Recovering Aquinas’s Motion Proof

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.

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A Reply to Michèle Mulchahey Regarding My Book on the Sermons of Aquinas

A Reply to Michèle Mulchahey Regarding My Book on the Sermons of Aquinas

RANDALL B. SMITH

Randall B. Smith (Professor of Theology, University of St. Thomas, Houston) replies to Michèle Mulchahey’s Review in The Thomist 83.3 (2019) of Smith’s book, Reading the Sermons of Thomas Aquinas: A Beginner’s Guide (Emmaus Academic, 2016).

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Aquinas on Happiness as an Antidote to Modern Life

Aquinas on Happiness as an Antidote to Modern Life

CHRISTOPHER J. THOMPSON

In a small section of his famous work, the Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas Aquinas provides us with a basic tutorial on human flourishing. This well-known “treatise on human happiness” forms the skeletal outlines of the dominant desire at the core of every human heart: the inescapable need for happiness, fulfillment, bliss.

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St Thomas Aquinas as a Model of Happiness

St Thomas Aquinas as a Model of Happiness

EDMUND WALDSTEIN, O.Cist.

The Greek historian Herodotus recounts that Solon, the lawgiver of Athens, travelled through the world and saw many things. On travelling through Asia Minor, he visited the fabulously wealthy king Croesus of Lydia. Croesus had his servants show off his many treasures to Solon. Then Croesus asked Solon who the happiest man…

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Intention and Representation: The Case of Thomas Aquinas

Intention and Representation: The Case of Thomas Aquinas

JOÃO PINHEIRO DA SILVA

After all, it is a common place in the history of philosophy that Aquinas was, following Aristotle, a realist in various philosophical domains. At the same time, Aquinas helped consolidate “intentio” in the philosophical grammar. We can then pose the question: does Aquinas use of “intentio” lead him down a representationalist path?

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The Focus on Immanent Activity in the Second Way

The Focus on Immanent Activity in the Second Way

After presenting the “first and more manifest way” of proving the existence of God by reason alone (without the aid of God revealing himself in Sacred Scriptures), in Summa Theologiae Ia, 2, 3, Saint Thomas Aquinas continues this project by turning in the “Second Way” to what he somewhat enigmatically calls “the nature of the efficient cause.” The greatest obstacle to understanding his Second Way, though, is determining precisely what Aquinas means by “the nature of the efficient cause” and “an order of efficient causes,” and how the Second Way is distinct from the First and Third Ways. This essay attempts to do so.

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At The Heart of Being: Thomistic Existentialism & Cosmological Reasoning

At The Heart of Being: Thomistic Existentialism & Cosmological Reasoning

By JOHN BRUNGARDT, Ph.D.

In the following review-essay, I explore in some detail Knasas’s argumentation and some of its consequences. First, I will look at some of the background to the issues regarding the contemporary Thomistic schools of thought so as to set forth what is at stake in the debate (§1).

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