Category: Aquinas and Thomism
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Mind-Body Dualism in Aquinas and Descartes: How Do They Differ?
Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, views the soul as the form of the body. Anima forma corporis. Roughly, soul is to body as form is to matter. So to understand the soul-body relation, we must first understand the form-matter relation. Henry Veatch points out that "Matter and form are not beings so much as they are…
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Edith Stein: Faith, Reason, and Method
August 9th is the feast day of St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross in the Catholic liturgy. She is better known to philosophers as Edith Stein (1891-1942), brilliant Jewish student of and assistant to Edmund Husserl, philosopher in her own right, Roman Catholic convert, Carmelite nun, victim of the Holocaust at Auschwitz, and saint of…
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Thomas Aquinas: Unity is Our Strength!
Summa Contra Gentiles, Book IV, Chapter 1, C. J. O'Neill, tr., University of Notre Dame Press, 1975, p. 35, para. 2, emphasis added: . . . since causes are more noble than their effects, the very first caused things are lower than the First Cause, which is God, and still stand out above their effects.…
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Incarnation: A Mystical Approach
A Substack meditation for Christmas Day drawing upon Thomas Aquinas, Juan de la Cruz, and Josef Pieper.
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Soul a Mere Life-Principle? How then Explain Conscience?
Aristotle, and following him Aquinas, thinks of the soul as the life-principle of a living body, that which animates the body's matter. A natural conception, but a dubious one, as it seems to me, one not up to the task of accounting for conscience. We humans are not just alive, we are also conscious both…
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A Problem for Hylomorphic Dualism in the Philosophy of Mind
Edward Feser's Immortal Souls: A Treatise on Human Nature may well be the best compendium of Thomist philosophical anthropology presently available. I strongly recommend it. I wish I could accept its central claims. This entry discusses one of several problems I have. The problem I want to discuss in this installment is whether an Aristotelian-Thomistic…
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Are the Souls of Brutes Subsistent?
Aquinas says No but his argument is inconclusive. Substack latest. Reader Zacary writes, I am just a layman who likes studying Aristotelian and Thomistic philosophy, and recently I haven’t been studying the issue of animals in the afterlife. I stumbled across your post from many, many years ago (all the way back in 2009!) that…
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Is Hegel the Protestant Aquinas?
Substack latest. UPDATE (5/8/2024). This from Kai Frederick Lorentzen: You write: " . . . It does annoy me, however, that Kainz doesn't supply any references. For example, we read: Hegel was critical of Catholicism at times, in his writings and lectures. For example, he once made a scurrilous remark about the Catholic doctrine of…
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The Christian View of Death and Immortality
Substack latest.
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Felicitas Theoretica et Visio Beata: Monasticism and Christianity
The bliss of the bios theoretikos as described by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics is the model for the Beatific Vision as described by Thomas Aquinas. The ultimate salvific state is a contemplative state. Monasticism is an institutional expression of this root commitment. The monk's life is decidedly biased toward the intellectual and the theoretical.…
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Another Theological Conundrum: Hypostatic Union and the Contingency of the Incarnation
In the immediately preceding theological thread, Dr. Caiati reminded me of Fr. Thomas Joseph White's The Incarnate Lord: A Thomistic Study in Christology (CUA Press, 2017). So I cracked open my copy and found some notes from October 2018, one batch of which I will now turn into a weblog entry. 'Hypostatic Union' ". .…
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Would it be Heaven for a Mother Whose Child is in Hell?
Vito Caiati raises an interesting theological question. This week, I again read your post of 08/24/2019 On the Specificity of Traditional Catholic Claims, in which you question the certainty assumed by the Catholic doctrine of the [moral] immutability of the soul, and hence its fate, after death. My interest in your thoughts on this matter arises…
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Why Did Thomas Aquinas Leave his Summa Theologiae Unfinished?
Burnout or visio mystica? Substack latest.
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Existence as Completeness? Gilson on Scotus, Thomas, and the Real Distinction
I composed this entry with Lukáš Novák in mind. I hope to secure his comments. ……………………… Marco Santambrogio, "Meinongian Theories of Generality," Nous, December 1990, p. 662: . . . I take existence to mean just this: an entity, i, exists iff there is a determinate answer to every question concerning it or in other words,…
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Husserl, Thomas, and Sister Adelgundis
Some of us live within the tension between the autonomy of reason and obedient faith and trust. On the one side, we are admirers of Edmund Husserl with his ethos of critical examination, of cautious inquiry painstaking and protracted, of scholarly sobriety; we share his fear of error, of doxastic over-extension; we subscribe to an…