Some attention has also been devoted to a particular kind of judgment or a particular form of the intellect’s second operation, sometimes named separatio by Thomas. Important editions of questions 5 and 6 of Thomas’s commentary on the De Trinitate of Boethius in 1948 and 1955 and the groundbreaking study by L. B. Geiger in 1947, all have set the stage for further emphasis on this distinctive type of intellectual operation when it comes to one’s discovery of being, or (...) better, of that notion of being that can serve as subject of a science of being as being rather than a science of being as material or as quantified. While this new development has remained largely unnoticed in certain regions of Thomistic scholarship for a number of years, it has been pursued in depth by other writers. At the same time, investigation of the same nicely dovetails with the renewed emphasis on existence and on judgment as the process required to discover being as existing to which we have referred above. For as will be seen below, at least one passage in Thomas’s commentary reinforces the contention that one must pass beyond simple apprehension to the mind’s second operation or to judgment if one is to grasp being explicitly as existing. This particular point, however, is not our primary concern here. (shrink)

W illia m o f Ockha m w a s a F rancisca n fria r , a theol o gia n an d a v e r y singula r philo sophe r . H e l i v e d a t a tim e o f crisi s an d durin g th e transitio n o f philosop h y an d theol o g y . Hi s secularis m i s manifeste d i n (...) th e defens e o f a radica l separatio n bet w ee n th e religious an d secula r p ow ers . Assigne d t o th e philosophica l cu r ren t o f nominalism , h e deal t a s e v ere b l o w t o th e metap h ysica l realis m o f Aristotl e an d Thoma s Aquina s an d h e ad v ocate d the separatio n o f reaso n an d f aith , bet w ee n philosop h y an d theol o g y an d thu s h e unde r mined th e ideol o gica l foundation s o f th e churc h o f hi s time . H e w a s accuse d o f heres y because o f hi s nominalism , althoug h h e himsel f condemne d P op e Joh n XXI I a s heretica l fo r his conceptio n o f p o v e r t y , a concep t f a r rem o v e d fro m ev angelica l principle s an d especial ly fro m th e notio n o f th e F rancisca n orde r . H e defende d th e separatio n o f churc h an d stat e and h e denie d th e P ope ’ s authorit y i n secula r matters . H e flat ly asse r te d freedo m o f conscience an d Luthe r too k hi m a s a teache r. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas III by John F. WippelTherese Scarpelli CoryWIPPEL, John F. Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas III. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2021. ix + 321 pp. Cloth, $65.00; eBook, $65.00This volume is the third in what can now be considered informally a series of volumes collecting some of John F. Wippel's most important writings. (Two previous volumes, Metaphysical Themes in Thomas (...) Aquinas and Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas II, were published in 1984 and 2007, respectively, by the same press.) In this volume, Wippel has collected nine of his articles or book chapters, originally published from 2002–2019, on a wide range of topics: (1) "Aquinas on Separatio and Our Discovery of Being as Being," (2) "Thomas Aquinas on Philosophy and the Preambles of Faith," (3) "Cornelio Fabro on the Distinction and Composition of Essence and Esse in the Metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas," (4) "Cornelio Fabro on Participation and Aquinas's Quarta Via," (5) "Aquinas on Creation and Preambles of Faith," (6) "Thomas Aquinas and the Unity of Substantial Form," (7) "Thomas Aquinas on the Separated Soul's Natural Knowledge," (8) "Metaphysical Themes in De Malo I," and (9) "Metaphysical Composition of Angels in Bonaventure, Aquinas, and Godfrey of Fontaines."Such collections provide a valuable opportunity for the author's retrospective on the work thus collected. In this respect, it is especially worth noting the usefulness of the introduction to this volume, in which Wippel has provided a detailed précis for each included chapter. The introduction thus serves as a helpful roadmap to orient new and returning readers of Wippel's work to some of his most important writings.In a book review of this length, it is impossible to summarize adequately the content of each essay. Indeed, it would be redundant to try, given the much more authoritative content of Wippel's own introduction to the volume. Consequently, I will limit myself to highlighting one of the notable inclusions in this collection, namely, chapter 6, "Thomas Aquinas and the Unity of Substantial Form." Despite the modest title, the piece is an extensive and wide-ranging study of the development and fate of Aquinas's controversial doctrine, the anxieties it raised among his contemporaries, and the debate that raged at Paris in the late thirteenth century, and during which the doctrine appears to have narrowly escaped inclusion on the list of condemnations of 1270. Wippel