This article, the second of a two-part essay, outlines a solution to certain tensions in Thomist philosophical anthropology concerning the interaction of the human person’s immaterial intellectual or noetic operations with the psychosomatic sensory operations that are constituted from the formal organization of the nervous system. Continuing with where the first part left off, I argue that Thomists should not be tempted by strong emergentist accounts of mental operations that act directly on the brain, but should maintain, with Aquinas, that (...) noetic operations directly interact with psychosomatic operations. I develop a Thomist account of noetic–psychosomatic interactions that expands upon the first part’s rapprochement between the new mechanist philosophy of neuroscience and psychology and hylomorphic animalism. I argue that noetic–psychosomatic interactions are best understood as analogous to the way diverse higher and lower order psychosomatic powers interact by actualizing, coordinating, and directing the operations of other psychosomatic powers. I draw on James Ross’s arguments for the immateriality of intellectual operations as realizing definite pure functions in order to elucidate the way noetic operations uniquely actualize, coordinate, and direct the psychosomatic operations they interact with. I conclude with a conjectural sketch of how this presentation of Thomist philosophical anthropology understands the noetic and psychosomatic deficits brought about by damage to the nervous system. (shrink)

Is it necessary for all Christians – including Christians who are metaphysicians with demonstrative knowledge of God’s existence – to hold by faith that God exists? I shall approach this apparently straightforward question by investigating two opposing lines of interpretation of Thomas Aquinas’s own response to this question. I shall begin with two texts from Thomas that motivate two incompatible theses concerning Thomas’s doctrine of the harmony of faith and reason with respect to the existence of God. Next, I shall (...) clarify the salient points of disagreement between these two interpretations of faith and reason in Thomas Aquinas before examining dialectically a number of arguments in favor and against the respective theses of these two interpretations. In the final section I shall argue that the results of our dialectical inquiry reveal that the initial disagreement between the two positions is not irresolvable. Accordingly, I shall conclude by proposing two revised versions of the initial theses that emphasize the compatibility of these two interpretations of Thomas Aquinas’s doctrine of the harmony of faith and reason. (shrink)

This paper investigates Thomas Aquinas’s threefold division of pleasure into delectatio, gaudium, and fruitio, and its taxonomical basis in his threefold division of knowledge into tactility, the cogitative power, and the intellect. -/- Thomas Aquinas distinguishes three ways in which the sensory and intellectual appetites rest in the good. When the will rests in the intellectually apprehended good, this act is called fruitio; when the concupiscible appetite rests in a good apprehended by the internal senses this passion is called gaudium; (...) and when the concupiscible appetite rests in a good apprehended by the external senses this passion is called delectatio. Each of these appetible goods presupposes a different kind of knowledge of a present good, namely, the knowledge of the intellect, internal senses, and external senses, respectively. The difficulty is that it is not entirely perspicuous what the difference is between the goods apprehended by the external senses and those grasped by the internal senses. How does Thomas justify the distinction between delectatio and gaudium? Can he reasonably maintain that there are three sufficiently different kinds of knowledge that specify three different kinds of pleasure? In order to address these questions this study investigates Thomas’s account of the external and internal senses, and in particular the way in which tactility and the cogitative power supply two kinds of knowledge that specify two kinds of pleasure. (shrink)

Is Neo-Aristotelian hylomorphism compatible mechanistic science? In this essay I forge a rapprochement between Neo-Aristotelian hylomorphism and the "new mechanist philosophy" in biology, neuroscience, and psychology by drawing attention to their shared commitments concerning multilevel organization, mechanisms, and teleology. Significantly, the new mechanists endorse organization realism (a touchstone of hylomorphism). Similarly, Neo-Aristotelian hylomorphism is committed to the reality of mechanisms or causal powers that produce, underlie, or maintain the behavior of (i) phenomena that are constituted through the (ii) spatial, temporal, (...) and active organization of their (iii) component entities and (iv) component activities (the four hallmarks of the new mechanist philosophy). In the course of the essay I address potential disagreements between these two positions pertaining to emergence, downward causation, and teleology. I conclude that Neo-Aristotelian hylomorphism should not been seen as fundamentally opposed to mechanisms; rather, hylomorphism provides a rigorous ontological framework that complements the insights of the new mechanist philosophy of biology, neuroscience and psychology. (shrink)

This thesis is concerned with answering the question, what is the central argument of Avicenna’s Metaphysics of the Healing that brings its opening ontological approach to the subject of first philosophy to its ultimate theological goal and conclusion? This dissertation contends that it is the function of the fundamental scientific first principles of metaphysics, and in particular the fundamental primary notion necessary, to provide the intelligible link that Avicenna employs to demonstrate the existence and true-nature of the divine necessary existence (...) in itself on the basis of his doctrine of being. This conclusion is pursued through a systematic and cumulative line of inquiry that begins in Part I with Avicenna’s logical–cum–epistemological doctrine of conceptualization and assent, the heuristic order of the basic scientific questions, and his theory of a demonstrative science. The thesis then moves from the wider concentric circles concerned with logical matters into a series of narrowing concentric circles pertaining to the scientific order of the MH. Part II presents a close analysis of the Metaphysics of the Healing’s novel reception and reorganization of Aristotelian metaphysics according to Avicenna’s theory of demonstrative science, which consists in a subject, scientific first principles, and objects of inquiry that includes the species, proper accidents, and the science’s ultimate goal which is the aitiological–cum–theological inquiry into the causes of being. Part III transitions into a still narrower set of concentric circles that provide a detailed explication of the formal and material aspects of the scientific first principles of the Metaphysics of the Healing. Finally, the main argument of the thesis reaches the central point and question of the dissertation in Part IV, which establishes the fundamentality of the primary notion the necessary in the ontology, aitiology, and theology of the Avicenna’s Metaphysics of the Healing. Part IV concludes that the principal function of the fundamental primary notion the necessary is to provide the intelligible link that connects Avicenna’s doctrine of being with the divine necessary existence in itself. (shrink)