Aquinas
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Aquinas’s Case for Apostolic Succession (and the Papacy)
In the fourth book of his Summa contra Gentiles (SCG), St. Thomas Aquinas considers the sacraments of the Church as extensions and instruments of Christ’s incarnation and redemptive acts. The sacraments are the means by which we participate in Christ’s incarnation, passion, death, resurrection: “Since . . . the death of Christ is as a universal…
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St. Albert the Great on whether God would have become man, if man had not sinned
There is a famous controversy between St. Thomas Aquinas and Bl. John Duns Scotus on the question of whether God would have still become man, if man had not sinned/fallen. Bl. Scotus says yes, for reasons having to do with his theory of the Primacy of Christ; St. Thomas gives a cautious “no,” because he…
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Id Quo or Id Quod: The Early Albertus Magnus on the Function of the Intelligible Species
For those generally familiar with Aquinas’s thought, it is well known that St. Thomas, along with many of his contemporaries, adheres to a species-model of cognition, according to which an item called a species (sensible or intelligible) plays a central role in the mechanism of cognition. A species is supposed to play a sort of…
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Are the Existential Acts of Created Beings Pure Act?
According to the Thomistic picture, individual created beings are compositions of essence and existential act (esse). The essence stands as potency to the esse which actuates it, resulting in an existing substance. In a paper I am working on and conferencing, I have made the point that the esse of finite (created) beings contains no…
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Translatio: The “Defensiones Theologiae” of Capreolus, Prologue I.1
The following is the first in a translatio series which I hope to be an ongoing project translating ancient and medieval texts, especially lesser known texts or those which have not been translated. The translations will come in short bits. My emphasis in translations is on literality rather than style. I am also not a…
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Yandell’s Presentation and Analysis of the First Way
Keith E. Yandell was a respected philosopher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, retiring in 2011. He specialized in the philosophy of religion, and wrote the philosophy of religion volume for the Routledge Contemporary Introductions to Philosophy series (which I highly recommend). In that volume, he included a chapter on arguments for monotheism, and spent a…
Disputed Questions 