Thomas Aquinas anthropology is related to the description of human nature, which was established at the beginning, before original sin, as well as taking into account all its effects, and the nature that was united with God. The distinction of two intellects adopted by Aristotle - a potential and active intellect - for Aquinas was helpful in showing the unique character of the knowledge that Adam and Christ had. Adam as the one who was appointed (...) as teacher of people, had perfect knowledge and did not have a potential intellect that would be an unwritten tablet. His potential intellect had the habits of knowledge, by which he had a perfect knowledge of everything that can be embraced in any field of cognition by the power of the first principles of knowledge. The perfection of Christ's knowledge was incomparably greater than knowledge of Adam and every other human being – it was result of unification with the Word, but not the mixing of two natures. Christ had knowledge which have blessed (saved), infused knowledge (resulting from union with the Word) and had experiential knowledge appropriate to age and time. Christ developed in knowledge and wisdom because he grew in human experience. (shrink)

Thomas Aquinas anthropology is related to the description of human nature, which was established at the beginning, before original sin, as well as taking into account all its effects, and the nature that was united with God. The distinction of two intellects adopted by Aristotle - a potential and active intellect - for Aquinas was helpful in showing the unique character of the knowledge that Adam and Christ had. Adam as the one who was appointed (...) as teacher of people, had perfect knowledge and did not have a potential intellect that would be an unwritten tablet. His potential intellect had the habits of knowledge, by which he had a perfect knowledge of everything that can be embraced in any field of cognition by the power of the first principles of knowledge. The perfection of Christ's knowledge was incomparably greater than knowledge of Adam and every other human being – it was result of unification with the Word, but not the mixing of two natures. Christ had knowledge which have blessed (saved), infused knowledge (resulting from union with the Word) and had experiential knowledge appropriate to age and time. Christ developed in knowledge and wisdom because he grew in human experience. (shrink)

Did we get Aquinas’ Epistemology right? St. Thomas is often interpreted according to Kantian principles, particularly in Transcendental Thomism. When this happens, it can appear as though Aquinas, too—along with Kant—had made the “turn to the subject”; as if Aquinas were no longer the Aristotelian “believer” who thinks nature is what it is but, instead, the Kantian “thinker” who holds that nature is what we think of it; as if St. Thomas, like Kant, had concluded that nature is (...) intelligible not only when we think of it, but because we think of it. After much struggle with this problem, the challenge seemed obvious to me: to show the radical difference between Aquinas and Kant. Kant had reasons to make his turn, his Copernican revolution. Could I explain those reasons, could I pinpoint the problem leading Kant to think in those terms? Could I show Aquinas facing the same problem and clearly taking a different direction in his proposed solution? That is what I have tried to do in this book. This book provides an interpretation of Aquinas’ agent intellect focusing on Summa Theologiae I, qq. 75-89, and proposing that the agent intellect is a metaphysical rather than a formal a priori of human understanding. A formal a priori is responsible for the intelligibility as content of the object of human understanding and is related to Kant’s epistemological views, whereas a metaphysical a priori is responsible for intelligibility as mode of being of this same object. We can find in Aquinas’ text many indications that the agent intellect is not productive of the intelligible object but is, rather, productive of the abstracted or intelligible mode of being of this object. This is because for Aquinas the universal as nature, which is the object of human understanding, is present in the things themselves but with a different mode of being. In this four-chapter book, Chapter 1 is intended to establish the fact which requires for Aquinas an agent intellect, and provides two very important principles: one is that the object of human understanding (the universal as nature) is present in the things themselves and, the other, that it is not in the things themselves with a mode of being which makes it available to the intellectual eye. These two principles lead us to the main point of Chapter 2, namely the distinction between the intelligible object and its intelligible mode of being. Now, because knowing is receptive of the intelligible object (Chapter 3), which is present in the things themselves (Chapter 1), the agent intellect is productive not of the object’s intelligible content, but of its abstracted or intelligible mode of being (Chapter 4). (shrink)

