Carl Gustav Jung was born in 1875 in Kesswil, a small town in German Switzerland. His father was a Protestant pastor and in his family there were other pastors: two brothers of the father and six relatives of the mother were pastors.
The characteristic claim of the group of thinkers who referred to themselves as “The Vienna Circle” and who formed the philosophical movement now known as “Logical Positivism” was their acceptance of the so-called verifiability principle. Put briefly, the verifiability principle is an empiricist criterion of meaning which says that only those statements that are verifiable by (i.e., logically deducible from) observational statements are cognitively meaningful. Statements that do not satisfy the verifiability principle were taken to be cognitively meaningless, statements that failed to describe any state of affairs.
Different from the natural order, the habit of the first supernatural principles is not an atoma species but a gender of intellectual habits, in which the gift of intellectus excels. For an adequate understanding of it, Santiago Ramírez rescues two particular aspects of St. Thomas’ thought: one philosophical, the real distinction that exists between disposition and habit in the qualitas predicament; and other theological, the real distinction between infused virtues and gifts of the Holy Spirit.
The aim of this article is the purpose in nature as a way of access to philosophical knowledge of the existence of God, based on St. Thomas’s fifth way. This is known as “teleological argument”, whose interest is that it still concerns both ancient and modern philosophers. The postmetaphysical crisis makes unavoidable a substantiation of purpose that takes into account the contributions of modern thought, especially the critical ones. This detailed exposition of the Thomistic argument and its systematic analysis will try to propose the validity together with its abiding relevance.
The prophetic and visionary framework of Saint Hildegard´s text can be understood in the light of Augustinian reflection as a continuity of a tradition rather than a simple textual presence. We will try to prove, then, this double hypothesis: on the one hand, that the prophetic experience of Saint Hildegard can be followed according to the parameters considered by Saint Augustine; and, on the other hand, in evident dependence of the previous reason: that the data “of this world” as a prison (not the cosmos but the state of disorder and harassment of necessity) can only be fully understood through a movement of the spirit upward or toward the deep, according to the internal logic of this movement.
The article presents different modes of participation in the divine nature (creation and salvation), as presented by Saint Thomas Aquinas, which is possible thanks to the elevation of human nature in the Incarnation of the Word, due to which the man is consors naturae divinae. In the perspective of the biblical commentaries of Aquinas the role of the virtue of faith is presented. It introduces into the divine nature making the man the adoptive son of God. This analysis allows to obtain the understanding of the Christian life from this fundamental fact of Christianity.
After exploring in the introduction the current sacramental and moral crisis and its foundation in ‘salvation optimism’ and in ‘moral optimism’, this article explores the realistic assessment of the human condition according to St. Thomas Aquinas in order to shed light on the connection between the sacramental and the moral crisis. First, I recall some essential elements of the doctrine of original justice and original sin. Secondly, I explore the wounding of human nature as an effect of original sin. Finally I discuss the fourfold effect of man’s wounded nature on moral action. In light of this crisis, St. Thomas’ account of the postlapsarian human condition is at the same time frightful and realistic. While St. Thomas is adamant in affirming that the root of man’s inclination to virtue as a good of nature remains, he is equally realistic regarding the moral fragility of postlapsarian man as a result of the diminution of the same inclination to virtue.
The purpose of this article is to present the biblical foundation of the natural law according to St. Thomas Aquinas. This foundation reveals to us all the breadth and depth of the full meaning of natural law in St. Thomas, especially as a participation of eternal law and its insufficiency to lead man to his perfection.
We pretend to collaborate with the work proposed by the Magisterium of the Church. He invites us to deepen the natural law, seeing it as an instrument that can offer to our contemporary society a foundation of solid moral convictions on which to base personal and social life.
The article tries to show the evolution of the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy of the University of Barcelona from 1700 to 1717, when it was transferred to Cervera. It is proposed a revision of historiography in order to rethink religious trends and intellectual affiliation of professors. With the new information, a list of professors, including their profiles, is provided, and interpretive keys are provided to understand the intellectual confrontation between Thomists and Suarists.
approach concerning the moral wrong is commonly treated in De malo, the same issue is treated by him in his Commentary on the Divine Names of Pseudo-Dionysius, through which the author shows some neoplatonic traits in his posture about the presence of moral wrong in the world, based on this profound and less known work. To illustrate these traits, I expound in this article some ethical-anthropological relevant concepts of Aquinas extracted from the forementioned source, trying to identify the existing paralelism between Pseudo-Dionysius and Aristotle with regard to passions like concupiscence and rage.
