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articles

1. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 95 > Issue: 4
Gaven Kerr

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Attitudes towards the fourth way differ from incredulity and embarrassment to seeing it as a profound demonstration of God’s existence. Aside from general treatments on all the five ways, the fourth way has received little by way of direct commentary in comparison to the other better known (and arguably better appreciated) ways. In this article I seek to present Aquinas’s fourth way as a way to God which makes use of his general and more familiar metaphysical reasoning. This serves to give the reading of the fourth way as a profound argument for God’s existence, and also to integrate it with the other four ways given the common metaphysical backdrop.
2. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 95 > Issue: 4
Dennis Bray

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Bonaventure’s Sentence Commentary provides the most comprehensive set of trinitarian arguments to date. This article focuses on just one of them, the one from beatitude. Roughly, beatitude can be thought of as God’s enjoyment of his own, supreme goodness. After a brief rationale of Bonaventure’s speculative project, I assay the concept of beatitude and exposit his four-stage argument. Bonaventure reasons: (i) for a single supreme substance; (ii) for at least two divine persons; (iii) against the possibility for an infinite number of divine persons; (iv) for at least three, and against the possibility of four (or more) divine persons. I show how this line of reasoning is significantly more complex than Bonaventure’s terse summaries initially indicate. My main goal is to explicate the four steps and unpack their main support. Along the way I attend to the argument’s sources, logical progression, and I respond to several concerns.
3. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 95 > Issue: 4
Lawrence Masek

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I present the strict definition of intended effects and pose two questions for its critics: (1) Apart from rationalizing moral intuitions about the craniotomy and other controversial cases, why classify an effect as intended if it does not explain the action? (2) What definition of intended effects can people use to guide their actions? These questions show that broad definitions of intended effects have no basis in action theory and are too vague to guide people’s actions. I suggest that broad definitions seem plausible because people confuse what someone intends and what someone is responsible for causing.
4. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 95 > Issue: 4
Bernard G. Prusak

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Linda Zagzebski’s exemplarist moral theory takes as its foundation “exemplars of goodness identified directly by the emotion of admiration.” This paper’s basic question is whether Zagzebski’s trust in the emotion of admiration is well-founded. In other words, do we have good reason to trust that those we admire on conscientious reflection warrant our admiration, such that we will not be led astray? The paper’s thesis is that Zagzebski’s theory would be stronger with a more fully developed account of conscience. The paper outlines and discusses Zagzebski’s theory, articulates the epistemic challenge that the theory confronts, and proposes a sketch of an account of conscience that supplements Zagzebski’s account of conscientiousness.
5. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 95 > Issue: 4
Alicia Rodrigo

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Through this paper we seek to deal with the question of whether God is capable of enjoying aesthetic beauty. First of all, we will consider whether this beauty has meaning for God by contrasting Maritain’s and Hildebrand’s thoughts. This will lead us to expose the fundamental distinctions drawn by both authors regarding beauty, and to study more carefully the relationship between aesthetic beauty and the senses. Subsequently, we will present four criticisms of the assertion, inferred from Maritain’s thought, that aesthetic beauty has no meaning for God. Examining these criticisms will involve recognizing the fundamental distinction between transcendental beauty and aesthetic beauty, which cannot be understood just as something grounded in transcendental beauty. Finally, partially restoring Maritain’s theses, we will acknowledge the aporia present in the relationship between aesthetic beauty and God and we will discuss possible solutions to it.
6. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 95 > Issue: 4
William Matthew Diem

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Paul Macdonald recently argued that a consistent Thomist must hold, against Aquinas, that non-human animals have direct rights. I show that his arguments fail and that, on the contrary, the impossibility of brute animals having rights flows directly from the very essence of justice itself as it is understood by Aquinas.

book review

7. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 95 > Issue: 4
Brian Besong

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8. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 95 > Issue: 4
Montague Brown

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9. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 95 > Issue: 4
R. Mary Hayden Lemmons

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10. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 95 > Issue: 4
Jack Mulder, Jr.