Thomas Aquinas wrote a text later known as Quaestio de attributis and ordered it inserted in a precise location of his Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard more than a decade after composing this work. Aquinas assigned exceptional importance to this text, in which he confronts the debate on the issue of the divine attributes that swept the most important centres of learning in 13th Century Europe and examines the answers given to the problem by the representatives of (...) the four mainstream schools of his time: the Greek mystic Dionysius Areopagita, the Latin Saint Anselm of Canterbury, the Jewish rabbi Moses Maimonides and the Muslim philosopher Ibn Sina. This in-depth study of Thomas Aquinas’ Quaestio de attributis (In I Sent., d. 2, q. 1, a. 3) binds together the findings of previous research on the unique history of this text by reconstructing the historical circumstances surrounding its composition, shows that the Quaestio contains Aquinas’ final answer to the dispute on the divine attributes, and thoroughly examines his interpretation of Maimonides’ position on the issue of the knowledge of God by analysing this and other texts related to it chronologically and doctrinally. The examination of the Quaestio reveals the background of Thomas Aquinas’ renewed interest in Maimonides’ position on the issue and brings to light elements of Aquinas’ interpretation that are absent from his earlier references to Maimonides. Moreover, the chronological and doctrinal connection of the Quaestio de attributis to other Thomistic works with explicit references to Maimonides enables a reconstruction of his comprehensive approach to Maimonides’ teaching on the possibility and extent of the knowledge of God in the Guide of the Perplexed and highlights the place of Maimonides’ philosophical teachings in Thomas’ own thought in issues like "Being" as the proper name of God, the multiplicity of the divine names, the beatific vision in the afterlife, the causes that prevent the instruction of the multitude in divine matters and the role of faith and prophecy in the acquisition of the true knowledge of God in this life. The last chapter examines the reasons behind Aquinas’ silencing of Maimonides’ name when introducing his Five Ways for the knowledge of the existence of God, in spite of the evident relation between these and Maimonides’ Four Speculations. The study is completed with an extensive appendix that includes the text of the Quaestio de attributis with an English translation and the critical edition of several chapters of the 13th Century Latin translation of the Guide of the Perplexed known as Dux neutrorum. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 : 3-13. / 0/ – Introduction I want to propose, as a trajectory into the philosophically weird, an absurd theoretical claim and pursue it, or perhaps more accurately, construct it as I point to it, collecting the ground work behind me like the Perpetual Train from China Mieville's Iron Council which puts down track as it moves reclaiming it along the way. The strange trajectory is the following: Kant's critical philosophy and much of continental philosophy which has followed, (...) has been a defense against horror and madness. Kant's prohibition on speculative metaphysics such as dogmatic metaphysics and transcendental realism, on thinking beyond the imposition of transcendental and moral constraints, has been challenged by numerous figures proceeding him. One of the more interesting critiques of Kant comes from the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land stating, “Kant’s critical philosophy is the most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth.” And while Alain Badiou would certainly be opposed to the libidinal investments of Land's Deleuzo-Guattarian thought, he is likewise critical of Kant's normative thought-bureaucracies: Kant is the one author for whom I cannot feel any kinship. Everything in him exasperates me, above all his legalism—always asking Quid Juris? Or ‘Haven’t you crossed the limit?’—combined, as in today’s United States, with a religiosity that is all the more dismal in that it is both omnipresent and vague. The critical machinery he set up has enduringly poisoned philosophy, while giving great succour to the academy, which loves nothing more than to rap the knuckles of the overambitious [….] That is how I understand the truth of Monique David-Menard’s reflections on the properly psychotic origins of Kantianism. I am persuaded that the whole of the critical enterprise is set up to to shield against the tempting symptom represented by the seer Swedenborg, or against ‘diseases of the head’, as Kant puts it. An entire nexus of the limits of reason and philosophy are set up here, namely that the critical philosophy not only defends thought from madness, philosophy from madness, and philosophy from itself, but that philosophy following the advent of the critical enterprise philosophy becomes auto-vampiric; feeding on itself to support the academy. Following Francois Laruelle's non-philosophical indictment of philosophy, we could go one step further and say that philosophy operates on the material of what is philosophizable and not the material of the external world. [1] Beyond this, the Kantian scheme of nestling human thinking between our limited empirical powers and transcendental guarantees of categorical coherence, forms of thinking which stretch beyond either appear illegitimate, thereby liquefying both pre-critical metaphysics and the ravings of the mad in the same critical acid. In rejecting the Kantian apparatus we are left with two entities – an unsure relation of thought to reality where thought is susceptible to internal and external breakdown and a reality with an uncertain sense of stability. These two strands will be pursued, against the sane-seal of post-Kantian philosophy by engaging the work of weird fiction authors H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. The absolute inhumanism of the formers universe will be used to describe a Shoggothic Materialism while the dream worlds of the latter will articulate the mad speculation of a Ventriloquil Idealism. But first we must address the relation of philosophy to madness as well as philosophy to weird fiction. /1/ – Philosophy and Madness There is nothing that the madness of men invents which is not either nature made manifest or nature restored. Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization. The moment I doubt whether an event that I recall actually took place, I bring the suspicion of madness upon myself: unless I am uncertain as to whether it was not a mere dream. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Idea, Vol. 3. Madness is commonly thought of as moving through several well known cultural-historical shifts from madness as a demonic or otherwise theological force, to rationalization, to medicalization psychiatric and otherwise. Foucault's Madness and Civilization is well known for orientating madness as a form of exclusionary social control which operated by demarcating madness from reason. Yet Foucault points to the possibility of madness as the necessity of nature at least prior to the crushing weight of the church. Kant’s philosophy as a response to madness is grounded by his humanizing of madness itself. As Adrian Johnston points out in the early pages of Time Driven pre-Kantian madness meant humans were seized by demonic or angelic forces whereas Kantian madness became one of being too human. Madness becomes internalized, the external demonic forces become flaws of the individual mind. Foucault argues that, while madness is de-demonized it is also dehumanized during the Renaissance, as madmen become creatures neither diabolic nor totally human reduced to the zero degree of humanity. It is immediately clear why for Kant, speculative metaphysics must be curbed – with the problem of internal madness and without the external safeguards of transcendental conditions, there is nothing to formally separate the speculative capacities for metaphysical diagnosis from the mad ramblings of the insane mind – both equally fall outside the realm of practicality and quotidian experience. David-Menard's work is particularly useful in diagnosing the relation of thought and madness in Kant's texts. David-Menard argues that in Kant's relatively unknown “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” as well as his later discussion of the Seer of Swedenborg, that Kant formulates madness primarily in terms of sensory upheaval or other hallucinatory theaters. She writes: “madness is an organization of thought. It is made possible by the ambiguity of the normal relation between the imaginary and the perceived, whether this pertains to the order of sensation or to the relations between our ideas” Kant's fascination with the Seer forces Kant between the pincers of “aesthetic reconciliation” – namely melancholic withdrawal – and “a philosophical invention” – namely the critical project. Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis is a combination and reversal of Kant's split, where an aesthetic over engagement with the world entails prolific conceptual invention. Their embrace of madness, however, is of course itself conceptual despite all their rhizomatic maneuvers. Though they move with the energy of madness, Deleuze and Guattari save the capacity of thought from the fangs of insanity by imbuing materiality itself with the capacity for thought. Or, as Ray Brassier puts it, “Deleuze insists, it is necessary to absolutize the immanence of this world in such a way as to dissolve the transcendent disjunction between things as we know them and as they are in themselves”. That is, whereas Kant relied on the faculty of judgment to divide representation from objectivity Deleuze attempts to flatten the whole economy beneath the juggernaut of ontological univocity. Speculation, as a particularly useful form of madness, might fall close to Deleuze and Guattari’s shaping of philosophy into a concept producing machine but is different in that it is potentially self destructive – less reliant on the stability of its own concepts and more adherent to exposing a particular horrifying swath of reality. Speculative madness is always a potential disaster in that it acknowledges little more than its own speculative power with the hope that the gibbering of at least a handful of hysterical brains will be useful. Pre-critical metaphysics amounts to madness, though this may be because the world itself is mad while new attempts at speculative metaphysics, at post-Kantian pre-critical metaphysics, are well aware of our own madness. Without the sobriety of the principle of sufficient reason we have a world of neon madness: “we would have to conceive what our life would be if all the movements of the earth, all the noises of the earth, all the smells, the tastes, all the light – of the earth and elsewhere, came to us in a moment, in an instant – like an atrocious screaming tumult of things”. Speculative thought may be participatory in the screaming tumult of the world or, worse yet, may produce its spectral double. Against theology or reason or simply commonsense, the speculative becomes heretical. Speculation, as the cognitive extension of the horrorific sublime should be met with melancholic detachment. Whereas Kant's theoretical invention, or productivity of thought, is self -sabotaging, since the advent of the critical project is a productivity of thought which then delimits the engine of thought at large either in dogmatic gestures or non-systematizable empirical wondrousness. The former is celebrated by the fiction of Thomas Ligotti whereas the latter is espoused by the tales of H.P. Lovecraft. /2/ – Weird Fiction and Philosophy. Supernatural horror, in all its eerie constructions, enables a reader to taste treats inconsistent with his personal welfare. Thomas Ligotti Songs of a Dead Dreamer. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve,momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis H.P. Lovecraft. “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” Lovecraft states that his creation of a story is to suspend natural law yet, at the same time, he indexes the tenuousness of such laws, suggesting the vast possibilities of the cosmic. The tension that Lovecraft sets up between his own fictions and the universe or nature is reproduced within his fictions in the common theme of the unreliable narrator; unreliable precisely because they are either mad or what they have witnessed questions the bounds of material reality. In “The Call of Cthulhu” Lovecraft writes: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Despite Lovecraft's invocations of illusion, he is not claiming that his fantastic creations such as the Old Ones are supernatural but, following Joshi, are only ever supernormal. One can immediately see that instead of nullifying realism Lovecraft in fact opens up the real to an unbearable degree. In various letters and non-fictional statements Lovecraft espoused strictly materialist tenets, ones which he borrowed from Hugh Elliot namely the uniformity of law, the denial of teleology and the denial of non-material existence. Lovecraft seeks to explore the possibilities of such a universe by piling horror upon horror until the fragile brain which attempts to grasp it fractures. This may be why philosophy has largely ignored weird fiction – while Deleuze and Guattari mark the turn towards weird fiction and Lovecraft in particular, with the precursors to speculative realism as well as contemporary related thinkers have begun to view Lovecraft as making philosophical contributions. Lovecraft's own relation to philosophy is largely critical while celebrating Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. This relationship of Lovecraft to philosophy and philosophy to Lovecraft is coupled with Lovecraft's habit of mercilessly destroying the philosopher and the figure of the academic more generally in his work, a destruction which is both an epistemological destruction and an ontological destruction. Thomas Ligotti's weird fiction which he has designated as a kind of “confrontational escapism” might be best described in the following quote from one of his shortstories, “The human phenomenon is but the sum of densely coiled layers of illusion each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity. That there are persons of any kind when all there can be is mindless mirrors laughing and screaming as they parade about in an endless dream”. Whereas Lovecraft's weirdness draws predominantly from the abyssal depths of the uncharted universe, Ligotti's existential horror focuses on the awful proliferation of meaningless surfaces that is, the banal and every day function of representation. In an interview, Ligotti states: We don't even know what the world is like except through our sense organs, which are provably inadequate. It's no less the case with our brains. Our whole lives are motored along by forces we cannot know and perceptions that are faulty. We sometimes hear people say that they're not feeling themselves. Well, who or what do they feel like then? This is not to say that Ligotti sees nothing beneath the surface but that there is only darkness or blackness behind it, whether that surface is on the cosmological level or the personal. By addressing the implicit and explicit philosophical issues in Ligotti's work we will see that his nightmarish take on reality is a form of malevolent idealism, an idealism which is grounded in a real, albeit dark and obscure materiality. If Ligotti's horrors ultimately circle around mad perceptions which degrade the subject, it takes aim at the vast majority of the focus of continental philosophy. While Lovecraft's acidic materialism clearly assaults any romantic concept of being from the outside, Ligotti attacks consciousness from the inside: Just a little doubt slipped into the mind, a little trickle of suspicion in the bloodstream, and all those eyes of ours, one by one, open up to the world and see its horror [...] Not even the solar brilliance of a summer day will harbor you from horror. For horror eats the light and digests it into darkness. Clearly, the weird fiction of Lovecraft and Ligotti amount to a anti-anthrocentric onslaught against the ramparts of correlationist continental philosophy. /3/ – Shoggothic Materialism or the Formless Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes—viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile—slaves of suggestion, builders of cities—more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative—Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and to carve such things? H.P. Lovecraft. “At the Mountains of Madness” On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. Georges Bataille. “Formless”. The Shoggoths feature most prominently in H.P. Lovecraft's shortstory “At the Mountains of Madness” where they are described in the following manner: It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self -luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. The term is a litmus test for materialism itself as the Shoggoth is an amorphous creature. The Shoggoths were living digging machines bio engineered by the Elder Things, and their protoplasmic bodies being formed into various tools by their hypnotic powers. The Shoggoths eventually became self aware and rose up against their masters in an ultimately failed rebellion. After the Elder Ones retreated into the oceans leaving the Shoggoths to roam the frozen wastes of the Antarctic. The onto-genesis of the Shoggoths and their gross materiality, index the horrifyingly deep time of the earth a concept near and dear to Lovecraft's formulation of horror as well as the fear of intelligences far beyond, and far before, the ascent of humankind on earth and elsewhere. The sickly amorphous nature of the Shoggoths invade materialism at large, where while materiality is unmistakably real ie not discursive, psychological, or otherwise overly subjectivist, it questions the relation of materialism to life. As Eugene Thacker writes: The Shoggoths or Elder Things do not even share the same reality with the human beings who encounter them—and yet this encounter takes place, though in a strange no-place that is neither quite that of the phenomenal world of the human subject or the noumenal world of an external reality. Amorphous yet definitively material beings are a constant in Lovecraft's tales. In his tale “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadatth” Lovecraft describes Azathoth as, “that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe,” that, “last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blashphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity,” who, “gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time”. Azathoth's name may have multiple origins but the most striking is the alchemy term azoth which is both a cohesive agent and a acidic creation pointing back to the generative and the decayed. The indistinction of generation and degradation materially mirrors the blur between the natural and the unnatural as well as life and non-life. Lovecraft speaks of the tension between the natural and the unnatural is his short story “The Unnameable.” He writes, “if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulousity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature?”