Eleonore Stump

The Cambridge companion to Aquinas

Introduction 1. Aquinass philosophy in its historical setting Jan A. Aertsen 2. Aristotle and Aquinas Joseph Owens 3. Aquinas and Islamic and Jewish thinkers David B. Burrell 4. Metaphysics John F. Wippel 5. Philosophy of mind Norman Kretzmann 6. Theory of knowledge Scott MacDonald 7. Ethics Ralph McInerny 8. Law and politics Paul E. Sigmund 9. Theology and philosophy Mark D. Jordan 10. Biblical commentary and philosophy Eleonore Stump.

Boethius's De topicis differentiis

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Alternative Possibilities and Moral Responsibility: The Flicker of Freedom

Some defenders of the principle of alternative possibilities (PAP) have responded to the challenge of Frankfurt-style counterexamples (FSCs) to PAP by arguing that there remains a “flicker of freedom” -- that is, an alternative possibility for action -- left to the agent in FSCs. I argue that the flicker of freedom strategy is unsuccessful. The strategy requires the supposition that doing an act-on-ones-own is itself an action of sorts. I argue that either this supposition is confused and leads to counter-intuitive results; or, if the supposition is acceptable, then it is possible to use it to construct a FSC in which there is no flicker of freedom at all. Either way, the flicker of freedom strategy is ineffective against FSCs. Since the flicker of freedom strategy is arguably the best defense of PAP, I conclude that FSCs are successful in showing that PAP is false. An agent can act with moral responsibility without having alternative possibilities available to her.

Law and politics

Aquinass political and legal theory is important for three reasons. First, it reasserts the value of politics by drawing on Aristotle to argue that politics and political life are morally positive activities that are in accordance with the intention of God for man. Second, it combines traditional hierarchical and feudal views of the structure of society and politics with emerging community-oriented and incipiently egalitarian views of the proper ordering of society. Third, it develops an integrated and logically coherent theory of natural law that continues to be an important source of legal, political, and moral norms. These accomplishments have become part of the intellectual patrimony of the West, and have inspired political and legal philosophers and religious and social movements down to the present day.

Theology and philosophy

Nothing occurs more spontaneously to the modern reader of Aquinas than to ask about the relations between his philosophy and his theology, and no question is more misleading. To ask how his philosophy is related to his theology supposes that he would admit to having two separate doctrines and that he would agree that a doctrine was his in any important sense. Aquinas was by vocation, training, and self-understanding an ordained teacher of an inherited theology. He would have been scandalized to hear himself described as an innovator in fundamental matters and more scandalized still to hear himself - or any Christian - called a “philosopher,” since this term often had a pejorative sense for thirteenth-century Latin authors. Still, there is certainly something to be queried in Aquinass ample use of philosophical terms and texts, in his having commented meticulously on a dozen of Aristotles works, and in his having been regarded by some of his contemporaries as too indebted to pagan thinkers. What, then, is the appropriate formulation of the modern readers question?

Knowledge and illumination

In Rome at the beginning of his stay in Italy, Augustine became disenchanted with the Manichaeism he had provisionally embraced in Carthage. He found himself increasingly attracted to the skeptical position taken by the Academics, the followers of Arcesilaus and the New Academy, who, as he writes in his Confessions , “held that everything is a matter of doubt and asserted that we can know nothing for certain ” (5.10.19). What Augustine knew of ancient skepticism, including the debate between Arcesilaus and the Stoic Zeno of Citium, he seems to have learned from Ciceros Academica .

Philosophy of mind

This chapter is concerned first with Aquinass account of what the mind is and how it relates to the body and then with his account of what the mind does and how it does it - the metaphysical and the psychological sides of his philosophy of mind. SOUL AS THE FIRST PRINCIPLE OF LIFE The central subject of Aquinas’s philosophy of mind is what he calls rational soul [ anima rationalis ) far more often than he calls it mind (mens). This apparently trivial fact about his terminology has theoretical implications.2 Aquinass philosophy of mind can be understood only in the context of his more general theory of soul, which naturally makes use of many features of his metaphysics. Obviously, Aquinas is not a materialist. God – subsistent being itself, the absolutely fundamental element of Aquinas’s metaphysics. – is, of course, in no way material. But even some creatures are entirely independent of matter, which Aquinas thinks of as exclusively corporeal. The fundamental division in his broad classification of created things is between the corporeal – such as stars, trees, and cats - and the incorporeal (or spiritual) – for example, angels. (Aquinas sometimes calls spiritual creatures “separated substances” because of their incorporeality.) But this exhaustive division seems to be not perfectly exclusive, because human beings must be classified as not only corporeal but also spiritual in a certain respect. They have this uniquely problematic status among creatures in virtue of the peculiar character of the human soul.

Augustine’s philosophy of memory

The topic of memory in Augustines thought includes much of his philosophy of mind, for memory is not a distinct power or faculty of the soul, but the mind itself, from which memory, understanding, or will are distinguished only in terms of their different activities. Memory for Augustine has not merely the rather straightforward role of retaining recollections of past experiences, but also the much more problematic tasks of holding in mind present realities and even of anticipating the future. Augustines account of memory shows a marked development from his early writings, in which he accepted a Platonic doctrine of reminiscence, up to the works of his maturity, in which he clearly rejects almost all, if not all, traces of such a teaching. In the Confessions , Augustine devotes the first half of Book 10 to a description of the contents of his memory as he searches for God, and in Book 11 memory plays a key role in the perception of time. In De Trinitate , Augustine finds in the memory, understanding, and will of the human soul a series of psychological analogies or images of the three persons in one God.

Aquinas and Islamic and Jewish thinkers

The work of Thomas Aquinas may be distinguished from that of many of his contemporaries by his attention to the writings of Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), a Jew, and Ibn Sina (Avicenna) (980- 1037), a Muslim. His contemporaries, especially in Paris, were responsive to the work of another Muslim, Ibn Rushd (Averroes) (1126-1198), for his rendition of the philosophical achievements of Aristotle, but Aquinass relation to Averroes and to those who took their lead from him was far more ambivalent. Aquinas respected Rabbi Moses and Avicenna as fellow travelers in an arduous intellectual attempt to reconcile the horizons of philosophers of ancient Greece, notably Aristotle, with those reflecting a revelation originating in ancient Israel, articulated initially in the divinely inspired writings of Moses. So while Aquinas would consult “the Commentator” (Averroes) on matters of interpretation of the texts of Aristotle, that very aphorism suggested the limits of his reliance on the philosophical writings of Averroes, the qadi from Cordova. With Maimonides and Avicenna his relationship was more akin to that among interlocutors, and especially so with Rabbi Moses, whose extended dialectical conversation with his student Joseph in his Guide of the Perplexed closely matched Aquinas’s own project: that of using philosophical inquiry to articulate ones received faith, and in the process extending the horizons of that inquiry to include topics unsuspected by those lacking in divine revelation.

Walter burley and the obligationes attributed to william of sherwood

The history of the mediaeval obligationes-literature has only recently begun to be studied. Two important treatises in this literature, one by Walter Burley and the other attributed to William of Sherwood, have been edited by Romuald Green in a forthcoming book. But there is considerable doubt concerning the authenticity of the text attributed to Sherwood. The correct attribution and dating of this treatise is crucial for our understanding of the history of this literature. In this paper, we argue that the treatise is not as early as William of Sherwood, that on the contrary it dates no earlier than the very end of the thirteenth century, and that, although there is some contrary evidence, the treatise may be an early work by Walter Burley himself.