14 found
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  1. Thomas Aquinas on Establishing the Identity of Aristotle’s Categories.Paul Symington - 2008 - In Lloyd A. Newton (ed.), Medieval commentaries on Aristotle's Categories. Boston: Brill. pp. 119-144.
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  2. Powerful Logic: Prime Matter as Principle of Individuation and Pure Potency.Paul Symington - 2020 - Review of Metaphysics 73 (3):495-529.
    A lean hylomorphism stands as a metaphysical holy grail. An embarrassing feature of traditional hylomorphic ontologies is prime matter. Prime matter is both so basic that it cannot be examined (in principle) and its engagement with the other hylomorphic elements is far from clear. One particular problem posed by prime matter is how it is to be understood both as a principle of individuation for material substances and as pure potency. I present Thomas Aquinas’s way of squeezing some intelligibility out (...)
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  3. Categories and Modes of Being: A Discussion of Robert Pasnau’s Metaphysical Themes.Paul Symington - 2014 - In Gyula Klima & Alexander Hall (eds.), Medieval Themes, Medieval and Modern Volume 11: Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. pp. 32-69.
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  4. Grossmann and the Ontological Status of Categories.Paul Symington & Jorge J. E. Gracia - 2010 - In Javier Cumpa (ed.), Studies in the Ontology of Reinhardt Grossmann. De Gruyter. pp. 133-158.
    The task of this chapter is to investigate and assess Grossmann’s view of the ontological status of categories. It has two dimensions. Because Grossmann does not offer a full discussion of the ontology of categories, we first need to present an interpretation of his view. Our point of departure is Grossmann’s claim that a category is a fundamental property of being (which implies that he holds view 3 above). Our second task is to assess the adequacy of his view. We (...)
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  5. A Category Semantics.Paul Symington - 2018 - In M. W. Hackett Paul (ed.), Mereologies, Ontologies, and Facets: The Categorial Structure of Reality. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 65-85.
    In this paper, I present a categorial theory of meaning which asserts that the meaning of a sentence is the function from the actualization of some potentiality or the potentiality of some actuality to the truth of the sentence. I argue that it builds on the virtues of David Lewis’s Possible World Semantics but advances beyond problems that Lewis’s theory faces with its distinctly Aristotelian turn toward actuality and potentiality.
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  6. The unconscious and conscious self: The nature of psychical unity in Freud and Lonergan.Paul Symington - 2006 - American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 80 (4):563-580.
    This article compares the accounts of psychical unity in Freud and Lonergan. Following a detailed account of Freud’s understanding of psychical structure andhis deterministic psycho-biological presuppositions, Lonergan’s understanding of psychical structure in relation to patterns of experience is discussed. As opposed to Freud’s theory, which is based on an imaginative synthesis of the classical laws of natural science, Lonergan considers psychical and organic function as concretely integrated in human functionality according to probabilistic schemes of recurrence. Consequently, Lonergan offers a theory (...)
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  7. The Nature of Naming and the Analogy of Being: McInerny and the Denial of a Proper Analogy of Being.Paul Symington - 2007 - International Philosophical Quarterly 47 (1):91-102.
    This paper addresses the question of whether there is a proper analogy of being according to both meaning and being. I disagree with Ralph McInerny’s understanding of how things are named through concepts and argue that McInerny’s account does not allow for the thing represented by the name to be known in itself. In his understanding of analogy, only ideas of things may be known. This results in a wholesale inability to name things at all and thereby forces McInerny to (...)
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  8. Response to John Rist’s “Must Morality be Grounded on God?”.Paul Symington - 2014 - Quaestiones Disputatae 5 (1):26-29.
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  9. Thomas Aquinas, Perceptual Resemblance, Categories, and the Reality of Secondary Qualities.Paul Symington - 2011 - Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 85:237-252.
    Arguably one of the most fundamental phase shifts that occurred in the intellectual history of Western culture involved the ontological reduction of secondary qualities to primary qualities. To say the least, this reduction worked to undermine the foundations undergirding Aristotelian thought in support of a scientific view of the world based strictly on an examination of the real—primary— qualities of things. In this essay, I identify the so-called “Causal Argument” for a reductive view of secondary qualities and seek to deflect (...)
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  10. The Analogical Logic of Discovery and the Aristotelian Epistemic Principle.Paul Symington - 2015 - American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 89 (2):195-222.
    In this paper, I focus on the important semantic components involved in analogy in hopes of providing an epistemic ground for predicating names of God analogously. To this task, I address a semantic/epistemic problem, which concludes that the doctrine of analogy lacks epistemological grounding insofar as it presupposes a prior understanding of God in order to sufficiently alter a given concept to be proportionate to God. In hopes of avoiding this conclusion, I introduce Aquinas’s specifically semantic aspects that follow after (...)
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  11. Metaphysics Renewed.Paul Symington - 2011 - International Philosophical Quarterly 51 (3):285-301.
    This article considers the significance of Kant’s schematized categories in the Critique of Pure Reason for contemporary metaphysics. I present Kant’s understanding of the schematism and how it functions within his critique of the limits of pure reason. Then I argue that, although the true role of the schemata is a relatively late development in Kant’s thought, it is nevertheless a core notion, and the central task of the first Critique can be sufficiently articulated in the language of the schematism. (...)
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  12. Beyond Continents.Paul Symington - 2006 - Philosophy Today 50 (3):263-271.
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  13. The Aristotelian Epistemic Principle and the Problem of Divine Naming in Aquinas.Paul Symington - 2010 - Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 84:133-144.
    In this paper, I engage in a preliminary discussion to the thorny problem of analogous naming in Aquinas; namely, the Maimonidean problem of how ourconceptual content can relate to us any knowledge of God. I identify this problem as the First Semantic/Epistemic Problem (FSEP) of religious language. Theprimary determination of semantic content for Aquinas is what I call the Aristotelian Epistemic Principle (AEP). This principle holds that a belief is related tosome experience in order to be known. I show how (...)
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  14. Rockmore, Tom. Kant and Phenomenology. [REVIEW]Paul Symington - 2012 - Review of Metaphysics 66 (2):380-382.
    Book review of Tom Rockmore's "Kant & Phenomenology," which appeared in "Review of Metaphysics" in 2011.
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