. Lovecraft explores exactly the tension outlined at the beginning of this chapter, between life and thought. At the end of his short tale Lovecraft compounds the problem as the unnameable is described as “a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory”. Deleuze suggests that becoming-animal is operative throughout Lovecraft's work, where narrators feel themselves reeling at their becoming non-human or of being the anomalous or of becoming atomized. Following Eugene Thacker however, it may be far more accurate to say that Lovecraft's tales exhibit not a becoming-animal but a becoming-creature. Where the monstrous breaks the purportedly fixed laws of nature, the creature is far more ontologically ambiguous. The nameless thing is an altogether different horizon for thought. The creature is either less than animal or more than animal – its becoming is too strange for animal categories and indexes the slow march of thought towards the bizarre. This strangeness is, as aways, some indefinite swirling in the category of immanence and becoming. Bataille begins “The Labyrinth” with the assertion that being, to continue to be, is becoming. More becoming means more being hence the assertion that Bataille's barking dog is more than the sponge. This would mean that the Shoggotth is altogether too much being, too much material in the materialism. Bataille suggests that there is an immanence between the eater and the eaten, across the species and never within them. That is, despite the chaotic storm of immanence there must remain some capacity to distinguish the gradients of becoming without reliance upon, or at least total dependence upon, the powers of intellection to parse the universe into recognizable bits, properly digestible factoids. That is, if we undo Deleuze's aforementioned valorization of sense which, for his variation of materialism, performed the work of the transcendental, but refuse to reinstate Kant's transcendental disjunction between thing and appearance, then it must be a quality of becoming-as-being itself which can account for the discernible nature of things by sense. In an interview with Peter Gratton, Jane Bennett formulates the problem thusly: What is this strange systematicity proper to a world of Becoming? What, for example, initiates this congealing that will undo itself? Is it possible to identify phases within this formativity, plateaus of differentiation? If so, do the phases/plateaus follow a temporal sequence? Or, does the process of formation inside Becoming require us to theorize a non-chronological kind of time? I think that your student’s question: “How can we account for something like iterable structures in an assemblage theory?” is exactly the right question. Philosophy has erred too far on the side of the subject in the subject-object relation and has furthermore, lost the very weirdness of the non-human. Beyond this, the madness of thought need not override. /4/ - Ventriloquial Idealism or the Externality of Thought My aim is the opposite of Lovecraft's. He had an appreciation for natural scenery on earth and wanted to reach beyond the visible in the universe. I have no appreciation for natural scenery and want the objective universe to be a reflection of a character. Thomas Ligotti. “Devotees of Decay and Desolation.” Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure [….] Horror is more real than we are. Thomas Ligotti. “Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror”. Thomas Ligotti's tales are rife with mannequins, puppets, and other brainless entities which of replace the valorized subject of philosophy – that of the free thinking human being. His tales such as “The Dream of the Manikin” aim to destroy the rootedness of consciousness. James Trafford has connected the anti-egoism of Ligotti to Thomas Metzinger – where the self is at best an illusion and we plead desperately for someone else to acknowledge that we are real. Trafford has stated it thus, “Life is played out as an inescapable puppet show, an endless dream in which the puppets are generally unaware that they are trapped within a mesmeric dance of whose mechanisms they know nothing and over which they have no control”. An absolute materialism, for Ligotti, implies an alienation of the idea which leads to a ventriloquil idealism. As Ligotti notes in an interview, “the fiasco and nightmare of existence, the particular fiasco and nightmare of human existence, the sense that people are puppets of powers they cannot comprehend, etc.” And then further elaborates that,“[a]ssuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear”. The externality of the idea leads to the unfortunate consequence of consciousness eating at itself through horror which, for Ligotti, is more real than reality and goes beyond horror-as-affect. Beyond this, taking together with the unreality of life and the ventriloquizing of subjectivity, Ligotti's thought becomes an idealism in which thought itself is alien and ultimately horrifying. The role of human thought and the relation of non-relation of horror to thought is not completely clear in Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Ligotti argues in his The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,that the advent of thought is a mistake of nature and that horror is being in the sense that horror results from knowing too much. Yet, at the same time, Ligotti seems to suggest that thought separates us from nature whereas, for Lovecraft, thought is far less privileged – mind is just another manifestation of the vital principal, it is just another materialization of energy. In his brilliant “Prospects for Post-Copernican Dogmatism” Iain Grant rallies against the negative definition of dogmatism and the transcendental, and suggests that negatively defining both over-focuses on conditions of access and subjectivism at the expense of the real or nature. With Schelling, who is Grant's champion against the subjectivist bastions of both Fichte and Kant, Ligotti's idealism could be taken as a transcendental realism following from an ontological realism. Yet the transcendental status of Ligotti's thought move towards a treatment of the transcendental which may threaten to leave beyond its realist ground. Ligotti states: Belief in the supernatural is only superstition. That said, a sense of the supernatural, as Conrad evidenced in Heart of Darkness, must be admitted if one's inclination is to go to the limits of horror. It is the sense of what should not be- the sense of being ravaged by the impossible. Phenomenally speaking, the super-natural may be regarded as the metaphysical counterpart of insanity, a transcendental correlative of a mind that has been driven mad. Again, Ligotti equates madness with thought, qualifying both as supernatural while remaining less emphatic about the metaphysical dimensions of horror. The question becomes one of how exactly the hallucinatory realm of the ideal relates to the black churning matter of Lovecraft's chaos of elementary particles. In his tale “I Have a Special Plan for This World” Ligotti formulates thus: A: There is no grand scheme of things. B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity. C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity. Here Ligotti is not discounting metaphysics but implying that if it does exist the fact that we are phenomenologically ill-equipped to perceive that it is nightmarish. For Ligotti, nightmare and horror occur within the circuit of consciousness whereas for Lovecraft the relation between reality and mind is less productive on the side of mind. It is easier to ascertain how the Kantian philosophy is a defense against the diseases of the head as Kant armors his critical enterprise from too much of the world and too much of the mind. The weird fiction of both Lovecraft and Ligotti demonstrates that there is too much of both feeding into one another in a way that corrodes the Kantian schema throughly, breaking it down into a dead but still ontologically potentiated nigredo. The haunting, terrifying fact of Ligotti's idealism is that the transcendental motion which brought thought to matter, while throughly material and naturalized, brings with it the horror that thought cannot be undone without ending the material that bears it either locally or completely. Thought comes from an elsewhere and an elsewhen being-in-thought. The unthinkable outside thought is as maddening as the unthought engine of thought itself within thought which doesn't exist except for the mind, the rotting décor of the brain. /5/ - Hyperstitional Transcendental Paranoia or Self -Expelled Thought Weird fiction has been given some direct treatment in philosophy in the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land. Nick Land along with others in the 1990s created the Cyber Culture Research Unit as well as the research group Hyperstition. The now defunct hyperstitional website, an outgrowth of the Cyber Culture Research Unit, defined hyperstition in the following fourfold: 1-Element of effective culture that makes itself real. 2-Fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device. 3-Coincidence intensifier. 4-Call to the Old Ones. The distinctively Lovecraftian character of hyperstition is hard to miss as is its Deleuzo-Guattarian roots. In the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari write, “We have been criticized for over-quoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into”. The indisinction of literature and philosophy mirrors the mess of being and knowing as post-correlationist philosophy, where philosophy tries to make itself real where literature, especially the weird, aims itself at the brain-circuit of horror. The texts of both Lovecraft and Ligotti work through horror as epistemological plasticity meeting with proximity as well as the deep time of Lovecraft and the glacially slow time of paranoia in Ligotti. Against Deleuze, and following Brassier, we cannot allow the time of consciousness, the Bergsonian time of the duree, to override natural time, but instead acknowledge that it is an unfortunate fact of existence as a thinking being. Horror-time, the time of consciousness, with all its punctuated moments and drawn out terrors, cannot compare to the deep time of non-existence both in the unreachable past and the unknown future. The crystalline cogs of Kant's account of experience as the leading light for the possibility of metaphysics must be throughly obliterated. His gloss of experience in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics could not be more sterile: Experience consists of intuitions, which belong to the sensibility, and of judgments, which are entirely a work of the understanding. But the judgments which the understanding makes entirely out of sensuous intuitions are far from being judgments of experience. For in the one case the judgment connects only the perceptions as they are given in sensuous intuition [....] Experience consists in the synthetic connection of appearances in consciousness, so far as this connection is necessary. Here it is difficult to dismiss the queasiness that Kant's legalism induces upon sight for both Badiou and David-Menard. Kant's thought becomes, as Foucault says when reflecting on Sade's text in relation to nature, “the savage abolition of itself”. For Badiou, Kant's philosophy simply closes off too much of the outside, freezing the world of thought in an all too limited formalism. Critical philosophy is simply the systematized quarantine on future thinking, on thinking which would threaten the formalism which artificially grants thought its own coherency in the face of madness. Even the becoming-mad of Deleuze, while escaping the rumbling ground, makes grounds for itself, mad grounds but grounds which are thinkable in their affect. The field of effects allows for Deleuze's aesthetic and radical empiricism, in which effects and/or occasions make up the material of the world to be thought as a chaosmosis of simulacra. Given a critique of an empiricism of aesthetics, of the image, it may be difficult to justify an attack on Kantian formalism with the madness of literature, which does not aim to make itself real but which we may attempt to make real. That is, how do Lovecraft's and Ligotti's materials, as materials for philosophy to work on, differ from either the operative formalisms of Kant or the implicitly formalized images of Deleuzian empiricism? It is simply that such texts do not aim to make themselves real, and make claims to the real which are more alien to us than familiar, which is why their horror is immediately more trustworthy. This is the madness which Blanchot discusses in The Infinite Conversation through Cervantes and his knight – the madness of book-life, of the perverse unity of literature and life a discussion which culminates in the discussion of one of the weird's masters, that of Kafka. The text is the knowing of madness, since madness, in its moment of becoming-more-mad, cannot be frozen in place but by the solidifications of externalizing production. This is why Foucault ends his famous study with works of art. Furthermore extilligence, the ability to export the products of our maligned brains, is the companion of the attempts to export, or discover the possibility of intelligences outside of our heads, in order for philosophy to survive the solar catastrophe. To borrow again from Deleuze, writing is inseparable from becoming. The mistake is to believe that madness is reabsorbed by extilligence, by great works, or that it could be exorcised by the expelling of thought into the inorganic or differently organic. Going out of our heads does not guarantee we will no longer mean we cannot still go out of our minds. This is simply because of the outside, of matter, or force, or energy, or thing-in-itself, or Schopenhauerian Will. In Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zahn” an “impoverished student of metaphysics” becomes intrigued by strange viol music coming from above his room. After meeting the musician the student discovers that each night he plays frantic music at a window in order to keep some horridness at bay, some “impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium”. The aesthetic defenses provided by the well trained brain can bear the hex of matter for so long, the specter of unalterability within it which too many minds obliterate, collapsing everything before the thought of thought as thinkable or at least noetically mutable on our own terms. Transcendental paranoia is the concurrent nightmare and promise of Paul Humphrey's work, of being literally out of our minds. It is the gothic counterpart of thinking non-conceptually but also of thinking never belonging to any instance of purportedly solid being. As Bataille stated, “At the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who reflects within cohesion realizes there is no longer any room for him” Thought is immaterial only to the degree that it is inhuman, it is a power that tries, always with failure, to ascertain its own genesis. Philosophy, if it can truly return to the great outdoors, if it can leave behind the dead loop of the human skull, must recognize not only the non-priority of human thought, but that thought never belongs to the brain that thinks it, thought comes from somewhere else. To return to the train image from the beginning “a locomotive rolling on the surface of the earth is the image of continuous metamorphosis” this is the problem of thought, and of thinking thought, of being no longer able to isolate thought, with only a thought-formed structure. [1] One of the central tenets of Francois Laruelle's non-philosophy is that philosophy has traditionally operated on material already presupposed as thinkable instead of trying to think the real in itself. Philosophy, according to Laruelle, remains fixated on transcendental synthesis which shatters immanence into an empirical datum and an a prori factum which are then fused by a third thing such as the ego. For a critical account of Laruelle's non-philosophy see Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound. (shrink)