correlates some interesting historical anecdotes and documentary evidence with Aquinas's series of changing formulations in discussions of the unity of substantial form. He is thereby able to document a particularly nuanced case in which Aquinas attempts to make his own thought clearer in the face of a developing controversy, but without giving up on the essentials of his own position.Nonetheless, Wippel points out that Aquinas never fully resolved the theological criticisms lodged against his position. Within the debate over the number of substantial forms in a substance, the identity of Christ's dead body in the tomb between the crucifixion and resurrection ended up becoming a test case: What makes Christ's living body and his dead body in the tomb both be identically the same body? The problem is as follows: [End Page 371] Since substantial form is what secures the identity of a substance across time, if there is just one substantial form in a human substance, and that form (the human soul) departs Christ's body in his death on the cross, then after his death whatever is left can no longer be identified as Christ's body. It must be some new substance with its own substantial form.For opponents, this difficulty was fatal. How did Aquinas respond? Disappointingly, he only asserts that Christ's dead body is numerically identical with his living body, just not "in every way"—but without explaining why he thinks this identity is preserved. It is left to Giles of Rome to fill out a tentative solution: Although the matter of Christ's body does take on a new substantial form, it remains Christ's, because it remains united to the person of the Word.The problem is... (shrink)

O presente texto tem como escopo refletir sobre a retomada da metafísica tomasiana não apenas como uma fixação no contexto histórico, cultural e filosófico em que foi exercido o pensamento metafísico medieval, mas, sobretudo, como possibilidade de ainda se pensar em questões de sentido dos tempos atuais. O reavivamento do ato de filosofar não descarta a relevância intelectual de pensar a tradição e a primazia do ato de existir na ordem da inteligibilidade das coisas e ser na ordem intencional lançam (...) questões aos debates metafísicos contemporâneos. Ao se ir do nível protológico ao lógico, reconhece-se uma metafísica do existir (esse) e, quando se passa do nível psicológico ao gnosiológico, tem-se mais clara uma metafísica do juízo. O pensamento tomasiano retoma as noções primordiais de ordem, inteligência e natureza na teoria do juízo, que vai da representação ao Ser, na qual a separatio constitui o gesto metafísico da inteligência capaz de desvelar a culminância da inteligibilidade do ato de existir como fundamento de toda realidade, abrindo o horizonte de possibilidade de se compreender desafios antropológicos contemporâneos e seus desdobramentos no existir, a partir de um referencial mais profundo do que aqueles oferecidos por concepções subjetivistas, relativistas e niilistas do mundo. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to clarify, from a Thomistic point of view, the nature and method of metaphysics. I argue that metaphysics' object is created being, not God, even if God enters metaphysics as efficient cause of metaphysic's object. Also, that metaphysics is a science, insofar as a particular kind of coherent reasoning process, going from the many to understand a certain oneness, and then from that oneness to reinterpret the many. Moreover, that, in this particular process of reasoning, (...) doctrinal topics must follow a certain order. Thus, in particular, I argue that the distinction between essence and act of being in every creature cannot be argued before arguing the existence of God. I touch upon the notion of separation in metaphysics and I compare Aquinas' notion of resolution with Fabro's notion. (shrink)

Both Aquinas and Siger were familiar with a fundamental disagreement within the earlier philosophical tradition concerning the subject of metaphysics: Is it being as being, or is it divine being? If Avicenna represented one approach to this issue, and Averroes another, both Thomas and Siger were closer to Avicennathan to Averroes in their respective solutions. Nonetheless, each resolved the issue in a distinct way. Also contested in the earlier tradition was the question of whether it belongs to physics or to (...) metaphysics to demonstrate the existence of God. Again, Avicenna represents one side on this issue, and Averroes the other. Thomas’s personal position continues to be debated by contemporary scholars, and Siger’s seems to fall between those proposed by Avicenna and Averroes.Finally, Aquinas is credited with having developed a new and unique way of accounting for the discovery of being as being, through a process known as separatio; though there are antecedents for this in Avicenna. (shrink)

