In this essay I present two cases for what I term an “unobjectionable” or weak version of metaphysical realism, the first based on a commitment to a version of pragmatism, and the second based on a commitment to theism. I argue that it can be reasonable to accept such a version of realism even if there are no arguments that definitively prove its truth, and that both pragmatists and theists have good reasons to accept it. Although I conceive of these grounds as independent lines of justification, I see no reason in principle why one could not hold both simultaneously. This is not to suggest that there are not versions of pragmatism or theism that are incompatible with each other, but rather only that pragmatism and theism as such are not mutually exclusive views.

Thomistic dualism, based on the Aristotelian view of the soul as the form of the body, presents us with a conception of the person as part of the natural world in a way that deserves our attention. The view is outlined, following Eleonore Stump’s exposition, and some objections to it are noted. Consideration is then given to a modified version of Thomistic dualism developed by J. P. Moreland. Finally, attention is directed at the theory of “emergent dualism,” which obtains many of the benefits aimed at by the Thomistic view without its drawbacks.

Aquinas has been accused of being a sexist for making the following four claims about woman: (1) woman is a deficient male; (2) woman was created only for the purpose of procreation; (3) woman is inferior to man; (4) woman must submit to man. Some scholars, notably Michael Nolan, have attempted to defend Thomas, and a few have even gone so far as calling him a feminist. The aim of this paper is to show that Aquinas did hold these four claims throughout his career, and to show in what sense he held them, thus revealing how well-founded the accusations remain, given the assumptions of feminism. Finally, the authors propose that any future attempt to exonerate Aquinas from the charge of sexism must grapple with the question of how these claims are compatible with a gender-equality view.

Does possessing some human virtues make it impossible for a person to possess other human virtues? Isaiah Berlin and Bernard Williams both answered “yes” to this question, and they argued that to hold otherwise—to accept the harmony of the virtues—required a blinkered and unrealistic view of “what it is to be human.” In this essay, I have two goals: (1) to show how the harmony of the virtues is best interpreted, and what is at stake in affirming or denying it; and (2) to provide a partial defense of the harmony of the virtues. More specifically, I show how the harmony of the virtues can be interpreted and defended within the kind of Aristotelian naturalism developed by philosophers such as Philippa Foot, Rosalind Hursthouse, and Michael Thompson. I argue that far from being an embarrassing liability for Aristotelianism—based in an “archaic metaphysical biology”—the harmony thesis is an interesting and plausible claim about human excellences, supported by a sophisticated account of the representation of life, and fully compatible with a realistic view of our human situation.

In this paper I discuss Albert the Great’s notion of univocal analogy, which he raised in his Commentary on Pseudo-Dionysius’s De divinis nominibus. While other scholars such as Francis Ruello and Alain de Libera have addressed “analogy” as it pertains to Albert, I intend to treat the “univocal” aspect of “univocal analogy” so as to explain (1) how it informs Albert’s teaching on analogy, and (2) how it remains opposed to any pantheistic reduction of God to creature. While my own account remains close to that of Ruello and De Libera, I hope to show how primacy is to be accorded to univocity in such a manner that, in actual reality, for Albert, it is analogy that qualifies univocity rather than vice versa.

Both Thomas Aquinas and Meister Eckhart draw on the image of illuminated air to explain how being belongs to creatures. While for Aquinas the image reveals how an actus essendi can be a creature’s own, and yet not belong to it by means of its essential nature, Eckhart employs the image to show that being merely flows through creatures without taking up root as a real quality. Eckhart’s parsing of the image, I argue, invokes his claim that nothing is formally in both the cause and effect if the cause is a true cause. Thus, whereas creatures attain an analogical similitude of being according to Aquinas, Eckhart disputes the emergence of finite being distinct from God. He instead advocates detachment (Abgescheidenheit [MHG]) from such an apparent perfection, but not because God retains all existential wealth, granting nothing to impoverished creatures. Through detachment, both creatures and God return to their uncreated ground.