The following is an interpretation of Aquinas’ agent intellect focusing on Summa Theologiae I, qq. 75-89, and proposing that the agent intellect is a metaphysical rather than a formal a priori of human understanding. A formal a priori is responsible for the intelligibility as content of the object of human understanding and is related to Kant’s epistemological views; whereas a metaphysical a priori is responsible for intelligibility as mode of being of this same object. We can find in (...) Aquinas’ text many indications that the agent intellect is not productive of the universal as content but is, rather, productive of the abstracted or intelligible mode of being of the universal nature. This is because for Aquinas the universal nature, which is the object of human understanding, is present in the things themselves but with a different mode of being. Chapter 1 is intended to establish the fact which requires for Aquinas an agent intellect, and provides two very important principles: one is that the object of human understanding (the universal nature) is present in the things themselves and, the other, that it is not in the things themselves with a mode of being which makes it available to the intellectual eye. These two principles lead us to the main point of Chapter 2, namely the distinction between the intelligible object and its intelligible mode of being. Now, because knowing is receptive of the intelligible object (Chapter 3), which is present in the things themselves (Chapter 1), the agent intellect is productive not of the object’s intelligible content, but of its abstracted or intelligible mode of being (Chapter 4). (shrink)

Two stories have dominated the historiography of early modern philosophy: one in which a seventeenth century Age of Reason spawned the Enlightenment, and another in which a skeptical crisis cast a shadow over subsequent philosophy, resulting in ever narrower "limits to knowledge." I combine certain elements common to both into a third narrative, one that begins by taking seriously seventeenth-century conceptions of the topics and methods central to the rise of a "new" philosophy. In this revisionist story, differing approaches (...) to the central subject matter of early modern metaphysics--knowledge of substances through their essences and causal powers--arise as a result of disagreements about the powers of the human cognitive faculties. Methodological writings are seen as attempts to direct readers in the proper use of their cognitive faculties. The early modern rejection of the Aristotelian theory of cognition ranks equally in importance with rejection of Aristotelian doctrines about nature. Skepticism is more often than not a tool to be used in teaching the reader the proper use of the cognitive faculties, or indeed in convincing the reader of the existence or inexistence of certain cognitive faculties or powers. Instead of early modern "epistemology" or "theory of knowledge," one speaks, with seventeenth century writers, of theories of the cognitive faculties and their implications for the possibility of human knowledge. The early modern rejection of Aristotelian logic can then be seen as reflecting a negative assessment about the fit between syllogistic reasoning and logic as an art of reasoning or thinking which refines the use of the cognitive faculties. -/- Central to this new historiography is the story of the relation between the intellect and senses as cognitive faculties or powers. The development of philosophy from Descartes to Kant can be portrayed as a series of claims about the power of the intellect to know the essences of things, with resulting consequences for ontology and the foundations of natural philosophy. I illustrate this revised narrative by comparing three conceptions of the intellect in three philosophical settings, provided by several late scholastic Aristotelians, Descartes, and Locke. I have two aims: first, to exhibit the central role played by the conception of intellect or understanding in these authors, and, second, to locate their discussions of the cognitive faculties in relation to recent understandings of psychology, epistemology, logic, mind, and their relations. Early modern writings do not easily fit into the modern categories of epistemology and psychology; more generally, the early modern concern with the workings of mind does not coincide with recent conceptions of naturalism. These findings can help us to see problems with our current categories. (shrink)

The present essay took as its hypothesis the premise that the Metaphysical Neutrality proposed by Husserl since his initial studies needs to be recognized with methodological and analytical limits. In order to overcome this limit, a recovery of the Metaphysics and Theory of Knowledge of St. Thomas Aquinas was carried out, interpreting this theory through a Moderate and Direct Realism. As a conclusion, it was possible to identify that there is a very important similarity between both theories, as (...) well as that for phenomenological investigations to achieve their primary cognitive intent, care must be taken not to annihilate moderate realist metaphysics. (shrink)

In recent scholarship, moral theologians and readers of Thomas Aquinas have shown increasing sensitivity to the role of the passions in the moral life. Yet these accounts have paid inadequate attention to Thomas's writings on Christ's passions as a source of moral reflection. As I argue in this essay, Thomas's writings on Christ's human affectivity should not be limited to the concerns of Christology; rather, they should be integrated into a fuller account of the human passions. One (...) upshot of this approach for Thomists is that it sharpens our vocabulary when describing human nature and the conditions for the moral life. By considering the rubrics of creation, fall, and redemption – as Thomas does – we find that our resources for analyzing the passions are greatly enriched. (shrink)