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11. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 95 > Issue: 4
Mark K. Spencer

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12. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 95 > Issue: 4
Helen Watt

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contents of volume

13. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 95 > Issue: 4

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introduction

14. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 95 > Issue: 3
Michael Bowler, Mirela Oliva

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articles

15. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 95 > Issue: 3
Mark K. Spencer

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While all phenomenologists aim to grasp the “things themselves,” they disagree about the best method for doing this and about what the “things themselves” are. Many metaphysicians, especially Catholic realists, reject phenomenology altogether. I show that many phenomenological methods are useful for reaching the goals of both phenomenology and realist metaphysics. First, I present a history of phenomenological methods, including those used by Scheler, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Marion, Kearney, Rocha, and others. Next, I consider two sets of challenges raised to some of these methods. Finally, I outline how to join these methods with each other and with the methods of realist metaphysics, ultimately arriving at an aesthetic method, inspired by the work of von Balthasar, for considering fundamental phenomena.
16. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 95 > Issue: 3
Joseph G. Trabbic Orcid-ID

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Jean-Luc Marion proposes what he calls the “phenomenology of givenness” (phénoménologie de la donation) as the true “first philosophy.” In this paper I consider his critique of previous first philosophies and his argument for the phenomenology of givenness as their replacement. I note several problems with the phenomenology of givenness and conclude that it does not seem ready yet to assume the title of “first philosophy.”
17. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 95 > Issue: 3
Richard Colledge

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This paper looks to make a small contribution to the critical engagement between philosophical Thomism and phenomenology, inspired by the recent work of the German phenomenologist and hermeneutic thinker Günter Figal. My suggestion is that Figal’s proposal for a broad-based hermeneutical philosophy rooted in a renewed realism concerning things in their externality and “objectivity” provides great potential for a renewed encounter with Thomist realism. The paper takes up this issue through a brief examination of some of the more problematic idealistic features of Kantian and Husserlian thought, before turning to consider how these aspects of the tradition are reframed within Figal’s phenomenological realism. The Thomist position concerning the relation between things and their understanding (including the complex matter of the verbum mentis) is then raised, drawing both on Aquinas’s own texts and the interpretations of Jacques Maritain. Some striking emerging affinities between this tradition and Figal’s hermeneutic phenomenology are noted.
18. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 95 > Issue: 3
Daniel Dahlstrom

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“Experiencing others” in this paper stands for apprehending fellow human beings insofar as they express themselves and thus are or have been—on some level—alive and conscious. Contemporary scholars have increasingly paid attention to phenomenological approaches to explaining this phenomenon, whether under the rubric of knowing other minds, intersubjectivity, or empathy. In this connection, Max Scheler’s studies of sympathy and Edith Stein’s dissertation on empathy have stood out. Yet scholars often treat their views in tandem, paying little attention to their differences. This neglect is unfortunate since their disagreement harbors—at least prima facie—two radically different points of departure for understanding how we experience one another. The main objective of this paper is to identify their disagreement and to probe the possibility and necessity of resolving it.
19. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 95 > Issue: 3
George Heffernan Orcid-ID

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Stein claims that Husserl’s transcendental idealism makes it impossible to clarify the transcendence of the world because it posits that consciousness constitutes being. Inspired by Aquinas, Stein counters that making thinking the measure of being deprives what is of its epistemological and ontological independence from and primacy over what thinks. She contends that this approach inverts the natural relationship between the mind and the world. Given the complicated relationship between them, however, the question is whether Stein’s argument that Husserl lacked an adequate understanding of and appreciation for the phenomenon of transcendence is sound. In fact, Husserl’s treatments of “limit problems of phenomenology” in his manuscripts from 1908 to 1937, which were only recently published in Husserliana XLII (2014), show that he undertook extensive investigations of metaphysical, metaethical, and religious and theological questions. Tragically, Stein was prevented from gaining an even remotely complete picture of Husserl’s work. In this paper, therefore, I examine Stein’s critique of Husserl’s transcendental idealism in light of the fuller evidence.
20. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 95 > Issue: 3
Chad Engelland

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Phenomenologists turn to Augustine to remedy the neglect of life, love, and language in the Cartesian cogito: (1) concerning life, Edmund Husserl appropriates Augustine’s analysis of distentio animi, Edith Stein of vivo, and Hannah Arendt of initium; (2) concerning love, Max Scheler appropriates Augustine’s analysis of ordo amoris, Martin Heidegger of curare, and Dietrich von Hildebrand of affectiones; (3) concerning language, Ludwig Wittgenstein appropriates Augustine’s analysis of ostendere, Hans-Georg Gadamer of verbum cordis, and Jean-Luc Marion of confessio. Phenomenology’s non-Cartesian Augustinianism can tell us something about phenomenology, namely that it is engaged in the project of recontextualizing the cogito, and something about Augustine, namely how radically different his project is than Descartes’s. Phenomenology presents an Augustine that is well positioned for the debates of our times concerning mind and world, desire and the human person, and language and embodiment.