On Power (De Potentia) is one of Aquinas's ''Disputed Questions'' (a systematic series of discussions of specific theological topics). It is a text which anyone with a serious interest in Aquinas's thinking will need to read. There is, however, no English translation of the De Potentia currently in print. Fr. Richard Regan has produced this abridgement, which passes over some of the full text while retaining what seems most important when it comes to following the flow of (...) class='Hi'>Aquinas's thought. (shrink)

Aquinas Saint Thomas. The Commentary of St. Thomas Aquinas on Aristotle's Treatise on the soul Aquinas Saint Thomas TI-IE COMMENTARY. OF * ST. THOMAS AQUINAS ON I. Front Cover.

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In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:What Makes the Common Good Common?Key Points from Charles De Koninck1Aquinas Guilbeau, O.P.In even the most capable philosophical hands, the common good remains a slippery concept. Its essence eludes the grasp of those who reach for it. This is due in part to the concept's complexity. "Common good" is composed of two rich, philosophically pregnant notions: goodness and commonness. Reflection on these two notions is ancient, of course. How (...) a thing is good has preoccupied philosophers since the dawn of time. How a thing may be common has exercised philosophers less throughout history, but even the ancients recognized that the question of a thing's commonness remains as intricate as the question of a thing's goodness. Despite their long philosophical history, however, the notions of goodness and commonness evade quick and easy description. Because they represent elemental characteristics of being itself, they share in being's fundamental mystery. As a result, millennia of reflection have not exhausted these notions' meanings. Like being, goodness and commonness require careful study by each generation, so that its intellectuals and teachers might clarify these notions' remaining secrets. Thus does each generation contribute to the perennial philosophy.When we modern and post-modern thinkers try to describe the common good, and thereby grapple with its notions of goodness and commonness, we find one of these two notions more elusive than the other. Which of the two might surprise us. It is not the common good's goodness. [End Page 739] Despite the philosophical confusions of our age, we more or less still agree publicly as to what constitutes a good, and as a result what constitutes an evil. We deem health a good, for example, while we deem disease an evil. We embrace one as perfective; we repulse the other as destructive. To my knowledge, no one has yet extolled COVID-19 as a good. So, we moderns and post-moderns have not completely lost hold of reality. We still share a sense of goodness, even if our generation mislabels some evils as goods.When it comes to describing the common good, therefore, it is not the common good's goodness that eludes us. Rather, it is its commonness that we have difficulty grasping. What does it mean for a good to be common? How is a common good common? Are all common goods common in the same way? How is the example of health common? Is health a common good properly speaking, or does it only appear to be common? How do we know the difference? Is there a difference? Unfortunately, few of us can answer these questions well. The reasons may not all be our fault, but we should admit that, along with our secular contemporaries, we remain largely unversed in commonness. A sign of our inexperience with the concept is that we seldom ask questions about commonness. Instead, we take it for granted that we know what commonness involves. When pressed to describe it, however, we quickly discover just how uncommon understanding of commonness is.In the first half of the last century, Charles De Koninck was well aware of modernity's inexperience with commonness. He recognized that individualism and its philosophical prerequisites had so captured the popular imagination, even among Catholics, that the common quality of the common good was disappearing from view. As a result, political discourse—to say nothing of political life—had entered serious difficulty. Between the World Wars, De Koninck spoke up among Catholic philosophers to remind them of the "primacy of the common good," not simply as a practical concept but as a speculative one, in accord with its classical conception.De Koninck recalled for his contemporaries not only that but also how commonness, like goodness, is primarily something objectively real and metaphysically constituted, and only secondarily something subjectively perceived and practically useful. To revive the objective and metaphysical notions of goodness and commonness among Catholic intellectuals—many of whom had traded these for easier subjective and practical notions2—De [End Page 740] Koninck composed his famous essay The Primacy of the Common Good, Against the Personalists.3 In it, De Koninck spends eighty pages reviewing the objective... (shrink)

A close reading of the personalism of Karol Wojtyla reveals that his regard for the orientation of the individual's particular good to the common good distinguishes his personalist thought from that of preeminent French personalists, including Emmanuel Mounier and Jacques Maritain.

This paper discusses the views of three medieval thinkers—Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, and John Duns Scotus—about a specific aspect of the problem of evil, which can be dubbed ‘the Lucifer problem’. What was the object of the first evil choice? What could entice a perfectly rational agent placed in ideal circumstances into doing evil? Those thinkers agreed that Lucifer wanted to be happier, but while Anselm thought that that was something Lucifer could achieve by his natural powers, Aquinas held (...) that it was not naturally possible for Lucifer to be happier, even though it was something he could obtain supernaturally. By contrast, Scotus posited that what Lucifer wanted was beyond what was logically possible, i.e. to be as happy as God (or to be God’s equal). An interesting consequence of Scotus’s hypothesis is that God could have done nothing to make Lucifer’s evil choice less likely. (shrink)

This reconsideration of the descriptive and normative components of my earlier comparisons of Mencius and Aquinas suggests that the strengths of Aquinas’s account were highlighted while some of his shortcomings and the corresponding strengths in Mencius were missing. This is made clear by considering the treatment of their respective ideas about optimal human fulfillment and even clearer by considering their understanding of the relationship between theoretical and literary accounts of that fulfillment. The third subject, their different treatments of (...) people’s failure to attain fulfillment, is more complicated, however, and involves a set of truly vexing issues. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION This study arose from involvement with the works of Thomas Aquinas (/5-) that was not only intensive, but also extensive in the time devoted to ...