PHILOSOPHY OF HUMAN RIGHTS: HUMAN RIGHTS IN LIGHT OF THEIR INTERNATIONAL PROTECTION Summary The book consists of two main parts: in the first, on the basis of an analysis of international law, elements of the contemporary conception of human rights and its positive legal protection are identified; in the second - in light of the first part -a philosophical theory of law based on the tradition leading from Plato, Aristotle, and St. Thomas Aquinas is constructed. The conclusion contains an (...) application of the results of the analysis conducted in the second part. The first part comprises four chapters. The first aims at revealing characteristics of human rights on the basis of an analysis of historical conditioning of the inter-national law of human rights and its development. The historical context displays the practical, vindicative, and critical character of the positive legal protection of human rights. Moreover, the process of change of positive human rights law is distinguished from the process of change of human rights as such. In the second chapter the content of human rights - a topic which is only auxiliary to the conducted analysis - is discussed. Basic typology and catalogues of rights proclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and protected in the International Covenants of Human Rights are presented. The review of the content of rights aims at a more precise limitation of the field of research. The examination shows a diversity of rights which poses a serious challenge to the coherence of every philosophical theory of human rights. In the third chapter, central in the first part, international law is analyzed with regard to the characteristics of rights and the foundations of them. The analysis of documents shows a number of solutions referring to the anthropological foundations of rights. The inherent dignity of the human person is the source of all human rights. Each human being is recognized as free, and endowed with both reason and conscience. In the propounded conception of man individuals are not rivals but create a community which is a condition for their development. International law characterizes the rights as universal, inherent, inalienable and inviolable. The reconstructed conception also comprises the following basic elements: on the level of the structure of rights, a recognition of their equality, interdependence, and comprehensiveness; in the grounding of these rights, a recognition of the anthropological foundations of law; in the conception of positive law, a recognition of the secondariness of the positive law of human rights to human rights themselves, and a recognition of human rights and justice as the basis for legal order; in the conception of state, a recognition of the well-being of the individual as the fundamental aim of actions undertaken by political institutions, and recogni¬tion of rights which form an impassable boundary to the power of the state, includ¬ing its legislative actions. The characterization of the international legal paradigm serving for the under¬standing of human rights is supplemented by analyses of the structure of their posi¬tive legal protection. Various meanings of the terms "right" and "freedom" are distinguished. Subjective right, as basic structure of the positive legal protection of human rights, is understood as a complex relation formed by various legal situations of the subject of a right which create a functional whole in respect of the subordi-nation of human person to its good. Subordinating person to a good proper for it, expressed usually in a proclamatory norm, is the central element of particular rights around which further elements aiming at the realization of this good are built. In the second part of the book a philosophical theory is developed which allows for the location of a coherent foundation for the presented characterization of human rights and their positive legal protection. This part consists of two chapters. The first includes a review of some - not entirely satisfactory - means of founding of human rights; the second presents philosophical conceptions of law and man which may form a basis for the constructed theory. The review of arguments contained in the first chapter does not aim at a detailed analysis of various specific ways of argumentation encountered in works on this subject but rather at a concise presentation of the main possible lines of argumentation. These analyses also serve to emphasize the positive solutions which are pro¬posed later and to underscore the explanatory power of the elaborated theory. This theory, retaining accurate intuitions contained in the presented types of argumenta¬tion, helps in avoiding their consequences which are difficult to reconcile with the reconstructed paradigm of human rights. Efforts to base human rights on the norms of international law rightly take into account the necessity of determining the content of the rights and their positive legal protection as a means for the realization of man's good. These attempts, how¬ever, do not properly take into account the inherent character of human rights, which are independent of positive law and provide grounds for applying specific legislative measures and not others. Founding human rights on freedom accurately points at the freedom of an indi¬vidual as a constitutive element of some rights; however, absolutization of freedom leads, to a loss of an important element of the contemporary paradigm of under¬standing human rights. This foundation undermines recognition of the fact that human rights may set limits to both the freedom of others and the freedom of the subject of rights itself. Additionally, attempts at the so-called axiological justification of human rights are discussed. This type of justification has a few variants depending on the as¬sumed conception of value. Subjectivistic conceptions have similar advantages and disadvantages to the conceptions basing human rights on freedom; objectivistic conceptions while providing for the universality of human rights place, the fundamental aim of human rights protection beyond the individual human being - in the idealistically existing world of values; finally, conceptions rooting values and human rights in culture, while accurately noting that human rights are learned through the medium of culture, place the source of human rights beyond a concrete individual - in culture and processes which take place in it - which leads to difficulties in finding a basis for the universality of rights. Furthermore, attempts to ground human rights in specific characteristics of the human being are presented. This type of approach points to an important problem of dependence of the content of rights on what man is. However, recognition of specific characteristics of a human being as an ontic foundation of the existence of rights poses a danger to their universality since one has to accept that it is not enough to be a man to be a subject of rights, but a man possessing specific charac¬teristics. The second chapter aims at outlining solutions worked out by Saint Thomas Aquinas. For a fuller understanding of his propositions selected elements of Plato's and Aristotle's philosophy are presented. It was them who formulated the founda¬tions for reflection on law and justice in the ontological context. A qualification is made that Stoicism is not be analysed in depth. Although Thomas' concept of law was undoubtedly developed under the influence of the Stoic doctrine as well, it is not in this that one should look for the tools to understand the ontic foundations of human rights and law in general since the Stoic moral philosophy and philosophy of law were developed in the context of a theory of being which assumed monistic and pantheistic premises as foundations, leading to the recognition of a total subor¬dination of the human individual to a larger unity of which man is only a part. The analysis of Plato's and Aristotle's texts concentrates on problems of justice. Plato seems to be the first philosopher who reflected on the formula basic in the history of European thought: to render to each his due. It appears that justice as both a characteristic of man and his acts is understood in the perspective of that which is just, that which is a good for another man - the recipient of the act. The basis for determining what is just is the relation of correspondence between some¬one and something. While in the case of Plato this relation is based on something beyond its terms, namely on ideas, in the case of Aristotle the relation occurs on account of the elements of the relation itself. Something is just when it contributes to the develop¬ment of the recipient of an act realizing that which is just. At the same time, the realization of that which is just is a good for the agent. In the analysis of the just two types of relation are revealed: the relation of due-to-recipient occurring on account of the compatibility of that which is due, with the recipient of the act; and - a "superstructure" - a relation of obligation-of-subject occurring on account of the compatibility of the acting subject with the thing which should be done. The basis for being that which is due is formed by various potentialities of development of man - the recipient of agency; the basis of being that which is an obligation is the possibility of development of the subject of action. Aristotle distinguishes various types of freedom and points to the necessity of taking them into account in the discussion of justice. Among other things, as the core of man's freedom, he considers life for its own sake, which can be seen as his expression of the basic indices of the autotelic character of man - which is funda¬mental for later conceptions of dignity. The freedom which is described by him is not, however, inherent and inalienable; being free is conditioned by a factual possi¬bility of undertaking actions, which are not solely means to the realization of aims set by others. Thomas Aquinas takes over the Aristotelian research perspective both in his conception of man and of law. At the same time, however, he significantly enriches it. In anthropology he develops a conception of personal being. Drawing upon his distinction between existence ("that something is") and essence ("what something is"), he sees the basis for being a person in the dignity of personal being which is a certain way of existence of a rational being more perfect than that of non-personal beings. The person is a being which, by virtue of its act of existence, is individual¬ized in a specific way. It is an aim in itself. Expressing it in a negative way, one may say that it does not exist as a means for the realization of the aims of others and, in this sense, that it is free. As distinct from Aristotelian conclusions, being a person is not conditioned by the specific actions of a being. Dignity is inherent, based on that which is the foundation of the factual existence of every rational being. Although freedom requires that a being is rational, dignity still encompasses all being, all its properties and potentialities. Thus an act conforming with dignity has to take into account a whole human being. Among different types of that which is just, ius, the first place, from the point of view of understanding law, falls to "the just thing itself ("ipsa res justa"), which is right in the full meaning of the word. On the one hand, it is that which is due; on the other hand, it determines the way of acting in the utmost degree, since the course of every act is determined in the fullest extent by its aim. The content of ius may be determined both by elements independent of free decisions - ius naturale - and by free decisions taking into account the state of things - ius positivum. Recognition of the objective structure of being as the basis of law does not entail that it is possible or desirable to determine unequivocally "the only right" patterns of conduct. This concept is very well justified within the system proposed by Saint Thomas. Individualization of being is a significant element of the develop¬ment of a person as a person. It is attained by the realization of individual aims which are not unequivocally determined by circumstances and the nature common to all people. By virtue of free choices made in the sphere of that which is not by its nature unjust, the object of action becomes ius. Since in the realization of the person the individualization of human being is central, Aquinas clearly sees the need for the protection of the sphere of "dominion of will". This sphere itself constitutes ius naturale, something which is due to man independently of the acts of will. Therefore "law should forbid nothing which is not unjust" ("nihil debet lege prohiberi quod licite fieri potest", In 3 Sent., dist. 40, q. I, a. 1, 3). Besides the relation of due-to-recipient, ius also includes the relation of obligation-of-subject which is superimposed on the relation of due-to-recipient. As far as the ontic foundations of obligation are concerned, in explaining why man is subordinated to realization of the good of others, Aquinas generally follows Aristotle in accepting that this basis is the subordination to moral good - to actions conforming with the learned truth about reality. Aquinas' systemic solutions allow, however, to reach deeper and understand why moral development is also a development of the whole human being. This was difficult within Aristotle's system, since he was reluc¬tant to decide whether precedence should be given to intellectual or moral develop¬ment. The inclination to realise good of another appears to be a transcendental characteristic of being, based on its very existence. Morality understood as rational and free subordination to realize the good of another is a specifically personal way of the realization of this inclination. Thus just actions contribute to the actualization of being in the aspect of its existence and therefore to the actualization of being as a whole. Thomas' conception of natural law (lex naturalis) as participation in eternal law (lex aeterna), offers possibilities for grasping that which is just as something which is basically accessible cognition, independently of Revelation and independently of faith in God, and at the same time as something based in eternal law, understood as a design of God's wisdom. Eternal law, embracing all particular actions, is not, from the human perspective, accessible cognition directly. It is enacted in the struc-ture of the created being and - in case of human beings - in free choices taking this structure into account. In the concluding remarks, the results obtained earlier are applied directly to the contemporary conception of human rights. Human rights are understood in the first place as "just things" - concrete goods of man; as that which is due because of subordination, based on dignity, to the personal development of man. That which is just is understood as a relational - actual or potential - state of things, which exists by virtue of existing relations. Evaluations referring to that which is right are true when respective relations of due-to-recipient take place; norms of conduct are true when respective relations of obligation-of-subject take place. Examples of the application of the sketched theory outside the field of human rights are also presented. Procedural consequences of the developed theory are shown, such as the discrimination of two types of legislative procedures which differ significantly in the structure of argumentation: the first aims at recognition of that which is just independently of the will of the legislator, and the second, at making individual or collective "projects" of development compatible. Finally the possibilities of applying the theory to the increasingly important problems of the protection of the environment and the "rights" of animals are mentioned. The central issue is a philosophical conception of man and his freedom and a conception of law. It is also indispensable to turn to a general theory of being. The search for a comprehensive theory of human rights requires attention to the Abso¬lute Being - God - as well. This is important for at least two reasons. First, a conception of the Absolute Being is integral to philosophy of the systemic type -of which the present book is a piece. A conception of the Absolute Being is signifi¬cant for understanding all being, including, first of all, man as a personal being. Second, every theory of human rights which does not comprise the problem of the Absolute may be questioned as to whether solutions adopted in it do not lead, in consequence, to eliminating God from the perspective of the understanding of law. It is desirable that a philosophical theory should deal with this problem directly. A theory which eliminates God from the perspective of the understanding of rights will be unacceptable for all those who, for philosophical reasons or relying on faith, consider God as the author of inherent rights. Nevertheless, a theoretical approach to rights from the perspective of the Absolute Being should only be a possible extension of a philosophical approach which bases rights on something which is cognizable independently of the acceptance of the existence of God so that the theory is also acceptable for those who reject the existence of God or suspend their judgment on this subject. The pursued theory should therefore contain, on the one hand, reference to natural, faith-independent foundations of human rights, but on the other hand, point to a possible extension accounting for the Absolute Being. The analyses contained in this chapter have undoubtedly some historical value since they are based on source texts. Nevertheless, the use of these texts and not critical works was dictated, first of all, by a conviction that analyses embrace a given theory in the aspect selected by the interests of the researcher. Therefore to find out what past thinkers say on the subject characterized in the first part it is simpler to reach to the sources than to adopt the existing critical works. The pre¬sented reconstruction of Aquinas' views on philosophy of law incorporates proposi¬tions of supplementing and developing some of the ideas undertaken by him. Obligation to act in this and not an other way arises because human actions are subordinated to the conformity, on the one hand, of aims realized by these actions and, on the one hand, the order of being determining that which is favourable to man or destroys him. The content of the order of being is, on the one hand, determined by the structure of being independent from man's will and, on the other, by free decisions of man. (shrink)

In this chapter I seek to examine the credibility of Finnis’s basic stance on Aquinas that while many neo-Thomists are meta-ethically naturalistic in their understanding of natural law theory (for example, Heinrich Rommen, Henry Veatch, Ralph McInerny, Russell Hittinger, Benedict Ashley and Anthony Lisska), Aquinas’s own meta-ethical framework avoids the “pitfall” of naturalism. On examination, the short of it is that I find Finnis’s account (while adroit) wanting in the interpretation stakes vis-à-vis other accounts of Aquinas’s meta-ethical foundationalism. I think (...) that the neo-Thomists are basically right to argue that for Aquinas we cannot really understand objective truths about moral standards unless we derive them from our intellective knowledge of natural facts as given to us by the essential human nature that we have. While I find Finnis’s interpretative position on Aquinas wanting, I go on to argue that his own attachment to non-naturalism is justified and should not be jettisoned. Because I think non-naturalism important to the future tenability of a viable natural law ethics (an ethics that is both cognitive and objectivist), I argue that Finnis should, so to speak, “beef up” his “fundamental option” for non-naturalism and more fully avail himself of certain argumentative strategies available in its defense, argumentative strategies that are inspired by the analytical philosophy of G.E. Moore. (shrink)

The concept of practical knowledge is central to G.E.M. Anscombe's argument in Intention, yet its meaning is little understood. There are several reasons for this, including a lack of attention to Anscombe's ancient and medieval sources for the concept, and an emphasis on the more straightforward concept of knowledge "without observation" in the interpretation of Anscombe's position. This paper remedies the situation, first by appealing to the writings of Thomas Aquinas to develop an account of practical (...) class='Hi'>knowledge as a distinctive form of thought that "aims at production" of things that lie within an agent's power; and then by showing how this Thomistic understanding of practical cognition seems to have been Anscombe's, too. Having done this, I question whether the thesis that agential knowledge is practical knowledge entails that an agent always has non-observational knowledge of what she is intentionally doing. I answer "Not": Anscombe's claims to the contrary rest on a misleading assimilation of human beings' finite agency to that of an infinite agent like God. (shrink)

This article faces the classic problem of the interpretation of what Aristotle calls in de An. III, 5 “the intellect that produces all things”, which is commonly named agent intellect. Historically, there have been two approaches: one that goes back to Alexander of Aphrodisias, who associates the agent intellect with the unmoved mover and the divinity, and another one, associated with Theophrastus but whose major representatives are Philoponus and St. Thomas of Aquinas, who consider that agent (...) intellect is an exclusively human faculty. This last interpretation has been the most accepted historically. Nevertheless, in recent years there has been a resurgence of interpretations of the agent intellect as divine (Caston, Frede, Burnyeat, and others). What we want to demonstrate in this article is that this revival, more than responding to a reinterpretation of the agent intellect, is due to a different understanding of the divinity in Aristotle’s philosophy, which supposes immanent characteristics closer to the human intellect. (shrink)

