Eileen C. Sweeney. gap between what faith believes and what reason understands, is also expressed in the attempt to think “that than which none greater can be thought.” For to think it is to reach God via a single, long extension of the mind ...

The paper discusses Anselm's account of human finitude and freedom through his discussion of what it means to receive what we have from God in De casu diaboli. The essay argues that Anselm is considering the same issue as Jean Paul Sartre in his account of receiving a gift as incompatible with freedom. De casu diaboli takes up this same question, asking about how the finite will can be free, which requires that it have something per se, when there is (...) nothing, as St. Paul asserted in Romans, that we have not received. Anselm's notion that we have two wills, one for benefit or advantage, and one for justice, allows for something to come per se from the individual who wills and also accounts for the willing of the good angels as the acceptance of what they are and have as received and, hence, as finite. The essay concludes with reflection on Sartre and Camus's The Plague taking as the central ethical and existential problem of human life, as Anselm does, the problem of finitude, and comparing their responses. (shrink)

The essay examines Anselm’s De libertate arbitrii and De casu diaboli, arguing that the points made about the will and free choice are mirrored in the questions and struggles of the student interlocutor in the dialogues. In contrast to Plato and Aristotle, who want to bring us to see that virtue is the path to happiness, Anselm wants to show that we have free choice and are responsible for not choosing rightly (i.e., choosing justice for its own sake), and that (...) human beings are autonomous but also finite and flawed. For this kind of learning, not just reasoning but insight and self-examination are required, a process reflected in the very human will, willfulness, and weakness of the student as he engages with his teacher. (shrink)

This essay will focus on analogies drawn from Aristotle’s account of natural motion and change which Thomas Aquinas uses to construct responses and explanations of free choice and its characteristic act, i.e. creation for God, and acts of virtue for human beings. Though these analogies to natural change recur throughout the Thomistic corpus, my analysis will focus on their use in the Summa Theologiae, where they consistently bear the weight of Aquinas’s account of the divine and human will and their (...) acts, and tend to be used to minimize the differences between the elements, animals, human beings, and God by relating them as being which tend to, move toward, act for, and are themselves an end. In contrast to De veritate and other texts, in which categories and examples of physical change are used to distance and distinguish human or divine willing and action from motion and change, the Summa attempts to build up from the ground of material natures and change toward the human and divine in gradual steps, transforming the gap and opposition separating creature from creator into a gradual ascent. (shrink)

This paper argues that the role of nature in Aquinas’s account of virtue, action and law does not require the kind of adherence to Aristotle’s ‘metaphysical biology’ that is refuted by Darwin because of the way Aquinas transforms nature as applied to a rational being and as an analogy to elucidate virtue, habit and law. Aquinas’s grounding of ethics and law in the notion of nature is also not a kind of intuitionism designed to answer all moral questions and stop (...) all ethical debates but a model which gives principles; these principles in turn are not that from which all conclusions can be derived with universality and certainty but are principles which are the topic of reasoned and ongoing debate about their interpretation and application in particular laws or practices. The paper then examines Aquinas’s application of the principles of natural law to evaluate human law as an example of this reasoned debate, which is both subject to error and correction, showing how Aquinas’s notion of nature can work in practical applied ethics. (shrink)