This essay examines whether the Catholic magisterium's use of Aquinas to condemn homosexual acts is actually Thomistic. Rather than being aligned with the magisterium, Aquinas advances a moral epistemology better illuminated by the work of philosopher Judith Butler. Deploying Butler as a means of immanent critique, I show how magisterial attempts to argue against lesbian and gay sex fail on their own terms. Reading Aquinas alongside Butler shows us why we need not choose between fidelity to Thomistic (...) natural law and affirmation of lesbians and gays. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"A Unity of Order":Aquinas on the End of PoliticsWilliam McCormick S.J.Nonspecialists are often surprised to learn that Aquinas's thought on Church and state is a matter of obscurity. After all, Aquinas is the most famous medieval thinker in the West, and the question of Church and state is one of the best-known medieval political questions. And yet his thought on that polemical topic remains obscure. As (...) John Watt puts it: "There are too many ambiguities in his doctrine and too many unanswerable questions about what he did or did not hold."1Why is his view not better understood? Part of its obscurity is the relative infrequency with which he writes on politics.2 Another is the relative lack of interest in medieval political thought among political scientists and historians of political thought, an obscurity dating back to the Renaissance.3 Those who do study Aquinas's thought, moreover, have been mired in a controversy over two key texts: one from book II of his Scriptum or commentary on Peter Lombard's Sentences (d. 44, q. 2, a. 3, exp. text.), and the other in book II of De regno (On kingship), chapter 3 (no. 110). For brevity, I will use S for the Scriptum passage and R for the De regno passage.4 These two [End Page 1019] appear to contradict each other, and with respect to fundamental political questions. The debate over these two texts points to what most contributes to the obscurity of Aquinas's teaching on Church and state: confusion about his vision of politics in human life. As I will show in this paper, Aquinas transcends modern categories of the "secular" and "belief" in his treatment of politics. Aquinas valorizes the integrity of political activity: that autonomy is not just a concession to the modern condition. It is in fact when Aquinas is most theological that he is most open to that integrity. The integrity of the political speaks to the intrinsic goodness of that order: it mirrors God's unity in its complex and ordered diversity.In this paper I examine R and S to show their concordance. I argue that they are complementary in what they prescribe for relations between Church and state, and indeed grounded in the same account of the origins of political authority. Through this investigation we will uncover key principles of Aquinas's political thinking that show him to have a capacious vision of politics where humans achieve the actualization of their full beings as human.A key notion will be unitas ordinis, or unity of order: the form of human cooperation in political life. As we will see, that form strikes a middle path between the simple unity of the individual person and the orderless collectivity of a crowd. For Aquinas, that order is itself a common good of politics, and an intrinsic one at that, before any "extrinsic" common good achieved by the people through that order. Part of why this seemingly secular consideration is good is its theological importance: it mirrors God.Further, if Aquinas does not elaborate on political arrangements as much as one would like, nevertheless he offers sure guidance for the principles which ought to guide the prudent development of those arrangements in a particular time and place. Ultimately Aquinas shows that medieval political thought is in key respects not as alien and hostile to us as we might imagine, but in its own way equally concerned about the integrity of the political life.5The Teaching of SAquinas's teaching on Church and state in S is widely accepted as his mature "two powers" teaching. Aquinas's most famous work, the Summa theologiae [ST], would eventually replace Lombard's Sentences, but in Thomas's own thirteenth century it was that compendium of quotations and arguments [End Page 1020] from Christian sources compiled by the twelfth-century theologian-bishop Lombard that was the standard theology textbook in the Latin West—the Ur-text for theological teaching and scholarship.6The Sentences is perhaps the most important Western book no one has heard of. It was so influential not only because it collected a rich trove of... (shrink)

CONTEMPORARY philosophers of religion have devoted much worthy effort to analyzing and reconsidering such important traditional doctrines as those of divine omniscience and simplicity. But the similarly important and traditional doctrine of creation ex nihilo has not been enjoying the same kind of attention. One reason for this may be that its purport seems clearer, and its place in classical theism accordingly less controversial, than those of certain other doctrines, so that neither proponents nor opponents are as much inclined to (...) puzzle over it as over those other doctrines. But in Aquinas's magisterial account, at least one of the doctrine's aspects bears a philosophical interest that is easy to overlook. In this paper I will bring out that aspect by resolving two alleged inconsistencies in Aquinas's account.... (shrink)

The author presents and compares Maritain’s and Aquinas’s accounts of our discovery (1) of being as existing; and (2) of being as being (ens inquantum ens or the subject of metaphysics). He finds that especially in his final discussion of how one discovers being as being, Maritain’s account suffers greatly from the absence of any appeal to Aquinas’s negative judgment of separation and also from the omission of reference to the role of judgments of existence in one’s discovery (...) of a premetaphysical notion of being. Wippel finds no evidence in Aquinas’s texts for Maritain’s defense of an intuition of being or of existence. (shrink)

... OU RÉALISME? L'aventure est trop courante dans la vie d'un érudit qu'il décide de lui-même ou à la demande d'autrui d'aborder un sujet qu'il croit ou ...