This article develops an argument in defense of the claim that Aquinas holds that there are some kinds of activities which can be performed only by persons. In particular, it is argued that Aquinas holds that only persons can engage in the activities proper to a rational nature, e.g., the activities of intellect and will. Next, the article turns to discuss two implications of this thesis concerning Aquinas’s concept of a person. First, the thesis can be used to resolve a (...) prominent scholarly debate concerning Aquinas’s views on the possibility of human persons surviving their bodily deaths. Second, it also points to a problem with a leading interpretation of Aquinas’ account of the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. Finally, the article concludes by discussing how a correct interpretation of Aquinas’s views on these matters is related to a broader scholarly debate concerning the history of the Western concept of a person. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant is known for his ideas about duty and morally worthy acts, but his conception of virtue is less familiar. Nevertheless Kant’s understanding of virtue is quite distinctive and has considerable merit compared to the most familiar conceptions. Kant also took moral education seriously, writing extensively on both the duty of adults to cultivate virtue and the empirical conditions to prepare children for this life-long responsibility. Our aim is, first, to explain Kant’s conception of virtue, second, to highlight some (...) distinctive and potentially appealing features of the Kantian account of virtue, third, to summarize and explain Kant’s prescriptions for educating young children and youth as well as the duty of moral self-improvement that he attributes to all adults, and, fourth, to respond to some common objections that we regard as misguided or insubstantial. (shrink)

From the perspective of Aquinas’ Biblical commentaries, the article develops the reflection on pignus / arra haereditatis (Eph 1:5) seeing these essential elements of Thomas’ reflection on salvation in the terminological question of which one is better: pignus or arra, namely the pledge or the earnest/deposit. Thomas develops soteriology, which indicates that human salvation starts “now” and not “later,” through the participation in the Passion of Christ and in His merits. Analyzing Aquinas’ commentary on Ps 21, on the (...) Letter to the Ephesians and on the Letter to the Galatians together with the themes of Christ’s obedience and its soteriological significance as well as His wish of voluntary death for us, the article shows the Biblical roots of Thomas’ soteriology. The author devotes particular attention to the analysis of the logic of inchoatio and consummatio in Thomas’ soteriological grammar and his understanding of faith as the beginning of eternal life and the ensuing consequences. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to give the main lines of a theological accounting for the fullness of knowledge in Christ from the time of his conception. We follow the doctrine of St. Thomas and take into account some objections which are relatively modern. The paper is intended as a systematic articulation that is faithful to the Tradition and the doctrine of the Church and also concerned with faithfully interpreting the whole biblical narrative in our preaching. In (...) particular, we have in mind Gilles Mongeau’s question: “If from the beginning [Jesus] has all knowledge, how could he learn, which is such a fundamental part of a genuinely human existence?” We try to connect the issue of the knowledge of Christ with the reasons for the Incarnation. First, we show that our theological accounting finds support in the Magisterium and in the Bible. Secondly, we try to articulate systematically the reasons for affirming the fullness of human knowledge in Christ and the progression in his acquired knowledge. (shrink)

This is an excerpt of Aquinas' proof of the existence of God. In proving God's existence, Aquinas lays out a cosmological argument of which also sets that tone for his seminal work in epistemology.

Identity-Over-Time has been a favorite subject in the literature concerning Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas addresses this issue in many discussions, including especially the identity of material things and artifacts, the identity of the human soul after the corruption of body, the identity of the body of Christ in the three days from his death to his resurrection and the identity of the resurrected human body at the end of time. All these discussions have a point in common: they lead Aquinas (...) to raise the question of Identity-Over-Time with respect to things that fully exist in act, i.e., things that possess an identity of their own and change some of their parts or properties over time while continuing to be what they are. In this article, I investigate this topic from a different angle, considering the case of the trans-temporal identity of things that do not yet have an identity of their own or fully exist in act. The case at stake is that of the identity of the human embryo through the process of human generation. It is a puzzle that Aquinas seems to have some difficulties to solving, given his account of human embryogenesis as a process that alternates generations and corruptions of the subject. At the same time, though, Aquinas does not want to renounce the idea that the subject of generation must be numerically one and the same throughout all the process. In order to solve this puzzle, Aquinas seems to suggest distinguishing the identity of the subject from the identity of its matter and/or form. At given conditions, a thing can even change its matter and form while continuing to be the same thing in number. Specifically, the numerical identity of the subject of generation is justified by the identity entailed by the metaphysical notions of potency and act. (shrink)

Is it necessary for all Christians – including Christians who are metaphysicians with demonstrative knowledge of God’s existence – to hold by faith that God exists? I shall approach this apparently straightforward question by investigating two opposing lines of interpretation of Thomas Aquinas’s own response to this question. I shall begin with two texts from Thomas that motivate two incompatible theses concerning Thomas’s doctrine of the harmony of faith and reason with respect to the existence of (...) God. Next, I shall clarify the salient points of disagreement between these two interpretations of faith and reason in Thomas Aquinas before examining dialectically a number of arguments in favor and against the respective theses of these two interpretations. In the final section I shall argue that the results of our dialectical inquiry reveal that the initial disagreement between the two positions is not irresolvable. Accordingly, I shall conclude by proposing two revised versions of the initial theses that emphasize the compatibility of these two interpretations of Thomas Aquinas’s doctrine of the harmony of faith and reason. (shrink)

We argue that any strong version of a knowledge condition on intentional action, the practical knowledge principle, on which knowledge of what I am doing (under some description: call it A-ing) is necessary for that A-ing to qualify as an intentional action, is false. Our argument involves a new kind of case, one that centers the agent’s control appropriately and thus improves upon Davidson’s well-known carbon copier case. After discussing this case, offering an initial argument against (...) the knowledge condition, and discussing recent treatments that cover nearby ground, we consider several objections. One we consider at some length maintains that although contemplative knowledge may be disconnected from intentional action, specifically practical knowledge of the sort Anscombe elucidated escapes our argument. We demonstrate that this is not so. Our argument illuminates an important truth, often overlooked in discussions of the knowledge-intentional action relationship: intentional action and knowledge have different levels of permissiveness regarding failure in similar circumstances. (shrink)

These thirteen paragraphs portray epistemology as the study, not directly of knowing as a human action (which could be considered the object also of anthropology) but as the study of the mode of being of the object in the subject and, in this sense, of intentional being. Moreover, intentional being is not understood as the being of the cognitional species or representation, which is real and subjective, but as the being of the known, as the presence of the known to (...) the knower (obviously, through the species but a being not reduced to the subjective being of the species): this kind of being is the proper object of epistemology. Other considerations regarding the distinction between metaphysics and epistemology take place as well. As regards the method, this essay attempts to apply Aquinas’ four steps of scientific reasoning to epistemology, in the following fashion and order: 1- Solution of the problem of the universals by recourse to the theory of the agent intellect (resolutio secundum rem); 2- Definition of knowledge as intentional possession of being (res. sec. rationem); 3- Judgment of value regarding the different instances of human knowledge or critique of knowledge (compositio secundum rem) and 4- Reinterpretation (in the light of the previous path) of common notions of epistemology, such as truth, certainty, evidence, and error (comp. sec. rationem). (shrink)

St. Thomas Aquinas has always considered intelligence a potency higher than the will, absolutely speaking. That being said, and in my view, the existential primacy of the will in the act of freedom (particularly in choosing the existential end) is also indisputably Thomistic, as Cornelio Fabro has shown. This paper endeavors to explain Aquinas' doctrine on the absolute primacy of the intellect and thus show that these two primacies can be affirmed coherently, that is, the intellect’s absolute primacy and (...) the will’s existential primacy. Firstly, I will explain the reasoning St. Thomas Aquinas uses in the Summa to justify the absolute primacy of the intellect over the will. Secondly, I will explore some parallel texts, in order to shed light on my interpretation of the Summa and expand our view regarding this and related doctrinal points. Thirdly, I will offer a brief study of Fabro’s position, one in which his concerns regarding the intellect’s absolute primacy are taken into account and carefully considered. (shrink)

This research intends to show a Kantian influence in Transcendental Thomism, particularly in Rahner, Lonergan and Von Balthasar. What is meant by a Kantian influence is a certain attitude regarding the problem of the universals, an attitude which is radically different from St. Thomas’. In my previous work (The Radical Difference between Aquinas and Kant: Human Understanding and the Agent Intellect in Aquinas [Chillum: IVE Press, 2021], the radical difference between St. Thomas and Kant was shown. In (...) this present research, what is argued is that Rahner, Lonergan and Von Balthasar follow Kant, not St. Thomas, with regard to the analysis of human understanding. From each Transcendental Thomist author mentioned above, I have taken one sample text, one most significant work where each author’s epistemology can be explored. Thus, I have selected Rahner’s Spirit in the World, Lonergan’s Verbum articles and Von Balthasar’s Theologic I. (shrink)

This essay addresses arguments regarding the “place” or “non-place” in which ideas originate and whether they are wholly transcendental, wholly contingent, or a combination of transcendental and contingent. Far from a resuscitation or recitation of Medieval scholastic disputations, the essay seeks to situate these untimely concerns in the context of spent discursive and ideological systems that support capitalist exploitation of the knowledge commons, exploitation only made possible because of a decisive and historically determined reduction of knowledge to fully (...) contingent status as spectral commodity. (shrink)

Where artificial agents are not liable to be ascribed true moral agency and responsibility in their own right, we can understand them as acting as proxies for human agents, as making decisions on their behalf. What I call the ‘Moral Proxy Problem’ arises because it is often not clear for whom a specific artificial agent is acting as a moral proxy. In particular, we need to decide whether artificial agents should be acting as proxies for low-level agents — e.g. (...) individual users of the artificial agents — or whether they should be moral proxies for high-level agents — e.g. designers, distributors or regulators, that is, those who can potentially control the choice behaviour of many artificial agents at once. Who we think an artificial agent is a moral proxy for determines from which agential perspective the choice problems artificial agents will be faced with should be framed: should we frame them like the individual choice scenarios previously faced by individual human agents? Or should we, rather, consider the expected aggregate effects of the many choices made by all the artificial agents of a particular type all at once? This paper looks at how artificial agents should be designed to make risky choices, and argues that the question of risky choice by artificial agents shows the moral proxy problem to be both practically relevant and difficult. (shrink)

This paper will explore an epistemic aspect of hope, namely hope’s relationship to knowledge. It has been taken for granted that people do not hope for things to occur that they know will occur. I will be giving an argument that hope and knowledge are compatible, and I will defend that argument against one primary objection. More specifically, I will argue that there are instances when an agent knows that p and still hopes that p.

