Norman Kretzmann

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.

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 .

The metaphysics of theism

Introduction 1. Theology from the bottom up 2. The God of the self-movers 3. The existence of alpha 4. From independence to perfection 5. From perfection to infinity 6. Intellect 7. Will 8. Joy, love, and liberality Appendix 1: Chronology of Aquinass life and works Appendix 2: Pera (Marietti) edition and Pegis translation References, index locorum, general index

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.

Aristotle and Aquinas

Today a somewhat prevalent impression links Aristotle and Aquinas as though they both represented the same general type of philosophical thinking. Prima facie indications, it is true, may seem to point in the direction of a unitary trend in their basic philosophical procedures. Aquinas uses Aristotles formal logic. Both of them reason in terms of actuality and potentiality; of material, formal, efficient, and final causes; and of the division of scientific thought into the theoretical and the practical and productive. Both regard intellectual contemplation as the supreme goal of human striving. Both look upon free choice as the origin of moral action. Both clearly distinguish the material from the immaterial, sensation from intellection, the temporal from the eternal, the body from the soul. Both ground all naturally attainable human knowledge on external sensible things, instead of on sensations, ideas, or language. Both look upon cognition as a way of being in which percipient and thing perceived, knower and thing known, are one and the same in the actuality of the cognition.

Tu Scis Hoc Esse Omne Quod Est Hoc : Richard Kilvington and the Logic of Knowledge

Concepts and techniques developed in medieval theories of language, about which Jan Pinborg taught us all so much, were frequently applied to philosophical and theological problems throughout the Middle Ages, but in new and particularly subtle ways in the early fourteenth century. I am taking this occasion to present a sample of one important genre of early fourteenth-century applications of semantic theory and linguistic analysis. I hope that a close look at a small representative sample will provide a more pointed and intriguing introduction to this still largely unfamiliar literature than can be provided in historical surveys, indispensable though they are.1