The Heythrop Journal, Volume 63, Issue 3, Page 458-472, May 2022.

A considerable group of contemporary philosophers and theologians—including those engaged in the science-theology dialogue, such as Barbour, Clayton, Davies, and Peacocke—supports panentheism, i.e., a theistic position which assumes that the world is in God, who is yet greater than everything he created. They see it as a balanced middle ground between the positions of classical theism and pantheism. In this article, I offer a presentation and a critical evaluation of the most fundamental principles of panentheism from the point of view (...) of classical theism. First, I list six main species of panentheism and the motivations of those who support it. In the second part, I analyze the three main difficulties concerning its ontological and theological principles, i.e., (1) the meaning of the preposition ‘in’ (_en_) in ‘pan_en_theism’; (2) the accuracy of panentheistic definition of divine immanence, and (3) the question of whether panentheism is successful in protecting God’s transcendence. I conclude that panentheism fails as a Christian theistic position. Nevertheless, it might still be valuable and play an important role in addressing the cognitive drama of the modern human beings, often seduced by secular (scientific) or spiritual naturalism, or pantheism. (shrink)

This book investigates what change is, according to Aristotle, and how it affects his conception of being. Mark Sentesy argues that change leads Aristotle to develop first-order metaphysical concepts such as matter, potency, actuality, sources of being, and the teleology of emerging things. He shows that Aristotle’s distinctive ontological claim—that being is inescapably diverse in kind—is anchored in his argument for the existence of change. -/- Aristotle may be the only thinker to have given a noncircular definition of change. When (...) he gave this definition, arguing that change is real was a losing proposition. To show that it exists, he had to rework the way philosophers understood reality. His groundbreaking analysis of change has long been interpreted through a Platonist lens, however, in which being is conceived as unchanging. Offering a comprehensive reexamination of the relationship between change and being in Aristotle, Sentesy makes an important contribution to scholarship on Aristotle, ancient philosophy, the history and philosophy of science, and metaphysics. (shrink)

This essay offers an interpretation of Descartes’ treatment of the concepts of place and space in the Principles of Philosophy. On the basis of that interpretation, I argue that his understanding and application of the concept of space supports a pluralist interpretation of Descartes on extended substance. I survey the Scholastic evolution of issues in the Aristotelian theory of place and clarify elements of Descartes’ appropriation and transformation thereof: the relationship between internal and external place, the precise content of the (...) claim that space and body are really identical, and the way we conceptually distinguish space from body. Descartes applies his concept of space in ways that illuminate the metaphysical structure of extension. In particular, he uses the concept to specify the degree to which finite parts of matter are independent of each other. I argue that for Descartes, conceiving extension as indivisible is an artifact of conceiving it as a space. That is, pace the monistic reading of Cartesian extended substance, regarding extension as indivisible is an artifact of conceiving it in a way more removed from its real nature. (shrink)

Thomas Aquinas has long been understood to have reconciled faith and reason. Typically, he is understood as having provided justification for faith by means of proof, particularly, that the Five Ways prove the existence of God. Under this interpretation, faith becomes a species of justified belief, and the justification for faith rests upon the success of the Five Ways . In this dissertation, I argue that Aquinas' account of faith is not one of justified belief, at least as it is (...) understood in contemporary philosophy. Instead, I argue, faith has its own basis for epistemic "reasonableness"---a reasonableness that does not derive from ordinary evidence nor proof. Rather than requiring evidence accessible to the natural light of reason, Aquinas holds that faith has its own sort of "evidence"---that which results from the light of faith. Aquinas "Aristotelianizes" faith and argues that faith has the Aristotelian epistemic virtue of certitude, and in so doing reconciles faith and Aristotelian reason, at least as Aristotle was understood by Medieval philosophers. This reconciliation resolves important tensions between Aristotelian science and Christian doctrine. Further, I examine three contemporary accounts of what counts as an epistemically "responsible" belief and argue that under Aquinas' account, faith should be counted as rational, and in an important, though modified sense, as justified. (shrink)

In the part of the first Critique known as “The Paralogisms of Pure Reason” Kant seeks to explain how even the most acute metaphysicians could have arrived, through speculation, at the ruefully dogmatic conclusion that the self (understood as the subject of thoughts or "thinking I") is a substance. His diagnosis has two components: first, the positing of the phenomenon of “Transcendental Illusion”—an illusion, modelled on but distinct from, optical illusion--that predisposes human beings to accept as sound--and as known to (...) sound--certain in fact flawed arguments for substantive theses about the nature of the self; second, the identification of the fallacy we commit when we succumb to this illusion. It is explained how these two elements combine to produce a central instance of (what Kant sees as) dogmatic speculative metaphysics, namely, the doctrine that the self is a substance in the sense of a necessarily non-inhering subject of inherence. It is argued that Kant has a novel, ingenious, and even somewhat plausible account of the route by which the rational psychologist arrives--or might arrive--at this view, an account that involves identifying a rather deep-rooted confusion about the very nature of conceivability. (shrink)

