“Physical premotion” is a concept associated with Baroque Catholic theological debates concerning grace and freedom. In this paper, I present an argument that the entities identified in this debate, physical premotions, are necessary for any classical theist’s account of divine causality. A “classical theist” is a theist who holds both that God is simple, that is, without inhering properties, and that humans and God are both free in the incompatibilist sense. In fact, not only does the acceptance of physical premotions (...) not entail determinism, physical premotions are the only way for classical theists to preserve the aforementioned two commitments. Nevertheless, the theory of premotions cannot help theologians resolve questions of how God causes human free acts without violating their freedom. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper examines Thomas Aquinas’ and John Duns Scotus’ respective views on the action-passion identity thesis. This thesis, which goes back to Aristotle, states that when an agent causes a change in a patient, then the agent’s causing of the change is identical to the patient’s undergoing of said change. Action and passion are, on this view, one and the same change in the patient, albeit under two distinct descriptions. The first part of the paper considers Aquinas’ defence of this (...) thesis. The second part discusses Scotus’ attack on this thesis. As this paper shows, Scotus argues, against Aquinas and other scholastics, that action and passion are discrete entities inhering in two distinct bearers: action in the agent and passion in the patient. (shrink)

The active/passive distinction, once a hallmark of classical metaphysics, has largely been discarded from contemporary thought. The revival of powers theory has not seen an equally vigorous rehabilitation of the real distinction between active and passive powers. I begin an analysis and vindication with a critique of E.J. Lowe's discussion. I then argue that the active/passive problem is a metaphysical one, not a logical or logico‐linguistic one, and so logic is impotent to solve it. Following this is a discussion of (...) the rights and wrongs of Aristotle's and Aquinas's (identical) defence of the distinction. We will see that one main part of their analysis is a bright red herring while the other part contains the solution to the problem. I then state and clarify the key Scholastic principle concerning action and passion, which I call the Fundamental Thesis – one that will appear scandalous to contemporary ears, yet from which we can derive the tools needed to understand action and passion in the right way. I end with a definition of what I call the Minimal Metaphysical Agent, where the formulation is to be understood as an epistemic criterion for identifying agent and patient in a given causal interaction. (shrink)

According to most medieval thinkers, whenever something causally acts on another thing, God also acts with it. Durand of St.-Pourçain, an early fourteenth-century Dominican philosopher, disagrees. This paper is about a fourteenth-century objection to Durand’s view, which I will call the Fiery Furnace Objection, as formulated by Durand’s contemporary, Peter of Palude. Although Peter of Palude is not usu- ally regarded as a particularly original thinker, this paper calls attention to one of his more interesting controversies with his fellow friar, (...) while it also clarifies how some medieval thinkers understood the broadly speaking Aristotelian conviction that causes and effects are necessarily related. (shrink)

For theological reasons, medieval thinkers maintained that sacraments “effect what they figure”—that is, they are more than mere signs of grace; and yet, they also maintained that they are not proper causes of grace in the way fire is the proper cause of heat. One way to reconcile these requirements is to explicate sacramental causation in terms of sine qua non causes, which were distinguished from accidental causes on the one hand, and from proper efficient causes on the other hand. (...) This article traces the development of this concept, as discussed in the context of the sacraments, from Scotus and Auriol, via Ockham and Peter of Ailly, to Gabriel Biel. It shows how the discussion, in its later stages, opened up concerns about occasionalism, offering thereby a case study of how particular theological issues led to metaphysical ones in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. (shrink)