This article seeks to justify the claim that Thomas Aquinas proposed a concept of natural law which is immune to the argument against the recognition of an objective grounding of the good formulated by a well-known representative of the liberal tradition, Isaiah Berlin, in his famous essay “Two Concepts of Freedom.” I argue that Aquinas’s concept of freedom takes into account the very same values and goals that Berlin set out to defend when he composed his critique of natural (...) law. In particular, the article suggests that Aquinas recognizes freedom as a greater perfection of man than rationality, and that this freedom is realized, among other things, through the co-construction of the good that gives a goal and a shape to human action and to the whole of a person’s life. I argue that the co-construction of such a good involves the co-construction of natural law in the strict sense of the term. Indeed, the content of natural law can be understood as a set of goods which are goals that inform human action. From a human perspective, natural law is not a pre-existing recipe which has merely to be “read.” Defining the concrete content of natural law is an ongoing process. The process of defining natural law’s content takes humanly knowable, objective elements into account, and so draws on knowledge. Yet free choice also plays an important part in this process. When speaking of the process of defining the content of natural law, therefore, and in determining what here-and-now is to be done, it is reasonable to describe man as a creator of the natural law, or as a legislator, just as the members of a parliament are the creators of civil law — bearing in mind that only a just law is truly law and therefore the creation of both civil and natural law reaches only as far is the scope of just actions directed by these laws. From the perspective of human action, we may speak of each person’s free choice to establish a given good as the end of a specific act, and in so doing to declare that action proper under natural law in the strict sense of the term (which differs from the rules of natural law). An appreciation of what is particular and individual (particulare et individuum), and an appreciation of free choice that goes hand-in-hand with this, is deeply embedded in Thomas’s system of thought. Particularity and individuality has its basis in an especially excellent way of human existence. (shrink)

Within the Thomistic moral tradition, the is-ought gap is regularly treated as identical to the fact-value gap, and these two dichotomies are also regularly treated as being identical to Aristotle and Aquinas’s distinction between the practical and speculative intellect. The question whether (and if so, how) practical (‘ought’) knowledge derives from speculative (‘is’) knowledge has driven some of the fiercest disputes among the schools of Thomistic natural lawyers. I intend to show that both of these identifications are wrong (...) and the debate has been misframed. The is-ought gap is not the fact-value gap, nor does the is-ought gap correspond to Aquinas’s distinction between the speculative and practical. This opens the possibility of a resolution--within the Thomistic school--to a debate that has, heretofore, proven particularly resistant of consensus. I close by offering a tentative account of precisely how synderesis gives us our first awareness of moral law from a prior speculative understanding. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to compile a selection of the various formalisms found in conversation theory to introduce readers to Pask's discursive algebra. In this way, the text demonstrates how concept sharing and concept formation by means of the interaction of two participants may be formalized. The approach taken in this study is to examine the formal notation system used by Pask and demonstrate how such formalisms may be used to represent concept sharing and concept formation through conversation. (...) The compilation of the discursive algebra using the framework provided by conversation theory could potentially be used as an auxiliary framework to study conversational interactions in multi-agent systems theory. (shrink)

“Epistemic Dexterity: A Ramseyian Account of Epistemic Virtue” by Abrol Fairweather & Carlos Montemayor: A modification of F.P. Ramsey’s success semantics supports a naturalized theory of epistemic virtue that includes motivational components and can potentially explain both epistemic reliability and responsibility with a single normative-explanatory principle. An “epistemic Ramsey success” will also provide a better account of the “because of” condition central to virtue-reliabilist accounts of knowledge from Greco, Sosa and Pritchard. Ramsey said that the truth condition of a (...) belief is the condition that guarantees the success of desires based on that belief. Taken as a theory of epistemic achievements, the truth condition for the attribution of an epistemic achievement is the condition that guarantees the success of epistemic desires and is also a success based on abilities attributable to the agent. One of its major advantages is that it may be the best way to achieve a naturalistic version of the etiologcal requirement on knowledge in virtue epistemology while also supporting important responsibilist desiderata. The account defended is robustly agent-centered in the straightforward sense that individual desires are partly constitutive of epistemic successes like having a rational belief, justified belief, and even of knowledge once we see the both the reliabilist and repsonsibilist desiderata are met. Another important aspect of the paper is that it provides a plausible psychology for virtue epistemology that is grounded in important empirical findings on agency, and thus constitutes a form of naturalized virtue epistemology. (shrink)

We explore new connections between the epistemologies of mental rehearsal and suppositional reasoning to offer a novel perspective on skilled behavior and its relationship to practical knowledge. We argue that practical knowledge is "easy" in the sense that, by manifesting one's skills, one has a priori propositional justification for certain beliefs about what one is doing as one does it. This proposal has wider consequences for debates about intentional action and knowledge: first, because agents sometimes act intentionally (...) in epistemically hazardous environments, these justified beliefs do not always rise to the level of (practical) knowledge. Second, practical knowledge is more intimately related to basic knowledge than has been appreciated. Third, an attractive "middle way" opens between the Anscombian tradition of defending a necessary connection between intentional action and practical knowledge and the more recent tradition of explaining away substantive epistemic conditions on intentional action. (shrink)

This paper outlines the case for a future research program that uses the tools of experimental cognitive science to investigate questions that traditionally fall under the remit of the philosophy of historiography. The central idea is this – the epistemic profile of historians’ representations of the past is largely an empirical matter, determined in no small part by the cognitive processes that produce these representations. However, as the philosophy of historiography is not presently equipped to investigate such cognitive questions, legitimate (...) concerns about evidential quality go largely overlooked. The case of mental state representation provides an excellent illustration of this. Representations of past mental states – the thoughts and fears and knowledge and desires of past agents – play much the same evidential role in historiography as in everyday life, serving in the causal explanation of agents’ behaviors and supporting normative evaluation of those behaviors. However, we have good reason to suspect that the theory of mind processes that support these representations may be more susceptible to error when deployed in the context of historiography than under everyday conditions. This raises worries about the quality of evidence that theory of mind can provide historiography, worries which require experimental cognitive science to properly address. (shrink)

Our aim is to provide a topography of the relevant philosophical terrain with regard to the possible ways in which knowledge can be conceived of as extended. We begin by charting the different types of internalist and externalist proposals within epistemology, and we critically examine the different formulations of the epistemic internalism/externalism debate they lead to. Next, we turn to the internalism/externalism distinction within philosophy of mind and cognitive science. In light of the above dividing lines, we then examine (...) first the extent to which content externalism is compatible with epistemic externalism; second, whether active externalism entails epistemic externalism; and third whether there are varieties of epistemic externalism that are better suited to accommodate active externalism. Finally, we examine whether the combination of epistemic and cognitive externalism is necessary for epistemology and we comment on the potential ramifications of this move for social epistemology and philosophy of science. (shrink)

Abstract. Traditional epistemology of knowledge and belief can be succinctly characterized as JTB-epistemology, i.e., it is characterized by the thesis that knowledge is justified true belief. Since Gettier’s trail-blazing paper of 1963 this account has become under heavy attack. The aim of is paper is to study the Gettier problem and related issues in the framework of topological epistemic logic. It is shown that in the framework of topological epistemic logic Gettier situations necessarily occur for most topological models (...) of knowledge and belief. On the other hand, there exists a special class of topological models (based on so called nodec spaces) for which traditional JTB-epistemology is valid. Further, it is shown that for each topological model of Stalnaker’s combined logic KB of knowledge and belief a canonical JTB-model (its JTB-doppelganger) can be constructed that shares many structural properties with the original model but is free of Gettier situations. The topological model and its JTB-doppelganger both share the same justified belief operator and have very similar knowledge operators. Seen from a somewhat different perspective, the JTB-account of epistemology amounts to a simplification of a more general epistemological account of knowledge and belief that assumes that these two concepts may differ in some cases. The JTB-account of knowledge and belief assumes that the epistemic agent’s cognitive powers are rather large. Thereby in the JTB-epistemology Gettier cases do not occur. Eventually, it is shown that for all topological models of Stalnaker’s KB-logic Gettier situations are topologically characterized as nowhere dense situations. This entails that Gettier situations are epistemologically invisible in the sense that they can neither be known nor believed with justification with respect to the knowledge operator and the belief operator of the models involved. (shrink)

Many of Margaret Cavendish’s criticisms of Thomas Hobbes in the Philosophical Letters (1664) relate to the disorder and damage that she holds would result if Hobbesian pressure were the cause of visual perception. In this paper, I argue that her “two men” thought experiment in Letter IV is aimed at a different goal: to show the explanatory potency of her account. First, I connect Cavendish’s view of visual perception as “patterning” to the “two men” thought experiment in Letter IV. (...) Second, I provide a potential reply on Hobbes’s behalf that appeals to physiological differences between perceivers’ sense organs, drawing upon Hobbes’s optics in De homine. Third, I argue that such a reply would misunderstand Cavendish’s objective of showing the limited explanatory resources available in understanding visual perception as pressing when compared to her view of visual perception as patterning. (shrink)

Recognizing that truth is socially constructed or that knowledge and power are related is hardly a novelty in the social sciences. In the twenty-first century, however, there appears to be a renewed concern regarding people’s relationship with the truth and the propensity for certain actors to undermine it. Organizations are highly implicated in this, given their central roles in knowledge management and production and their attempts to learn, although the entanglement of these epistemological issues with business ethics has (...) not been engaged as explicitly as it might be. Drawing on work from a virtue epistemology perspective, this paper outlines the idea of a set of epistemic vices permeating organizations, along with examples of unethical epistemic conduct by organizational actors. While existing organizational research has examined various epistemic virtues that make people and organizations effective and responsible epistemic agents, much less is known about the epistemic vices that make them ineffective and irresponsible ones. Accordingly, this paper introduces vice epistemology, a nascent but growing subfield of virtue epistemology which, to the best of our knowledge, has yet to be explicitly developed in terms of business ethics. The paper concludes by outlining a business ethics research agenda on epistemic vice, with implications for responding to epistemic vices and their illegitimacy in practice. (shrink)

In order to predict and explain behavior, one cannot specify the mental state of an agent merely by saying what information she possesses. Instead one must specify what information is available to an agent relative to various purposes. Specifying mental states in this way allows us to accommodate cases of imperfect recall, cognitive accomplishments involved in logical deduction, the mental states of confused or fragmented subjects, and the difference between propositional knowledge and know-how .