This paper presents a way of classifying different forms of naturalness and unnaturalness. Three main forms of (un)naturalness are found as the following: history- based (un)naturalness, property-based (un)naturalness and relation-based (un)naturalness. Numerous subforms (and some subforms of the subforms) of each are presented. The subforms differ with respect to the entities that are found (un)natural, with respect to their all-inclusiveness, and whether (un)naturalness is seen as all-or-nothing affair, or a continuous gradient. This kind of conceptual analysis is needed, first, because (...) discussion concerning (un)naturalness is common in current bioethics and environmental ethics, and second, because the terms natural and unnatural are highly ambiguous. Thus, the lack of an exact definition of the type of (un)naturalness may lead into equivocation, other forms of bad argumentation, or at least vagueness. (shrink)

This paper argues that idealism can offer a new solution to the problem of relating the “static” presence of things to eternity and the “dynamic” passage of reality in the temporal realm. I first offer a presentation of this problem using the dispute between Aquinas and Scotus, then describe “ontological idealism about time,” as a smaller–scale idealism, and show how it resolves the original problem. I conclude by demonstrating that this view is consonant with the recent emphasis on the ontological (...) dependence of things on God and that it offers a way of bringing together non–eternalist ontologies and the ontological conclusions posited by the special theory of relativity. (shrink)

Although Hegel does not pass up the opportunity to express his deep admiration for specific aspects of the Aristotelian notion of God, he is not interested in giving a concrete account of its systematic significance for hisPhilosophy of Mindas a whole. In this article, I seek to take an overarching perspective on both the Aristotelian God and the Hegelian mind. By contrast to the common practice of focusing on Hegel's interpretation of Aristotle in hisLectures on the History of Philosophy, I (...) first examine the Aristotelian text itself and then focus on Hegel'sEncyclopaedia Philosophy of Mind, in order to explore the coincidence between the two conceptions from a systematic point of view. With regard to Aristotle, I argue that ‘God’ represents the conceptual vanishing point of his philosophy at which all philosophical sciences appear to converge. With regard to Hegel, I show that it is precisely such conceptual convergence of all philosophical sciences that constitutes both the starting and ending points of thePhilosophy of Mind. The result is a novel meta-scientific and non-theistic conception of ‘God’ that provides the means not only to re-evaluate the systematic relation between Hegel and Aristotle but also to reconsider the character, content and aim of speculative philosophy in general. (shrink)

In this dialogue we explain why nonrelativistic and relativistic quantum mechanics are basically the same and how the Lorentz group operates canonically only on the dynamics.

Abstract: There is no such thing as ‘the’ hylemorphic account of personal identity. There are several views that count as hylemorphic, and these views can be grouped into two main families—the corruptionist view, and the survivalist view. The differentiating factor is that the corruptionist view holds that the persistence of the soul is not sufficient for the persistence of the person, while the survivalist view holds that the persistence of the soul is sufficient for the persistence of the person. In (...) this paper, I argue that hylemorphists should prefer the corruptionist view. This project ought to be of interest to anyone working on issues of personal identity, not only because hylemorphic views are historically important, but also because they are currently receiving significant attention in the personal identity literature. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThomas Aquinas argues that the agent intellect's function is to abstract an intelligible species from a phantasm. However, insofar as he claims that the intelligible species is not present in the phantasm, it is unclear how the agent intellect accomplishes this task. In this paper I explore two models of abstraction – the extraction model and the production model – suggesting that each fails to capture Aquinas’ understanding of abstraction. I then offer my own interpretation of the function of the (...) agent intellect – the illumination model – by employing Aquinas’ comparison of the agent intellect to light. I argue that the agent intellect neither extracts nor produces an intelligible species, but rather makes the nature that is already present in the object intelligible by actualizing its passive power of intelligibility. This involves the co-actualization of partner powers in the intellect and in the intelligible object, and ultimately makes it possible to cognize a particular, material object in a universal way. (shrink)

The paper deals with the problem of divine causation in relation to created agents in general and human rational agents in particular. Beyond creation and conservation, Aquinas specifies divine contribution to created agents’ operation as application in the role of the first cause and the operation of the principal cause employing an instrumental cause. It is especially the latter which is open to varying interpretation and which might be potentially threatening to human freedom. There are different readings of what it (...) is for the secondary agent to “act through the power of the principal cause”. Either the divine cause causes only the existence of the effect of the secondary cause, or it also causes the cause to operate in the sense that it determines its outcome. The latter seems to contradict human freedom. Both readings of Aquinas were developed in the latter half of the sixteenth century within scholastic philosophy and theology. (shrink)

According to the Aristotelian account of substantial change, that is, the corruption of one substance and the generation of another, prime matter must be found at the starting and at the end point of change, as that which persists throughout the change. But knowing that matter remains as the substrate of change tells us little about the nature of this matter, which constitutes both the corrupted substance and the new generated substance. Among the questions we can ask about its nature (...) are whether prime matter is an entity of its own apart from form; whether it is one in all those individual material substances or is somehow divided or partitioned into different parts. Early commentaries on the Physics and Metaphysics were interested in precisely these questions about the unity and divisibility of prime matter and about what kind of unity this may be. This article aims to investigate how authors from the English commentary tradition in the period 1250–1270 answered these questions. (shrink)

In June 2022, Christopher Southgate delivered the Boyle Lecture for that year at St Mary-le-Bow, in the City of London, on the theme of evolutionary theodicy. This article contains the text of the short talk and vote of thanks delivered in response that evening.