Academic attention to the place of beauty within the Thomist edifice has been revived in the last century. Christopher Scott Sevier begins Aquinas on Beauty by pointing out that, despite revived interest, St. Thomas Aquinas’s thought about it has not been explored and expounded in systematic depth, evidenced by the few books devoted to beauty in Thomas exclusively.
The 2020-2021 academic year was the eighty-second in the history of the Balmesiana Foundation, and the eighteenth of Instituto Santo Tomás.
On Saturday, June 12, 2021, Fr. Pedro Suñer Puig, of the Society of Jesus, died in the early afternoon, at the age of 91, 72 years of religious life and 59 years of priesthood. That day the Immaculate Heart of Mary was commemorated, after the solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The corpore insepulto funeral was held on Monday 21 in the chapel of the Borja Center of Sant Cugat, at the foot of the image of the Immaculate Conception, and was subsequently buried in the cemetery of the PP. Jesuits.
Since its beginnings, Polish history and culture is inherently intertwined with Christian religion, perhaps even more so than it is the case in many other European counters, where, in the current-day era, the processes of secularisation seem to have gotten further and developed quicker than in Poland.
The objective of this paper is to elucidate the content of the argument presented by the American philosopher William James (1842-1910) in his “Is Life Worthliving?”, a lecture given in 1895 at the Harvard Young Men’s Christian Association and published a few years later, in 1897, in the compilation entitled The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy [La voluntad de creer y otros ensayos en filosofía popular].
The researcher interested in the figure of Antonio Millán-Puelles needs to have a rigorous and agile bibliographic tool. The most recent was published in 2006 by J. Mª Garrido and J. J. Escandell, but it is now obsolete. The time that has passed since then and, in particular, the investigations derived from the preparation of the Complete Works of the Cadiz philosopher, have led to the discovery of some writings that did not appear in it, as well as to detect errors in that 2006 list.
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.
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.
Debates on the question of God and religion in contemporary political philosophy often end by blending different methodological perspectives, so as to melt the peculiar point of view of political philosophy with those of political science, theology, and sociology. The essay tries to shed some light on such a theoretical situation, individuating the specific task of a properly philosophical-political research, and finally introducing an exemplar expression of it in the traditional reflection on the essential structure of human acting, especially considering the peculiar conceptual development it received through the work of Thomas Aquinas.
According to Thomas, although it is universal, Providence cares about persons in a particular way, since they are partly incorruptible and directly contribute to the common good of the universe, which is the end of the divine government. The traditional doctrine of the guardian angel effectively highlights this eminent dignity of any person.
“God, he who is”, revealed himself by manifesting his Name and his Glory. Understanding the deep meaning of the words “YHWH” and “Jesus”, and the circumstances in which they were revealed, is fundamental for a better understanding of the divine nature. The Glory of God, visible in the manna. (Ex 16, 4), Sinai (Ex 24, 15), the Tabernacle (Ex 40, 34) and the Temple (2 Cro 5, 11), ceased to be so until become flesh in Christ, whose Easter illuminates the meaning of the Name of God.
In the interesting collection of Thomistic Studies of the recent Cor Iesu Editions a new work has been published on the perennial theme of freedom. Its author, Xavier Prevosti Vives, who presented the work as a doctoral thesis obtaining the highest qualification, delves into the study of the metaphysical foundation of “one of the most precious gifts that the heavens gave to men” as Don Quixote said . In this case, however, the travel guide will not be our literary giant but another philosophical-theological giant: Saint Thomas Aquinas.