John Rist's What Is a Person? is a scholarly, rich, and trenchant study of the history of the concept of personhood in Western thought. However, its sharp critique of modern and postmodern accounts of personhood, though thought-provoking, also uses jarringly polemical language, which further undermines the book's flawed overall argument. The first section, "Constructing the Mainline Tradition," carefully mines ancient and medieval sources, tracing with nuance and complexity the different threads in the notion of person. The threads are religious, philosophical, (...) legal, and literary, and the philosophical sources are multiple. Rist does not privilege Boethius's definition in Contra Eutychem et Nestorium of person as... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THREE NOTIONS OF RESOLUTIO AND THE STRUCTURE OF REASONING IN AQUINAS 1 EILEEN c. SWEENEY Boston College Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts RESOLUTIO, better known by the English transliteration of its Greek counterpart, "analysis," has been touted as " the conceptual model for some of the most important ideas in the history of philosophy, including the history of the methodology and philosophy of science." 2 But while resolution /analysis may (...) be important in the histories of philosophy and science, its own history is, to say the least, confused. A Renaissance commentator, Jeremias Triverius gives some sense of this when, after giving a list of four methods of dialectic (division, definition, demonstration, and resolution),3 he writes, 1 I have used the following abbreviations for works by Thomas Aquinas. All translations of Aquinas are my own. Commentum in Quatuor Libros Sententiarum (ed. Busa): In Sent; Compendium Theologiae (ed. Busa): Comp Theo!; E:rpositio Super Librum Boethii De Trinitate (ed. Decker): Exp de Trin; In Aristotelis Libros Posterium Analyticorum (ed. Marietti) : In Anal Post; In Duodecem Libros Metaphysicorum Aristotelis E:rpositio (ed. Marietti): In Meta; In Librum Beati Dionysii De Divinis Nominibus E:rpositio (ed. Marietti): In Div Nom; Sententia Libri Ethicorum Aristotelis ad Nichomachum: In Ethic; Sententia Libri Politicormn Aristotelis (ed. Leonine): In Pol; De Substantiis Separatis (ed. Busa): De Sub Sep; Summa Contra Gentiles (ed. Leonine): SCG; Summa Theologiae (ed. Leonine): ST; Questiones Disputatae de Veritate: QDV. 2 Jaakko Hintikka and Unto Remes, The Method of Analysis (Boston: D. Reidel, 1974), p. 1. s These four methods of dialectic are also given by a number of ancient commentators, for example, Ammonius (In Porphyrii Isagogen, in Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca [hereafter, CAG], ed. Maximilian Wallies [Berlin, 1891], vol. IV, pt. 6, p. 34, 11. 19-20) and a later commentator, David (Davidis Prolegomena et in Porphyrii Isagogen Commentarium, CAG, ed. Adolf Busse [Berlin, 1904], vol. 18, p. 88, 11. 6-10). 197 198 EILEEN C. SWEENEY Now anyone who has some knowledge of dialectical matters knows what Definition, Division, and Demonstration are. There is no general agreement, however, so far as I can see, on Resolution. Some identify it with Division. Others regard it as contrary [to Divi- • ] 4 S!On, ••• Triverius, like many modern commentators, adds to, rather than sorts out, the confusion, continuing, " And since each one is entitled to his opinion, I am now maintaining that Resolution is contrary to Demonstration...." 5 Many centuries before Triverius we find a similar ambiguity in Greek commentators on Aristotle, who outline several types of analysis. Unlike Triverius, however, most seem untroubled by the multiple types; Ammonius and David, without puzzlement, explain carefully that analysis is the opposite of each of the other three methods.6 The lack of 4 Jeremias Triverius, In texnhn [sic] Galeni clarissimi commentarii (Lyon, 1547), p. 14; cited and translated in Nea! Gilbert, Renaissance Concepts of Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), p. 106. Galen's opening remarks of the Ars medica, giving three methods of teaching (analysis, synthesis, and definition) is a common locus for the discussion of resolution/ analysis in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Galen's contribution, at least for Aquinas, seems to have been completely mediated by Medieval Arabic commentators. Galen's own discussions are either incomplete, as in the opening passage to the Ars medica (in Claudii Galeni Opera Omnia, ed. C. G. Kiihn, [Repr. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1965], vol. I, pp. 305-306), which merely mentions the word, or are unclear accounts of analysis (Cf. Galen's discussion of analysis in De Peccatorum, in Opera Omnia, vol. 5, ch. 5, pp. 80-81). On two of the Arabic commentaries' descriptions of analysis to accompany medieval translations of Galen, see below, nn. 80 & 83. On Galen's supposed contribution to the notion of resolution and method in the development of experimental science, see A. C. Crombie, Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), especially pp. 7680, and Gilbert, Renaissance Method, pp, 13-27, 44-46. 5 Triverius, In texnhn, p. 14; Gilbert, p. 106. 6 For analysis as the opposite of division, definition, and demonstration, see Ammonius, In Aristotelis Analyticorum Priorum Librum I Commentarium, CAG, ed. Maximilian Wallies, (Berlin, 1891... (shrink)