Both Aquinas and Siger were familiar with a fundamental disagreement within the earlier philosophical tradition concerning the subject of metaphysics: Is it being as being, or is it divine being? If Avicenna represented one approach to this issue, and Averroes another, both Thomas and Siger were closer to Avicenna than to Averroes in their respective solutions. Nonetheless, each resolved the issue in a distinct way. Also contested in the earlier tradition was the question of whether it belongs to physics or (...) to metaphysics to demonstrate the existence of God. Again, Avicenna represents one side on this issue, and Averroes the other. Thomas’s personal position continues to be debated by contemporary scholars, and Siger’s seems to fall between those proposed by Avicenna and Averroes. Finally, Aquinas is credited with having developed a new and unique way of accounting for the discovery of being as being, through a process known as separatio; though there are antecedents for this in Avicenna. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Metaphysics between Experience and Transcendence: Thomas Aquinas on Metaphysics as a Science by Rudi A. te VeldeO.P. Philip-Neri ReeseVELDE, Rudi A. te. Metaphysics between Experience and Transcendence: Thomas Aquinas on Metaphysics as a Science. Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 2021. vii + 246 pp. 38,00€In the opening chapter of Metaphysics 4, Aristotle states not only that there is a science of being as being and its per se properties but (...) also that it is the task of the metaphysician to investigate the principles and causes of such being. Does this mean that metaphysics comes in two parts—namely, an ontology that investigates being and its properties, followed by a theology that investigates the first principle of being? Or does it mean that the very investigation into being and its properties involves an investigation into the first principle of being—that is, that ontology in some sense is theology? The central purpose of Rudi A. te Velde's newest book is to show that, at least for Thomas Aquinas and those who would follow him, the answer is emphatically the latter: Thomistic metaphysics is essentially the resolutio, or tracing-back, of common being (ens commune) to divine being (ens divinum). This process of resolution situates Aquinas's metaphysics "between experience and transcendence." Unlike natural philosophy, metaphysics is not focused on reality as it is given to us in and through sensory experience. Unlike Christian theology, metaphysics is not focused on God as revealed to us in and through supernatural faith. Rather, it is focused on what both of these—experience and transcendence—presuppose, namely, the fundamental truth that all of reality comes from, and points back to, God as its principle and source. For te Velde, Aquinas's metaphysics is etiology or, as he puts it, "the science of presuppositions."Chapter 1 offers the reader a synoptic view of the basic outlines and contours of Aquinas's metaphysics, both positively and negatively. Positively, te Velde points out that Aquinas understands metaphysics to be an Aristotelian science, that is, a discipline unified around its subject. For the properties of a subject are what we aim to demonstrate when we engage in Aristotelian science, and its principles are what we appeal to when doing so. Negatively, te Velde contrasts Aquinas's view of metaphysics with that of his contemporary, Siger of Brabant, and that of our contemporary, John Haldane. Unlike the former, Aquinas's metaphysics takes common being, which is participated and created (and so does not include God), as its subject. Unlike the latter, Aquinas's [End Page 162] metaphysics is unified by the intelligibility of being in light of its principles.In chapters 2 through 5, te Velde focuses in on particular themes that are of central importance to Aquinas's account of metaphysics. Chapter 2 examines the role of separatio in distinguishing metaphysics from physics and mathematics. Where physics considers things that require matter both to be and to be understood, and mathematics considers things that require matter to be but not to be understood, metaphysics considers things that require matter neither to be nor to be understood. It does so by means of a judgment of separation—a judgment that something (for example, substance, form, and so on) can be without matter. Chapter 3 turns to the topic of resolutio, wherein the mind moves "from the concrete particular to its intelligible ground." Aquinas's metaphysics is marked by a twofold resolution: one in which being and its attributes are grasped as the intrinsic principles of all things, and a second in which God and separate substances are grasped as the extrinsic principles of all things. Chapter 4 then investigates the notion of transcendentality, which arises in the first of those two resolutive processes—for insofar as being and its attributes are common to all things, they are not limited to just one of the ten categories (that is, they are transcendental). Nevertheless, the way in which predicates like "one," "true," and "good" cut across the categories that divide common being is different from the way that they cut across the divide between God and creatures. This difference ushers in chapter 5's discussion... (shrink)