Continuing the repertoire started eight years ago, in this issue of Spirit we collect the Hispanic Thomistic bibliography of 2020. With the adjective “Hispanic” we specify that this catalog includes publications in any of the languages born in ancient Hispania: Spanish, Portuguese and Galician, Catalan and Basque
The objective of this article is to show the influence of Thomas Aquinas’ De veritate on the reflections of E. Stein on theological anthropology, developed especially in the lessons she prepared on this subject between February and May 1933. Although the use of De veritate is observed to explain the philosophical basis of the statements of the Magisterium of the Church, its influence is also shown in the personal reflection of E. Stein on the theological-dogmatic problem of the status naturae purae.
The rejection of the genuine love of his daughter Cordelia and the preference for an inappropriate love of himself, explain the surprising behavior of King Lear at the beginning of the great Shakespearean play and the subsequent tragedy. This hermeneutical approach is based on the reflections of Stanley Cavell and the consideration by Thomas Aquinas of accidie (at the base of which there is an unbalanced love of oneself) as a vice opposed to charity (love of friendship with God).
As academic debate over Kant’s transcendental philosophy continues, important ambiguities remain to be addressed. His Critique of Pure Reason is focused on presenting only the formal conditions for the possibility of knowledge in experience, and yet in the Third Analogy of Experience he inserts a material condition. The drafts of the Opus postumum reveal a Kant struggling to reconcile his physics with his transcendental philosophy, with positions that go directly against the first Critique. These ambiguities are inherent to Kant’s view of reality, while Fabro’s presentation of Aquinas’s philosophy of participation allows for a clearer explanation of our knowledge.
In this paper, after a brief definition of mechanistic materialism, six difficulties are explained that neo-mechanism seems to be unable to solve and that, in consequence, seems to require its abandonment. Such are: (1) the unity of the human being, (2) the unity of consciousness, (3) the distinction between the cause and that without which the cause could not be a cause, (4) that thought and perception are not in the neurons, (5) that concepts –because of their immateriality– cannot be found in a material organ, and (6) free will.
From the end of the 19th century and practically until the end of Francoist regime, Neoscholastic psychology that emerged from the Catholic University of Louvain had a notable influence in Spain. One of the main Spanish Neoscholastics was Juan Zaragüeta Bengoechea (1883-1974), who had a prominent role in the University of Madrid during the first half of the 20th century and made interesting contributions to psychology from Aristotelian-Thomistic keys. In the present work, some aspects related to his conception of psychology from such keys are exposed: its hilemorphic anthropological foundation, its two-faced nature, and the soul-body relationships.
The ontology of knowledge a faithful expression of the thought of Aquinas remained present as a philosophically perennial truth in the work of Joan Poinsot. Knowledge is conceived by the portuguese commentator, as a vital emanation of an interior verb as an understood term in which everything that is undertood is undetood. This verb arises from the intimacy of the knower in act ex abundantia as act of act and in way as an expression of a weakness or indigence of the knower.
The article analyzes some fundamental themes of Canals’s gnoseology that have their inspiration in the thought of John Poinsot (John of St. Thomas). In his mature work Sobre la esencia del conocimiento, Canals highlights the locutionary character of knowledge, as a consequence of the communicative nature of the act. The article examines the communicability and immanence of cognition, and attempts to develop a correct understanding of the notion of representation. This study is supplemented with a brief mention of Polo and Sanguineti in their explanations of intentionality and habit, respectively.
Starting from the text of the Letter of St. Paul to the Philippians where the apostle affirms that for him to live is Christ, we reflect on the scope of this affirmation in the light of the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas regarding the necessity of grace for the moral life and for understanding the dynamism of human life. The New Law, which is the grace of the Holy Spirit, transforms man into the image of the Word of God and inserts him into the Trinitarian dynamism, so that the total personality can only be understood when considered from this higher perspective.
Claudio Cirinei, PhD in philosophy, is a high school teacher and has self-produced and distributed this interesting and easy volume, in the format of a pantry, through Amazon. The content is concise and valuable.