The claim of this paper is that there is a common form of reflection in Anselm’s prayers and the Proslogion and Monologion. The practice of meditation, of rumination and introspection, is the crucial link between these works, mostly thought of as philosophy or speculative theology, and as opposed to Anselm’s monastic practices of meditative prayer and thoughtful examination of self and scripture. The philosophical meditations are, like the prayers, the product of an imaginative project, in this case of reasoning as (...) if he did not already believe and as if reason alone were his only resource. I show that Anselm’s arguments are solutions to the aporetic paradoxes toward which he pushes reason. Like the sinner’s realization of his own inability to extricate himself, grasping these paradoxes is for Anselm the only way of moving toward a sense of the metaphysically unique being of God. (shrink)

This companion volume to Stump's earlier translation of Boethius's De topicis differentiis contains Stump's translation of Boethius's lengthy commentary on Cicero's Topica, extensive explanatory notes, and a short, basic explanation of ancient and medieval notions of the categories and predicables. Much of this volume depends on the earlier one; most of the introduction on Boethius is repeated from the earlier work, and many of the explanatory notes refer the reader to the earlier volume. Though the two Boethian texts have the (...) same subject--the description of the categories or universal differentiae of topics to be used in the discovery of arguments--Boethius' Cicero commentary covers this ground in a much more expansive way, explaining and amplifying Cicero's examples of arguments falling under each of the topic types, responding to possible objections to Cicero's scheme, and adding his own adjustments. (shrink)

This well-written volume consists of paired chapters on human being, understanding, freedom, and happiness on Aquinas and Sartre. Stephen Wang's project is to use Sartre to reveal the more "radical" aspects of Aquinas's thought and to use Aquinas to "unlock the meaning" of Sartre's more radical claims . There is a great deal that is fresh and illuminating in this rapprochement between two thinkers most would not join together. Because the aim is to bring the thinkers into conversation, Wang avoids (...) any temptation merely to repeat their technical language. Overall, his account is helpful as a counter to distorted readings of Aquinas that overemphasize the determination of human ends and actions by nature, as well as his intellectualism and realism. Similarly countered are extreme readings of Sartre as an irrationalist and radical voluntarist.In the account of understanding, Wang points out that Sartre eschews both idealism and realism, arguing that, on the one hand, "consciousness adds nothing to being" but, on the other, it "reveals what is there through negation" . Aquinas occupies similar ground, Wang contends, holding that reason can observe the present reality in a number of different ways, not just one . The will. (shrink)

This essay focuses on three interpretations of Aquinas influenced by Continental philosophy, those of John Caputo, Jean-Luc Marion, and John Milbank/Catherine Pickstock. The essay considers the well-worn question, whether Aquinas is an onto-theologian in Heidegger’s sense, but looks more broadly at the point of contact common to these interpretations: Aquinas’s relationship to modernity.As Continental thought has put into question the nature of philosophy through a critical look at modern philosophy—questioning its self-representation as progress and characterizing the present as post-modern—Aquinas is (...) of interest to Continental thought in his anti-modernity. The author considers three issues: (1) What does Continental philosophy bring to the study of Aquinas missing from analytic approaches? (2) What is highlighted about Aquinas as he is seen by Caputo, Marion, and Milbank/Pickstock? (3) Can Aquinas escape both the limitations of modernism and the deconstruction of postmodernism, as some claim, and would he want to? (shrink)