Among the interpretations of St. Thomas thought, a relevant place belongs to Fabro’s one, especially in regard to the esse, true speculative nucleous of the thomistic Metaphysics. According to Fabro, the esse is an intensive act, having a double emergency, namely a formal and a real one, in such a way that in respect of him, the essence becomes potency. Consequently, the esse looks as the genetical nucleous of the being and the last term of the resolutive path of the reflex thinking, so that the first plexus becomes the first nexus in the step to the transcendency.
The course 2008-2009 was the seventieth of the history of the Balmesiana Foundation, and its journey will be for the memory very significant events that should be remembered.
On February 7, 2009, Professor Francisco Canals, member emeritus of the Pontifical Academy of Santo Tomás, died in Barcelona after a long and fruitful life dedicated to study and teaching, mainly of the thought of the Common Doctor of the Church.
About the document of the International Theological Commission, “In search of a universal practice. New look on the natural law “. By extension, we observe that we have no other pretension than that of a first contact with a document that is destined to have a great repercussion in the reflection on the moral nature of our human existence.
The Encyclical “Humanae vitae” establishes on a definitive way the position of the Roman Church with regard to two essential concepts: ‘conjugal love’ and “responsible parenthood”. The foundation of these concepts is the natural law. It is not an external imposed code, but it is in every man’s nature, and every man is able to know it to some extent, as evidenced by the spontaneous moral sense of everybody, for instance, in the immediate conscience of a determined case of injustice. It is not a feature added to human behavior, but its essential quality and therefore unavoidable.
In “Sources of the Self ” (1989), C. Taylor explains the human identity as something that we cannot construct in a solipsistic way. In “The Malaise of Modernity” (1991), he describes the authenticity as a freedom that we cannot reduce to self-determined freedom. We should take account of the “horizons of meaning” and of its “dialogic” component. F. Botturi, in “L’ontologia dialettica della Libertà” (2003), makes a theoretical exercise and tries to articulate dialectically the different dimensions of the freedom: “autodeterminazione”, “autorealizzazione” and “relazione”. In this article, we want to cooperate in the theoretical articulation of the “authenticity” understood as “dialectic” and “plural freedom”. We also want to understand what was Taylor talking about when he made a call for the “lotta continua”, in the chapter VII of The “Malaise of Modernity”.
The sociological theory, from its origins, has been dealing with how to define its own object of study. From the begining two great tendencies appeared to affirm this problem. One of them asserted how men didn’t exist, the other one tried to prove how society didn’t exist as well. Both had the negation of natural society in commmon; both had already minimized the concept of person. The sociological theory had to reinterpret the concepts of rationality and freedom, as well as negation and a proporsal of a very different reality
Does moral blindness, unavoidable according to positivist scientist analysis, lead to nihilism? When Max Weber tries to defend, for instance, the per se value of intellectual honesty, he is falling in an inconsistency: he tangles himself in the critical moment that led Thrasymachus to his fall, knocked down by Socrates, in the first book of Plato’s Republic. Leo Strauss warned about this danger of falling into nihilism as the underlying fate of the modern social sciences. Does the principle of value-neutrality lead in practice to a vague indifference? Were this true, social science would actually turn into a mere instrument of domination serving to a certain established social order, unable to call, for instance, tyranny by its own name.
The argument that pretends to deny the existence of God has been recently articulated on the Nietzschean assumption that “the world’s global nature is chaos for the entire eternity”, as we can see, for instance, in the Neo-Darwinist mechanicism of Richard Dawkins. This paper seeks to find an answer to this issue from the Aristotelian- Thomistic teleology. According to this perspective, acknowledging the order in a contingent universe allows us to recognise the existence of a Creator God, who, in Aquinas’ words, “produced many and diverse creatures, that what was wanting to one in the representation of the divine goodness might be supplied by another” (S.Th. I, q.47, a.1 in c.)
Gallen Strawson has played the leading role in the assault to the notion of narrative self. His theory has respected phenomenological variety of the self, but he has also held an episodic ontology, which claims for a three seconds duration of the self. This article aims to show the implications of this Theory of Mind debate in our cultural conception of the self, and the link between the strawsonian ontologically anti-narrative notion and Lipovetsky’s sociological approach to the self