Dieu. “Celui qui est” (De Deo ut Uno) is a volume, broad from every point of view, written by the Dominican father Serge-Thomas Bonino, currently dean of the Faculty of Philosophy of the Pontifical University of San Tommaso in Rome, President of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas and Secretary of the International Theological Commission.
Julian Baggini is a British journalist and philosopher of Italian origin, quite famous in the United Kingdom, also dedicated to the dissemination of atheistic issues. In this small volume, originally published by Oxford University Press in 2003, he engages in a basic presentation of what atheism is.
The book by Ardian Ndreca, full professor in the Faculty of Philosophy of the Pontifical Urbanian University, is part of the series “Paths of urban theology”, edited by Armando Matteo and programmatically inspired by the indication of Pope Francis “It is necessary to arrive where new stories and paradigms are formed, reaching with the Word of Jesus the deepest nuclei of the soul of the cities ”(Evangelii Gaudium, n. 74).
Massimo Borghesi is one of the most authoritative Italian interpreters of the “modern”, to whom he has dedicated numerous studies, focusing in particular on the thought of Romano Guardini and Augusto del Noce.
The relationship between art and religions is analyzed, outlining the notion of “system of art”. Then the contestation of the “system of Christian art” that has occurred in recent centuries, is specifically addressed, through various types of revivals mechanisms. Finally, forms of contemporary art which declare themselves atheistic are analyzed. In the contemporary world we encounter a lot of art full of gods and against God, or an art that lacks God; an art that between disbelief and unbelief cannot find the right measure between meaning and its form, because the “system of art” always expresses a vision of the world, in such a way that between form and content there is always a one-to-one relationship.
Elementary examples show that mathematical infinity is actually present in the applications of mathematics to reality. This leads to remarks on Cantor’s definitive introduction of actual infinity in mathematics, through his theory of sets, which is part of the current formalization of mathematics. However, mathematics goes beyond its formalization in a somewhat “mysterious” way. The equally “mysterious” effectiveness of mathematics in the universe ultimately suggests a dynamic understanding of creation, an open-ended process where infinite and finite are intertwined.
Elementary examples show that mathematical infinity is actually present in the applications of mathematics to reality. This leads to remarks on Cantor’s definitive introduction of actual infinity in mathematics, through his theory of sets, which is part of the current formalization of mathematics. However, mathematics goes beyond its formalization in a somewhat “mysterious” way. The equally “mysterious” effectiveness of mathematics in the universe ultimately suggests a dynamic understanding of creation, an open-ended process where infinite and finite are intertwined.
Both the most recent ecclesial documents on the world of young people, such as Christus vivit, and numerous sociological researches describe the younger generations as disinterested with regards to the religious dimension towards which they show, not hostility, but indifference: they don’t embrace atheism in the classical sense, but a weak form of disbelief. The causes of this situation are to be sought in the world of the adults, in which “youthfulness” has spread. The youthfulness of the adults has caused a detachment of the adults from the limited and mortal reality of the human condition, the advent of post-Christian adults, and a sort of almost “religious” attention towards children, considered as the paragon of perfection. Young people, children of these adults, immersed in a technological world, are completely impervious to pastoral care, which should be rethought precisely to speak to this generation, finding the language of a humanism of proximity and self-giving.
For two of the main contemporary philosophical traditions – the phenomenological and the analytical – the second half of the previous century saw a rebirth of the philosophical discourse about God, established, however, beyond the boundaries of traditional metaphysics. Heideggers and Carnaps critiques of metaphysics do not seem to have ceased to exert their influence. In this article, I reconsider the legitimacy of those criticisms by asking: is it truly necessary that contemporary thought proposes a philosophical discourse about God outside of the realm of traditional metaphysics? In virtue of the same fundamental fault that, paradoxically, is hidden as much within the criticism of Heidegger as within that of Carnap, I respond negatively to this question.
The author illustrates the fundamental notions of Spinoza’s philosophy (substance, God and nature) and underlines their origin in the historical and cultural context. He then goes on to highlight the presupposition of the Spinozian position which is the identity of being and thought. From the Thomistic point of view, such a position shows many weaknesses, because it fails to grasp a real ontological distinction between God and created beings. In fact, it does not adequately consider that the human being knows starting from the real beings and only in this way he can come to discover the distinction between being and essence.