The paper examines the different uses of and responses to Aristotle’s account of science in the first wave of interpretation of Aristotle’s theory of science and works in natural science and metaphysics in the early 13th century in Roger Bacon and Albert the Great. The author argues that Bacon reduces all the disciplines to mathematics as the most scientific discipline, even as he argues that experimentum is at the center of scientific evidence and conclusions. Albert the Great, by contrast, gives (...) a more strongly analogical account of science, with broader differences between different disciplines as operating according to different intellectual ‘lights’ and methods. Albert champions experimentum in physics in a special way, rejecting a mathematical physics. (shrink)

This study explores how financial executives retrospectively account for their crossing the line into financial statement fraud while acting within or reacting to a financialized corporate environment. We conduct our investigation through face-to-face interviews with 13 former C-suite financial executives who were involved in and indicted for major cases of accounting fraud. Five different themes of accounts emerged from the narratives, characterizing executives’ fraud immersion as a meaning-making process by which the particulars of the proximal social context and individual motivations (...) collectively molded executives’ vocabularies of fraud immersion. Our executives’ narratives portray their fraud entanglement as typically occurring in small, incremental steps. Their accounts expand our understanding of the influence of socialization on executive-level financial fraud beyond the individualized focus of the fraud triangle model. (shrink)

B.-C. Bazán a déterminé récemment que les Questiones de anima de Thomas d’Aquin le conduisaient à s’éloigner de la représentation de l’âme comme substance, et qu’elles étaient antérieures à la Summa theologiae I Pars. Cette étude examine l’idée d’âme comme substance chez Thomas d’Aquin et éclaire les résultats de Bazán en montrant que Thomas utilise deux méthodes anthropologiques différentes, l’une philosophique et l’autre théologique.

C. J. Mews - Logic, Theology, and Poetry in Boethius, Abelard, and Alan of Lille: Words in the Absence of Things - Journal of the History of Philosophy 45:2 Journal of the History of Philosophy 45.2 327-328 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Constant J. Mews Monash University Eileen C. Sweeney. Logic, Theology, and Poetry in Boethius, Abelard, and Alan of Lille: Words in the Absence of Things. The New Middle Ages. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006. Pp. xii (...) + 248. Cloth, $65.00. Boethius, Abelard, and Alan of Lille all crystallized their thoughts in poetry as much as in prose. In seeking to condense their achievement into a slim monograph, Sweeney synthesizes much thought into relatively few pages. Her ambition pays off. Her opening chapter on Boethius.. (shrink)

Often those attempting to resolve the answering machine paradox appeal to Kaplan's claim that the objects of semantic evaluation are expression-types evaluated with respect to indices, instead of utterances, as part of their solution. This article argues that Dylan Dodd and Paula Sweeney exemplify the kind of mistakes theorists make in applying such expression-based semantic theories in that they conflate what is asserted with semantic content, and they take their approach to utterance interpretation as having semantic significance. In light (...) of these mistakes, we learn two things. First, we learn how expression-based semantic theorists can avoid making these kinds of mistakes. Second, we learn how the limits of expression-based semantics can contribute to what we should expect a semantic theory to explain regarding how semantics fits into a more general theory of linguistic communication and linguistic understanding. (shrink)

: The purpose of this paper and its sister paper (Farrell and Hooker, b) is to present, evaluate and elaborate a proposed new model for the process of scientific development: self-directed anticipative learning (SDAL). The vehicle for its evaluation is a new analysis of a well-known historical episode: the development of ape-language research. In this first paper we outline five prominent features of SDAL that will need to be realized in applying SDAL to science: 1) interactive exploration of possibility space; (...) 2) self-directedness; 3) localization of success and error; 4) Synergistic increase in learning capacity; and 5) continuity of SDAL process across scientific change. In this paper we examine the first three features of SDAL in relation to the early history of ape-language research. We show that this history is readily explicated as a self-directed, ever-finer, delineation of possibility space that enables the localization of both success and error. Paper II examines the last two features against this history. (shrink)

We conjecture that the existence of some fast-growing functions implies in a simple way the existence of some inaccessible cardinals. This note expands some previous work by the second author.

