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Thomistica III
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
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References
1 Kretzmann, Norman, The metaphysics of theism: Aquinas's natural theology in Summa contra gentiles I (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1997)Google Scholar; The metaphysics of theism in Summa contra gentiles II (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1999)Google Scholar.
2 For an appreciation of what many scholars owed to him see Aquinas's moral theory: essays in honor of Norman Kretzmann edited by MacDonald, Scott and Stump, Eleonore (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press 1999)Google Scholar.
3 Brian Shanley OP is charged with the same error, in his ‘Eternal knowledge of the temporal in Aquinas’, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 71 (1997): 197–224CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Cross, Richard, ‘Aquinas on nature, hypostasis, and the metaphysics of the Incarnation’, The Thomist 60 (1996): 171–202CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Reviewed by Boland, Vivian OP, New Blackfriars September 2003: 388–398Google Scholar.
6 Philosophical Investigations I: § 118: ‘What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing the ground of language on which they stood’.
7 Scholastic Thomists would be familiar with much stronger readings: Bernard Lonergan SJ, for example, speaks, in a now classic study, of ‘knowing by identity’, Aquinas's ‘theorem of immaterial assimilation’, etc., and distinguishes between what Aquinas regarded as the Platonist conception of knowledge on the model of confrontation and his own conception of knowledge as a kind of assimilation (Summa contra gentiles 2.98), see Lonergan, , Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas(Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press 1967)Google Scholar; John Haldane speaks of Aquinas's theory of knowledge as a ‘mind/world identity theory’, see ‘The life of signs’, The Review of Metaphysics 47 (1994): 451–70Google Scholar; while Norman Kretzmann seems to go further than Stump, seeing our access to the world, for Aquinas, as ‘utterly direct, to the point of formal identity between the extra-mental object and the actually cognizing faculty’, see his chapter ‘Philosophy of mind’ in The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas edited by himself and Stump, Eleonore (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press 1993)Google Scholar. None of these authors would go so far as to interpret Aquinas as conceiving meaning as a transaction between things and the mind which leaves neither things nor mind unchanged, in virtue of a thoroughly participationist metaphysics: Milbank, John and Pickstock, Catherine, Truth in Aquinas(London and New York: Routledge 2001Google Scholar).
8 For analytical Thomism see New Blackfriars April 1999: 157–216, with bibliography.
9 Commentary on Aristotle's De Anima book 2 chapter 18.
10 Robert Pasnau, Cognitive Theory in the Later Middle Ages(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press 1996) claims that Aquinas did interpose a tertium quid between the act of understanding and the extra-mental object understood, namely the species intelligibilis: basically, however, when he contends that the species intelligibilis abstracta a phantasmatibus is not what the mind understands but how, not the quod but the quo(Summa Theologiae 1.85.2), we have to emphasize that the species is only the means by which cognition occurs and not itself the object of cognition, if we are to save him from the dread representationalism that opens the way to scepticism.
11 O’Callaghan is listed as a contributor to Nova et Vetera.
12 St Hilary, Bishop of Poitiers (c.315–367/8), the ‘Athanasius of the West’, held an almost Monophysite Christology; hugely influential in the Middle Ages, he was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1851 by Pope Pius IX; gives his name to the spring term at the Law Courts and at Oxford and Durham universities.
13 Not so long ago one could trick good Catholics into hesitating over whether Christ had a human soul at all.
14 The better known instance in which Thomas catches himself out in semi-docetism is over the question of Christ's acquired or experimental knowledge —‘Clearly Christ grew in knowledge and grace…Therefore, if besides the habit of infused knowledge there were not as well a habit of acquired knowledge in the soul of Christ — which is what some people think, and what I myself once thought — none of Christ's knowledge would have increased…But it does not seem right that Christ should lack what is a natural activity of intelligence’ etc. (Summa Theologiae 3.12.2). ‘Some people’ include his great Franciscan colleagues Bonaventure and Alexander of Hales; this is the only occasion in the Summa in which Thomas refers to himself (mihi aliquando visum est).
15 Even if one cannot see Aquinas as an out and out Monophysite there is no doubt that he was attracted by Alexandrian theology, as witness his eagerness to learn as much as he could about the theology of St Cyril of Alexandria.
16 Many of those who want to maintain something like the doctrine of two natures in the person of Christ now take for granted one or other of the kenotic theories (from Philippians 2: 7, where Christ ‘emptied himself’): in the Incarnation Christ's divine nature allowed union with a genuine and thus necessarily mentally and emotionally limited human nature.
17 See Torrell, Jean-Pierre, ‘S. Thomas d’Aquin et la science du Christ: une relecture des Questions 9–12 de la tertia pars de la “Somme de théologie”, Saint Thomas au XXe siècle edited by Bonino, S.T. (Paris: Editions St Paul 1994): 394–409Google Scholar.