As engineering applications require management of ever larger volumes of data, ontologies offer the potential to capture, manage, and augment data with the capability for automated reasoning and semantic querying. Unfortunately, considerable barriers hinder wider deployment of ontologies in engineering. Key among these is lack of a shared top-level ontology to unify and organise disparate aspects of the field and coordinate co-development of orthogonal ontologies. As a result, many engineering ontologies are limited to their scope, and functionally difficult to (...) extend or interoperate with other engineering ontologies. This paper demonstrates how the use of a top-level ontology, specifically the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), greatly facilitates interoperability of multiple engineering-related ontologies. We constructed a system of formal linked ontologies by re-engineering legacy ontologies to be conformant with BFO and developing new BFO-conformant ontologies to capture knowledge in the engineering design, enterprise, human factors, manufacturing, and application domain of additive manufacturing. The resulting Integrated Framework for Additively Manufactured Products (IFAMP), including the body knowledge instantiated on its basis, serve as the basis for a proposed Design with Additive Manufacturing Method (DWAM), which we believe can support the design of innovative products with semantically enhanced ideation tools and enhanced access to application domain knowledge. The method and its facilitation through the ontological framework are demonstrated using a case study in medicine. (shrink)

This paper explores the origins of the term "causa sine qua non" used by Durand de Saint-Pourçain to describe the role of material things in knowledge. I show that its technical meaning comes from the Stoics and was transmitted to the Middle Ages by Boethius' commentary on Cicero's Topics. The expression "sine qua non" here does not have the ordinary and restricted meaning of "indispensable", "necessary condition", which can also apply to direct, per se causes of an effect. In (...) the present context, sine qua non causes do not act on the effect in question, either as concomitant, secondary, or instrumental causes, or as remote causes. They act only on that which hinders the actualization of a potentiality, in order to remove that obstacle. For example, the removal of a support that prevented something from falling does not act on that thing, nor does it add anything to its tendency to fall; it simply enables that thing to exercise its own actualization. Similarly, in cognitive processes, external things do not impose anything on the soul, but simply give it the opportunity to actualize its faculties of its own accord. I situate Durand's use of this form of causality in the context of late 13th/early 14th century theories of cognition, among several other attempts to find an alternative theory to the standard Aristotelian model and to maintain the pure activity of the soul with respect to the body. (shrink)

This chapter explores the concept and practice of responsible management of innovation. Responsible innovation is a key response to the grand challenges faced by society, helping to develop innovations with society in mind, and limit any unintended consequences. Responsible managers with influence over innovations need knowledge and understanding of how responsible innovation applies to their roles and how as individuals they can manage innovation responsibly. While the application of responsible innovation to these contexts faces a number of practical and (...) conceptual challenges, this chapter will focus on the contribution and potential of responsible management of innovation processes to provide economic and societal benefits. This chapter explores these issues through the perspective of individual managers, at the level of the organisation and finally at the level of the innovation system. (shrink)

We give a general description of a class of contrastive constructions, intended to capture what is common to contrastive knowledge, belief, hope, fear, understanding and other cases where one expresses a propositional attitude in terms of “rather than”. The crucial element is the agent's incapacity to distinguish some possibilities from others. Contrastivity requires a course-graining of the set of possible worlds. As a result, contrastivity will usually cut across logical consequence, so that an agent can have an (...) attitude to p rather than q but not to r rather than q , where r is a logical consequence of p . We relate these ideas to some general issues about thought, such as the question of whether all possibilities that can be distinguished in emotion can be distinguished in belief. (shrink)

he present study aims to offer an analysis of the analogical discourse on God from STh. I, q.13 a.3-4. Thomas Aquinas's claim consists, mainly, of presenting a solution to the problem of the foundations that support the theological discourse on God. But before analyzing this question, our author has established the conditions of possibility for the knowledge about God. It is just this specific framework of previous questions the place of the debate on the analogy, which is considered, (...) in addition, as a type of indirect language that points beyond itself. Keywords: Analogy, Proportion, Proportionality, Knowledge, Thomas Aquinas. El presente estudio pretende ofrecer un análisis del discurso analógico sobre Dios a partir de STh. I, q.13, aa.3-4. La intención de Tomás de Aquino consiste, principalmente, en presentar una solución al problema de los fundamentos que asisten al discurso teológico sobre Dios. Pero antes de analizar dicha cuestión, nuestro autor ha establecido las condiciones de posibilidad para un conocimiento sobre el mismo. Es precisamente en este marco concreto de cuestiones previas donde se sitúa el debate sobre la analogía, considerada, además, como un tipo de lenguaje indirecto que apunta más allá de sí mismo. Palabras clave: analogía, proporción, proporcionalidad, conocimiento, Tomás de Aquino. T. (shrink)

Some philosophers believe that when epistemic peers disagree, each has an obligation to accord the other's assessment the same weight as her own. I first make the antecedent of this Equal-Weight View more precise, and then I motivate the View by describing cases in which it gives the intuitively correct verdict. Next I introduce some apparent counterexamples – cases of apparent peer disagreement in which, intuitively, one should not give equal weight to the other party's assessment. To defuse these apparent (...) counterexamples, an advocate of the View might try to explain how they are not genuine cases of peer disagreement. I examine David Christensen's and Adam Elga's explanations and find them wanting. I then offer a novel explanation, which turns on a distinction between knowledge from reports and knowledge from direct acquaintance. Finally, I extend my explanation to provide a handy and satisfying response to the charge of self-defeat. (shrink)

This paper, as a response to Mark K. Spencer’s, “Perceiving the Image of God in the Whole Human Person” in the present volume, argues in defence of Aquinas’s position that the Imago Dei is limited in the human being to the rational, intellective soul alone. While the author agrees with Spencer that the hierarchical relation between body and soul in the human composite must be maintained while avoiding the various permeations of dualism, nevertheless, the Imago Dei cannot be located in (...) the human body or the principle of the body considered within the body/soul composite without betraying a number of fundamental Thomistic metaphysical principles. Essential to these includes Aquinas’s position that an image of God should image not only the Divine Nature, but also the Trinitarian relations between the Divine Persons. Further, the paper also argues that a phenomenology of sense experience could not, on principle, attain to an image of God in the whole human person within a Thomistic framework generally. (shrink)

Abstract The present work is a metaphysical analysis of the relation between the intellect and the will, starting from the solution offered by Saint Thomas Aquinas to the intellectualist and voluntarist proposals of his time. Through the application of the doctrine of the act and power discovered by Aristotle, and with the important elements that Christianity had contributed by the thirteenth century, St. Thomas solves the problem of the production of universal concepts in an environment of concrete material (...) realities. The contribution of St. Thomas consists in having achieved a moderate intellectualism, granting each faculty the value and preeminence that corresponds to it, avoiding relativistic voluntarism and reaching a depth that is unique in metaphysical realism in the history of thought. Keywords Intellect – will – act – potential – intellectualism – voluntarism. (shrink)

According to Christian doctrine as formulated by the Council of Chalcedon (451), Christ is one person (one supposit, one hypostasis) existing in two natures (two essences), human and divine. The human and divine natures are not merged into a third nature, nor are they separated from one another in such a way that the divine nature goes with one person, namely, the Word of God, and the human nature with another person, namely, Jesus of Nazareth. The two natures belong to (...) just one person, and the one person has two distinct natures. Chalcedon‟s justly-famous formula brought the debate into sharper focus and ruled out certain options, but of course it did not bring the arguments to a complete end. More councils,more debates, and more questions were to follow, although the range of disagreement tended to narrow. In the medieval Latin West, Peter Lombard (†1160) identified in book III of the Sententiae three “opinions” on the topic, but by the middle of the thirteenth century, it was widely agreed that only one of them was orthodox teaching. This relative unity of thought provided the space within which more detailed issues could be debated, and one of the most interesting of these concerned existence (esse): how many existences are there in Christ? Since Christ is only one person, it might seem that he has only one existence. On the other hand, he has two natures, so perhaps instead he has more than one existence. In this one paper, my goal is rather modest. I discuss only a few of the relevant authors, and I focus primarily on which questions they were asking. I proceed as follows. I first look at Thomas Aquinas, whose remarks on these topics had such a large influence on the debate later in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Crucial will be certain distinctions that Thomas makes, distinctions we can see as disambiguating the question we began with, namely, „How many existences are there in Christ?‟. After that I will look at how one of those distinctions makes its appearance in the writings of two post-Thomistic authors, Giles of Rome and Godfrey of Fontaines. (shrink)

Extended cognition theorists argue that cognitive processes constitutively depend on resources that are neither organically composed, nor located inside the bodily boundaries of the agent, provided certain conditions on the integration of those processes into the agent’s cognitive architecture are met. Epistemologists, however, worry that in so far as such cognitively integrated processes are epistemically relevant, agents could thus come to enjoy an untoward explosion of knowledge. This paper develops and defends an approach to cognitive integration—cluster-model functionalism—which (...) finds application in both domains of inquiry, and which meets the challenge posed by putative cases of cognitive or epistemic bloat. (shrink)

When extended cognition is extended into mainstream epistemology, an awkward tension arises when considering cases of environmental epistemic luck. Surprisingly, it is not at all clear how the mainstream verdict that agents lack knowledge in cases of environmental luck can be reconciled with principles central to extended cognition.

Alvin Plantinga’s theory of knowledge, as developed in his Warrant trilogy, has shaped the debates surrounding many areas in epistemology in profound ways. Plantinga has received his share of criticism, however, particularly in his treatment of belief in God as being “properly basic”. There has also been much confusion surrounding his notions of warrant and proper function, to which Plantinga has responded numerous times. Many critics remain unsatisfied, while others have developed alternative understandings of warrant in order to rescue (...) Plantinga’s theory from certain objections. The most promising of such attempts fall under the broad category of “virtue epistemology” or a “virtue-theoretic” approach. The work being done in virtue epistemology is still in its early stages and a consensus on what actually constitutes virtue epistemology has yet to be reached. While some have attempted to structure an entire theory of knowledge based on the virtues possessed by the knower, others have focused more on the role of epistemic virtues as an attempt to supplement existing theories, including Plantinga’s. In this paper, I will offer an analysis of what such an attempt might look like and evaluate the potential success of broadening Plantinga’s original model. -/- My proposal is that certain features of a virtue-theoretic approach (also referred to as “agent-reliabilism”) could improve Plantinga’s model in significant ways. Not only would such a broadened approach be better equipped to handle common objections, but it would also be better suited to contribute an enhanced understanding of the task of epistemology, one that seeks to discover multiple epistemic goods other than what has been traditionally confined to the realm of knowledge. I conclude by applying this approach to Plantinga’s treatment of theistic belief in Warranted Christian Belief and by articulating a few of the ways in which epistemic virtues can increase the degree of warrant enjoyed by such belief. (shrink)