In this paper we make some general remarks on the use of non-classical logics, in particular paraconsistent logic, in the foundational analysis of physical theories. As a case-study, we present a reconstruction of P.\ -D.\ F\'evrier's 'logic of complementarity' as a strict three-valued logic and also a paraconsistent version of it. At the end, we sketch our own approach to complementarity, which is based on a paraconsistent logic termed 'paraclassical logic'.

C'est à l'érudit jésuite américain Léo Sweeney que l'on doit de s'être intéressé le premier aux conditions de l'émergence du concept d'infini dans la théologie chrétienne ainsi qu'aux sources de ce concept dans l'antiquité. Un des grands mérites de Sweeney fut, dans un article paru en 1957, de mettre en évidence l'existence d'un groupe de penseurs actifs peu après 1241 et qui, confrontés à la question de savoir si l'essence de Dieu était infinie, avaient répondu par la négative, (...) et étaient même, semble-t-il, allés jusqu'à affirmer que l'essence divine était finie. Nous ne connaissons l'existence de ces quidam que par les allusions faites par des auteurs qui les citent afin de les réfuter. Sweeney en a donc conclu que les quidam étaient les «catalyseurs» de la doctrine classique de l'infini telle qu'elle allait prendre forme chez un Thomas d'Aquin et ses contemporains ou successeurs. Le problème se pose de savoir qui étaient ces énigmatiques quidam et quelle était la nature exacte de leurs doctrines. A la première de ces questions, laissée en suspens dans l'article de 1957, Sweeney vient récemment de proposer une tentative de solution précise, dans un ouvrage intitulé Divine Infinity in Greek and Medieval Thought: un auteur qui a très certainement défendu la thèse de la finitude de l'essence divine serait Guerric de Saint-Quentin. Le propos de cette note est simple: nous aimerions montrer, qu'à bien les lire, les textes de Guerric n'autorisent pas à lui imputer la doctrine de la finitude divine. Comme l'identification par Sweeney de Guerric comme un quidamdépend de sa reconstruction de la doctrine des quidam dans son article de 1957, il convient de commencer par là notre examen. (shrink)

In this volume C.A. (Chet) Bowers, whose pioneering work on education and environmental and sustainability issues is widely recognized and respected around the world, brings together a carefully curated selection of his seminal work on the ideological, cultural, and linguistic roots of the ecological crisis; misconceptions underlying modern consciousness; the cultural commons; a critique of technology; and educational reforms to address these pressing concerns. In the World Library of Educationalists, international scholars themselves compile career-long collections of what they judge to (...) be their finest pieces - extracts from books, key articles, salient research findings, major theoretical and/practical contributions - so the world can read them in a single manageable volume. Readers will be able to follow the themes and strands of their work and see their contribution to the development of a field, as well as the development of the field itself. Contributors to the series include : Michael Apple, James A. Banks, Joel Spring, William F. Pinar, Stephen J. Ball, Elliot Eisner, Howard Gardner, John Gilbert, Ivor F. Goodson, Peter Jarvis. (shrink)

Contrary to the Empiricist model of science, successful sufficiently fundamental theories not only fit and unify their data fields but also prescribe the general terms in which relevantly to describe observation; specify what is and is not observable; specify the conditions under which what is observable, is observable; specify the instrumental means and reliability by which what is measurable is measured; specify what is causally, statistically, and merely accidentally connected. Moreover, such theories typically require all or most of the entire (...) remainder of science to be properly applied in any given situation and theoreticians' models play a crucial role in such applications. (I call these respectively the internal and external globalnesses of theories.) A discussion of the consequences of these global features of theories for philosophy of science is offered in the context of specific examples and a structural model for science. (shrink)

C A Winch; Education, Literacy and the Development of Rationality, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 17, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 187–200, https://d.

Although the concept of psychopathy retains its currency in British psychiatry, apparently being meaningful as well as useful to practitioners (1), it is often taken to refer to a purely legal category with social control functions rather than a medical diagnosis with treatment implications. I wish, in this brief article, to suggest that it is essentially, and most usefully, an ethical category which stands outside the diagnostic framework of present-day psychiatry.