Contributions
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Ethics, Politics, and Natural Law: Principles for Human Flourishing
Arielle Harms reviews Melissa Moschella on the New Natural Law.
Measured Mercy and Ordered Providence: A Thomistic Reading of Wisdom 11:21-12:2 in Light of Divine Governance
Joshua Villanueva on “the wise patience that sustains and perfects all things.”
Return to the Heart: The Biblical Spirituality of St. Augustine's Confessions
Matthew Vander Vennet reviews Shane Owens’s work leading deeper into the heart of the Confessions.
Beauty and Imitation: A Philosophical Reflection on the Arts
Aaron James Weisel reviews Daniel McInerny’s case against a dichotomy between philosophy and the arts.
Last Thoughts on Whether the Natural Philosopher Escapes the Eternity of Time
John F. X. Knasas has the last word—for now—in his exchange with John Brungardt on Thomistic Existentialism and natural philosophy.
On Eternal Hell, against the murmurers
Dominic V. Casella on Universalists and Perditionists.
Have I Alone Escaped to Tell You? Another Response to Knasas
Professor Knasas has kindly responded to my rejoinder to his reply to my review of his book. He considers, once again, Aristotle’s argument for the eternity of motion from time, discusses the limits of natural philosophic speculation when it comes to imagining realities beyond those limits, discusses the limits of the considerations of natural philosophy in regard to the human soul as a subject of contemplation, and concludes with a reminder to a text central to his aforementioned book (ST, Ia, q. 44, a. 2) as emblematic of his interpretation as part of the project of existentialist Thomism.
Has Brungardt Escaped the Eternity of the World?: Further Thoughts
In a previous Thomistica posting I contended that Aquinas reformulates Aristotle’s third argument for the eternity of motion. The third argument is the argument from the eternity of time. In this third argument the now of time is characterized as middle such that there is always a now before and a now after. The argument includes the unfortunate comparison of the now of time to the point of a line. The comparison invites the easy rebuttal that the end points of a line are not middles and so perhaps not all nows are middles. The third argument can, then, proceed only by begging the question about all nows being middles.
Thomas Aquinas: Selected Commentaries on the Old Testament
These commentaries are a rich addition to the continued study of St. Thomas Aquinas and his thought, especially as it relates to Sacred Scripture. This is certainly a worthwhile addition to any library and the necessary completion to the set. Once again, Jason Paone and Word on Fire Academic has produced an eminently usable and needed volume of the Scriptural work of the Angelic Doctor.
Natural Philosophy Does Not Lead to Heresy: A Reply to John F. X. Knasas
In this essay, I respond to various points and counterarguments made by John F. X. Knasas in his reply to my review of his book. (In what follows, all quotations unless sourced otherwise are from Knasas’s reply.) Knasas’s main focus is my contention that it is not necessary to deploy metaphysics to defeat the Aristotelian arguments for the eternity of motion and time. In particular, he disputes the end of §4 of my review, beginning with “Absent from this analysis, however, ...”.
Thomistic Mystagogy: St. Thomas Aquinas's Commentaries on the Mass
It makes for a difficult task to review a book that contains no material ambiguities, let alone any asserted errors whatsoever; that is, I agree with everything I read. Hannon clearly has contemplated carefully, deeply, and regularly how Aquinas considers the intricate words and actions of the Mass; undoubtedly, he has done the same for the liturgy itself.
Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine
[Davison's] inquiry proceeds at two mutually reinforcing levels: a natural theology of creation that informs arguments about the fittingness and possibility of rational life beyond the human domain as well as a strictly theological speculation about the implications of such a possibility for our understanding of the Trinity, the Incarnation and the person of Christ, and eschatology.
Natural Law or Conventional Arbitrariness: Scotus, Ockham, and the Remote Roots of Legal Positivism
The purpose of this article is to analyze Scotus and Ockham’s voluntarism from a specific perspective, which allows us to clearly visualize how it leads to the destruction of natural law, and to its full replacement by conventional justice, divine or human.
Aquinas’ Metaphysics and Aristotle’s Arguments for the Eternity of the World
John F.X. Knasas responds to John Brungardt’s review of his book, Thomistic Existentialism and Cosmological Reasoning.
The Consciousness of the Historical Jesus
Where Stevenson’s work excels is its sustained critique of the historical Jesus scholarship, showing how metaphysical commitments cannot be sidestepped, since they remain deeply implicated in questions of historical method.
A Response to a Question Posed to Sed Contra on NFP and the Contraceptive Mentality
Regarding the Sed Contra episode “NFP and the Supposed Contraceptive Mentality,” a listener asks when it is permissible for a married couple to take recourse to infertile periods so as to be able to have sex while avoiding conception. Dr. Matthew Dugandzic replies
Further Defense of Aquinas’s Motion Proof
Daniel Shields briefly responds to the review by John Brungardt of his book, Nature and Nature’s God.
Recovering Aquinas’s Motion Proof
For too long has Aquinas’s motion proof languished in the gaol of a contemporary Thomistic metaphysics unwilling to fully countenance the debt which Aquinas’s metaphysics owes to Aristotelian natural philosophy and unable to recapture the ground taken by materialist, naturalist, or positivist accounts of the cosmos. Shields’s book represents a real jail-break and counterattack.
Martyrs of the Mind
The martyr can let himself be conquered by physical death; the doctor must hold fast to true knowledge so that he is not conquered by intellectual death. And if he does not have such knowledge, he should not become a doctor in the first place. For the theologian, not fortitude, but the truth, will set him free.
The Mathematical Realism of Thomas Aquinas
Jean Rioux has written an admirable synthesis of the main debates in the philosophy of mathematics between those of a largely classical perspective, particularly as in Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas, and the whole modern mathematical project begun especially by Cantor.