Higher education is in flux, and one of the challenges it faces is to relate education, research, and training. So far as Catholic institutions are concerned, there is also the fundamental issue of what it means to be Catholic. Leaving aside matters of history and religious observance, this bears in large part on issues of educational philosophy. This essay sets these matters within a historical context, considering Confucius, Augustine, and Aquinas, while focusing on nineteenth-century British discussions of education by Herbert Spencer, Mathew Arnold, J. S. Mill, and J. H. Newman, and then engaging challenges posed in recent times by Richard Rorty and others to the very idea of humanistic knowledge and understanding. This returns the discussion to what might be the distinctive contribution of Catholic colleges and universities, and to the suggestion that they should promote a sense of the Godly, the sacred, and the gracious. 

The concept of personhood in the Abrahamic tradition opens up new dimensions in contrast with the ancient world, especially the relationality and incommunicability of the person as a source of his or her dignity. However, these notions also originate their own set of contemporary challenges and problems. A proposal will be made as to how to overcome these problems by way of an integration of older insights on substance, act, and potency.

This paper presents a philosophical argument for divine providence by Aquinas. I suggest that upon returning to Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics to prepare his commentaries on these texts, Aquinas recognized that his stock argument from natural teleology to divine providence (the fifth way and its versions) needed to be filled out. Arguments from natural teleology can prove that God’s providence extends to what happens for the most part, but they cannot show that God’s providence also includes what happens for the least part. In order to prove the latter, Aquinas claims that one must argue from a higher science, which he then does with all characteristic clarity. This paper presents this argument, discusses what this means for his previous arguments from teleology, and discusses the argument’s relevance to the contemporary discussion about creation and evolution.

Robert Koons and Matthew O’Brien have leveled a number of objections against the New Natural Law account of human action and intention. In this paper, I discuss five areas in which I believe that the Koons-O’Brien criticism of the New Natural Law theory is mistaken, or in which their own view is problematic. I hope to show, inter alia, that the New Natural Law approach is not committed to a number of theses attributed to it by Koons and O’Brien; that their own view suffers from many ambiguities and difficulties; that passages from St. Thomas on which they draw to support their own view are in fact fully compatible with the New Natural Law account; and that neither the New Natural Law account of the controversial Phoenix abortion case, nor their account of the casuistry surrounding the acceptance of side-effects, is deficient in the ways asserted by Koons and O’Brien.

To protect art under the First Amendment, John Finnis claims that art is simply the expression of emotion. Later, to protect aesthetic experience from subjectivity, Finnis claims that aesthetic experience is just a form of knowledge. However, neither of these claims adequately accounts for the nature of their objects nor fully protects them. The expression of emotion—intrinsic to art in Finnis’s view—is not always clear or even present, yet people can still appreciate the work. Equally problematic, aesthetic experience is not mere knowledge. It involves something more: a response or judgment. So, what is the nature and purpose of art and aesthetic experience? I argue that the main purpose of art is to provide the possibility of an aesthetic experience. Further, aesthetic experience is a distinct basic good. This status as a basic good and as the purpose of art provides justification for the state to protect (and occasionally promote) art.

The title of this article evokes the problem in the pursuit of which Eric Voegelin, one of the foremost political philosophers in the twentieth century, produced his work. To inquire into what is called here “the movement unto knowing between reality and consciousness,” Voegelin progressively differentiated his language concerning “reality” and “consciousness.” In fact, language itself became for him a central theme. In his late essay The Beginning of the Beginning he added to the notions of reality and consciousness that of “language,” in one and the same “complex”” It is through language, he maintained, that reality becomes present to consciousness. To know reality means to enter into the “story” that reality is. In his quest for a theory of consciousness, the acme of his theory of politics, Voegelin found himself compelled to develop a theory of language.

In this essay, I present Augustine’s argument for the immortality of the soul in De Immortalitate Animae and critically evaluate it. I claim that the objections previous commentators have brought against the argument do not clearly show it to be problematic. Nevertheless, the argument does face several serious problems. One such problem is that it fails to demonstrate a personal immortality. There are several interesting responses one could make to address this supposed failure, but each such response has an alternate problem of its own.

