term the problem of the continuant. When something is generated in the unqualified sense of the term, that is, comes to be not just blue or hot or next to something, but is generated as an entity, what is it that survives the change from the original materials? This is a (...) very old problem: it fascinated Aristotle, and was of endless interest to the medievals. Some very old problems—for example, about the nature of the matter of the unchangeable heavenly bodies—we now see rest on false presuppositions. There are other ancient problems, however, such as the problem of the continuant, which for all of our knowledge of physics and chemistry seem to retain their power to mystify and intrigue. (shrink)

This essay argues that, for Thomas Aquinas, nature always points in the direction of Christ. Therefore, moral theologies that proceed by way of nature in order to move beyond the confines of confessional traditions fail to read Aquinas well. Because Jesus is the Second Person of the Trinity, the exemplar in whom all things are made, nature cannot be a more universal category than Christology. Karl Barth critiqued Roman Catholic moral theology for failing to honour this essential theological (...) point, wrongly attributing the error to Aquinas. However, many contemporary Catholic moral theologians have adopted the very understanding of nature Barth critiques, and are using Thomas to do so. This loses the ecumenical character of Aquinas’s work. (shrink)

This article examines the thoughts and works of Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain and evangelical philosopher Norman Geisler in light of their understanding of Thomas Aquinas’s view of faith and reason.

early march 2020: i'm in a french village on the Mediterranean near the Spanish border. The outdoor marché, thronged, is active twice a week. The cafés are crowded. On my morning walk, I am buoyed by the sounds of schoolchildren. The village's only grocery, a small outlet of a major chain, is well-stocked.Mid-March: pandemic. "Non-essential" vendors are banned from the marché. The cafés are shuttered. The school is closed. The little store has depleted shelves. There is a mandate to stay (...) home. Anyone venturing out must carry an attestation certifying the reason for being in public.Fortunately, there is the Internet. There are books. The local wine store offers home delivery. Fortunately, also, I'm in the final... (shrink)

Since the first decade of the 14th Century, Thomas Aquinas’s disciples have struggled to explain and defend his doctrine of analogy. Analogy after Aquinas: Logical Problems, Thomistic Answers relates a history of prominent Medieval and Renaissance Thomists’ efforts to solve three distinct but interrelated problems arising from their reading both of Aquinas’s own texts on analogy, and from John Duns Scotus’s arguments against analogy and in favor of univocity in Metaphysics and Natural Theology. The first of these (...) three problems concerns Aquinas’s at least apparently disparate statements on whether a name is said by analogy through a single concept or through diverse concepts. The second problem concerns the model of analogy suited for predicating names analogously across the categories of being or about God and creatures. Is “being” said analogously about God and creatures, or substance and accidents, on the model of how “healthy” is said of medicine and an animal, or on the model of how “principle” is said of a point and a line? The third problem comes from outside challenges to Aquinas’s thought, in particular Scotus’ claims that univocal names alone can mediate valid demonstrations, and any demonstration that failed to use its mediating terms univocally would fail by the fallacy of equivocation. Analogy after Aquinas makes a unique contribution to the study of philosophical theology in the tradition of Thomas Aquinas by showing the historical and philosophical connection between these three problems, as well as the variety of solutions proposed by leading representatives of this tradition. Thomists considered in the book include: Hervaeus Natalis (1250-1323), Thomas Sutton (1250-1315), John Capreolus (1380-1444), Dominic of Flanders (1425-1479), Paul Soncinas (d. 1494), Thomas dio vio Cajetan (1469-1534), Francis Silvestri of Ferrara (1474-1528), and Chrysostom Javelli (1470-1538). (shrink)

An inclusive and non-technical introduction to "the universal teacher of Christendom," in which biography, history, and philosophical argument are intertwined. The author emphasizes parallels between Thomas' time and ours, and points to the special relevance of his spirit to the challenges of our age. A major theme of the book is that Thomistic "terminology" is not coincident with Thomas' "living language," and that the latter is decidedly more worthy of attention.--C. D.

This paper offers a philosophical argument for the “fittingness” of the unusual order in which Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Trilogy articulates the transcendentalproperties of being: first beauty, then goodness, then truth. It begins with a presentation of the order Aquinas gives in De veritate, qu. 1, art. 1, in which truthfollows upon being and then goodness follows upon truth insofar as cognition for Aquinas precedes desire. The paper then explains the significance of the primacy Balthasar gives to beauty, (...) in contrast to Aquinas, and how this primacy entails an interpretation of truth as the final fruit of the soul’s engagement with reality under the aspect of goodness. It is precisely the conception of truth that emerges as the final transcendental, rather than the first, that serves to open the human horizon to biblical theology, which is one of the ultimate aims of the Trilogy. (shrink)

God and the City, based on the Aquinas Lecture delivered at the University of Dallas in 2022, aims to think about politics ontologically. In other words, it seeks to reflect on, not some political theory or other, nor on the legitimacy of political action or the distinctiveness of particular regimes, but on the nature of political order as such, and how this order implicates the fundamental questions of existence, those concerning man, being, and God. Aristotle, and Aquinas after (...) him, identified metaphysics and politics as "architectonic" sciences, since each concerns in some respect the whole of reality, of which the particular sciences study a part. Chapter one of this book argues that, just as metaphysics, in studying being as a whole, cannot but address the question of God in some respect, so too does politics, the ordering of human life as a whole, necessarily implicate the existence of God. In this regard, the modern liberal project has deluded itself in attempting to render religion a private, rather than a genuinely political, matter. We cannot organize human existence without making some claim, whether implicitly or explicitly, about the nature of God and God's relation to the world. The second chapter approaches this theme from the anthropological dimension. As Plato affirmed, the "city is the soul writ large": if man is religious by nature, he cannot be properly understood, and the human good cannot be properly secured and fostered, if the "God question" is "bracketed out" of the properly political order. Moreover, if we fail to recognize the essentially political dimension of relation to God, we will be unable properly to grasp the presence of God in the (ecclesial and sacramental) Body of Christ: God cannot be real in the Church as Church unless he is also real in the city as city (and vice versa). In his De regno, Aquinas famously affirms that "the king is to be in the kingdom what the soul is in the body and what God is in the world." Chapter three offers a careful study of the body-soul relationship in order to illuminate, on the one hand, the nature of political authority, and, on the other, the precise way that God is present in human community. (shrink)

In this paper I will delineate the psychological operations and faculties required for linguistic apprehension within a Thomistic psychology. This will require first identifying the proper object of linguistic apprehension, which will then allow me to specify the distinct operations and faculties necessary for linguisticapprehension. I will argue that the semantic value of any linguistic term is a type of incidental sensible and that its cognitive apprehension is a type of incidentalsensation. Hence, the faculties necessary for the apprehension of any (...) linguistic term’s semantic value will be the cogitative power and the intellect. The cogitativepower, because it is the faculty of particular intentions, and the intellect, because it is the faculty of universal intentions. (shrink)

"It's a jungle out there. And in here, too. Through this jungle prowl all the demons of dirt and disorder. Though they must win eventually, the way to delay their victory is to keep everything in its proper place, and that means noticing any detail that doesn't fit." "Welcome to the world of former San Francisco police detective Adrian Monk, intellectual athlete and behavioral cripple, master of crime-solving and slave to his own terrors. Mr. Monk and Philosophy examines that world (...) through the lens of philosophy, bags all the evidence, and identifies DNA samples of Aristotle, Aquinas, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein." --Book Jacket. (shrink)