Issue 140

Year 59 | 2010 Articles From Existence to Essence: Re-gaining the Aristotelian-Thomistic Doctrine in Front of Modern problems Horst Seidl Remarks on the correlation between thinking and being in the realistic ontology José Juan Escandell Typification in the ancient...

Some paradoxes of the constitutional State and its emergence in the current economic crisis

There is a certain consensus that, beyond the strictly economic and financial causes, it seems that the current crisis has to do with moral issues, which are either sharpening the problems or will affect a slower recovery. After decades of weak thinking, in the public discourse strong values ​​reappear, which refer to the personal and social virtues that are needed to succeed: industriousness, honesty, commitment, respect for the given word, austerity … Also, according to the budgetary limitations of the State and the risk of the collapse of the Social Security become more evident, the gaze turns to socially valuable institutions (such as the Church or the family), which are not only able to educate in the virtues previously outlined , but they constitute the best social buffer in situations of helplessness. Now, a novelty in the current crisis is that it will be the first one for Spanish society to live without the family mattress still existing: not only because immigrants – the first to notice the crisis – do not have families rooted in Spain, with a capacity to help them in difficult situations, but also because millions of Spaniards lack this mattress, due to the deterioration of the family institution experienced by Spanish society in recent decades.

The word of man in human life

I dedicate this session to the subject of the mental word, calling it “the word of man – verbum hominis with the terminology of Saint Augustine – in human life”. The word “human life” in the work of St. Thomas appears continually. I think he is about to make a doctoral thesis, or many, about the concept and all its dimensions of what St. Thomas calls “human life”.

“Metaphysics of Modesty”. A central aspect to the phylosophy of the body in Wojtyla’s “Love and responsability”

Wojtyla proposses to explain the essential relationship between value, action and subject through an integrated model of phenomenological analysis and the ontological perspective. The phylosophy of the body is central to the anthropological conception of Wojtyla’s Love and Responsability. Modesty functions as a pivotal element between the being of the person and its love expression: sexual modesty is the modesty of the person, in which all sexual morality is justified. It therefor requires a metaphysical interpretation –epistemic, ontological and ethical– that exceeds the phenomenological in terpretation. The analysis made by Scheler is a valid point of departure.

An Introduction to the Question of Political Legitimacy

This article is intended as an introduction to the general framework for the study of the question of political legitimacy. In the first place, some elements related to the nominal definition of the term “legitimacy” are offered. Then a distinction is made between “legitimacy” (of power), “validity” (of law) and “justification” (of the State). Finally, two main theoretical answers to the question of political power legitimacy are presented

Typification in the ancient Greek philosophers’ biography: the construction of a preconceived image

Ancient Greek biographers worked within a mental framework, close to myth, with a tendency to typify every single character in order to make sense universally for their communities. We can also discover this main feature of the ancient biographers in ancient biographies of Greek philosophers, especially in the Lives and tenets of the most illustrious philosophers by Diogenes Laertius. In this paper, I want to expose the theoretical assumptions of some mechanisms in the generation and the recurrence of these typified narrations that I have called biographemes. For biographeme I mean the real typified form that enables the past to become stereotype, to set and organize the past into memorable narrative patterns, in order to confer universal, collective sense to an individual life. Every biographeme is then a little independent cell with recursive anecdotal material, within which set patterns of historical reality is essentially adapted.

Remarks on the correlation between thinking and being in the realistic ontology

Among those who completely separate thinking and being ( for example, nominalism) and those who identify them (immanentisms), metaphysical realism proposes to separate and unite both as it recognizes that there are several relationships between them. This paper explores these relationships, describing them in accordance to four determinations: thinking requires subjectively and objectively being; being requires qualitatively and quantitatively thinking. First of all, thinking requires being in the sense that it is a being. Further more, in the objective sense, thinking requires being because it is essentially thinking of the being. In the third place, being requires “qualitatively” thinking since the being is inherently intelligible (veritas transcendentalis). Ultimately being requires “quantitatively” thinking meaning that where there is greater perfection, there is more intellection; that perfect being is subsistent thinking; and that the finite being needs to be thought by God.

From Existence to Essence: Re-gaining the Aristotelian-Thomistic Doctrine in Front of Modern problems

The present paper re-examines the traditional concepts of existence and essence which have been reflected also by modern philosophers, but only as problematic or even opposite terms. From Descartes until Kant, Hegel, Gilson and Heidegger, they are involved in the opposition of concrete reality and ideal abstract thinking, together with the connected problems, as the first part of my article shows. The second part of my re-examination explains that the two concepts, in their original meaning from Plato and Aristotle until Thomas Aquinas, are not opposed but coordinated, even complementary, thanks to the underlying meta phy sics which avoids the opposition between the concrete individuals and abstract universal thinking, referring properly to the essence in the individuals.