This review article summarizes and in part criticizes Hugh J. McCann’s detailed elaboration of the consequences of the idea that God is absolutely sovereign and thus unlimited in knowledge and power in his 2012 Creation and the Sovereignty of God. While there is much to agree with in McCann’s treatment, it is argued that divine sovereignty cannot extend as far as he would like to extend it. The absolute lord of the natural and moral orders cannot be absolutely sovereign over the conceptual and modal orders.

The paper focuses on the concepts of truth, truth-making and truth-preservation and their role in defining deductive validity as analysed by the late-medieval nominalist scholar Martin Le Maistre (1432–1481) in his Tractatus consequentiarum. This treatise, examined from the point of view of fourteenth-century British and Parisian influences, can be characterised as a critical adoption of the previous logical tradition and as the analysis of validity in term of truth-preservation. Part of this analysis is a study of self-referential phenomena, in particular, of self-referential inferences which are addressed in terms of a Bradwardinian implicit-meaning analysis of self-reference by Le Maistre. Also, his analysis of “consequentia formalis” summarises the fourteenth-century development of the discussion and compares alternative approaches towards formality.

Bernard Lonergan argued that a Thomist theory of intellect must begin with advertence to the act of understanding. He distinguished his cognitional theory from a conceptualism that neglects the experience of insight and reflection on it. Early in his career, he explained how the conceptualist approach misinterprets Aquinas and creates problems for the metaphysics of rational psychology. This article explains Lonergan’s position and illustrates the conceptualist alternative by analysing Joseph Owens’s view of cognition. By explaining the metaphysical differences between Lonergan’s and Owens’s opposing views of human knowing in relation to their distinctive readings of Aquinas, this article contributes to a more accurate reading of Aquinas on the act of understanding.

Albert the Great does not regard the creation of the world as philosophically demonstrable. In this article, it is shown why this is so: because Albert regards the temporal beginning of the world as essential to the meaning of creation, and because he holds that it is impossible to demonstrate the temporal beginning of the world, he concludes that the creation of the world is philosophically indemonstrable. Albert insists that creation must imply a temporal beginning because he thinks that temporal duration can only be created if it is created at a first instant. Albert’s position necessitates a sharp distinction between creation and conservation. Particular attention is given to Albert’s De causis et processu universitatis and Summa theologiae.

Hans-Georg Gadamer joins Martin Heidegger in thinking we need to jettison “subject” and related terms from our philosophical vocabulary. Gadamer thinks the term is problematic for different reasons than Heidegger, though, and thus has a different solution than Heidegger: a recovery of the term “Person.” Here I look at Gadamer’s reasons for rejecting the term “subject,” how Gadamer understands the historical development of the term “person” from the Ancient Greek prosopon through Pope Benedict XVI’s understanding of the Third Person of the Trinity as communio, and finally how Gadamer’s understanding of personhood as being-in-dialogue avoids the problems with the term “subject.”

Bernard Williams famously argued that eternal life is undesirable for a human because it would inevitably grow intolerably boring. I will argue against Williams and those who share his view. To make my case, I will provide an account of what staves off boredom in our current, earthly-mortal lives, and then I will draw on this account while advancing reasons for thinking that eternal life is desirable, given certain conditions. Though my response to Williams will partly overlap with some prior responses to Williams, especially the one offered by J. M. Fischer, my response will also be distinctive in some important ways. For instance, it will be distinctive in that it will discuss the role that one’s part-whole-reality conception plays in fending off boredom, where by “one’s part-whole-reality conception” I mean “one’s conception of his or her place (or purpose) in the whole of reality.”

Drawing upon Saul Kripke’s discussion of rules, James F. Ross deduces the immateriality of thinking from the metaphysical determinacy of thinking and the metaphysical indeterminacy of any physical process. It has been objected that Ross does not establish the metaphysical indeterminacy of what function a physical process realizes, that Ross does not show the incoherence of a highly deflationary view of our talk about thinking, and that Ross opens up an unbridgeable gulf between sui generis thinking and behavior. Edward Feser has recently defended Ross’s argument from these objections. The present paper explains why Ross’s argument remains vulnerable to all three objections.