The reviewed work, authored by a researcher at the Department of Philosophy of Culture and Rhetoric at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, aims at “analysing different cultural works in order to answer the question concerning the essence of culture, its place, and the role it plays in the personal life of the human being as both its subject and purpose.”
We present the careful German translation of the treatise On the Unity of the Intellect by Saint Albert the Great. This work has not yet been translated into our language, despite the fact that we have the Spanish translation of one of his books most related to it: San Alberto Magno, Sobre el alma. Translation, introduction and notes by J. A. Tellkamp. Pamplona: EUNSA, 2012.
The 2021-2022 academic year was the eighty-third in the history of the Balmesiana Foundation, and the nineteenth of the Santo Tomás Institute. The academic activity developed by the Santo Tomás Institute through the courses it offers annually began on September 28, 2021 and lasted until May 17, 2022.
Continuing the repertoire started nine years ago, in this issue of Espíritu we collect the Hispanic Thomist bibliography for 2021. With the adjective “Hispanic” we specify that this catalog includes publications in any of the languages born in ancient Hispania: the Iberian Peninsula.
This article introduces a metaphysical interpretation of saint Thomas Aquinas’s First Way, according to which this argument is in itself sufficient to conclude the existence of a First Cause of being, that is also Pure Actuality. This interpretation is based on the idea that the hierarchical chain of moved movers that leads to the First Unmoved Mover should be explained in a way that goes from more particular and less fundamental modes of actuality to more universal and fundamental ones, until the ultimate actuality of being is reached.
The article studies, in the first place, the importance that Clement of Alexandria assigns to philosophy, highlighting its role as a space to dialogue with paganism. Emphasizing that man has as his goal his perfection, which is salvation, which is given through gnosis and moral virtue, the author highlights the importance of knowledge of principles (above all of the Principle) and the practice of the various virtues, where piety (of Platonic origin) stands out, based on the knowledge and recognition of God.
In this work we propose to reflect, supported by the theological-historical synthesis of the Thomist School of Barcelona, about the importance that the heresy of Ebionism has had in the political philosophy of Marxism. In this heresy we find a secularizing engine of Christian hope that has left its traces in different moments of philosophical and political thought, reappearing in the bowels of Marxist secularizing dynamism, properly configuring a philosophy of history that will later justify its entire ideology. politics both in theory and in practice.
The formal reason of Deity crossed the life and work of R. Garrigou-Lagrange and from whose contemplation the philosophical, theological and mystical aspects of his thought radiated. This formal reason assumes not only the multiplicity of absolute perfections found in creatures and analogically predicated of God, but also his one and triune essence. Our work seeks to investigate the roots, development and contribution of Fr. Garrigou’s thought for the contemplation of the divine essence according to the imperfect way of the human intellect during this life and the participation of this essence through sanctifying grace…
The problem of representation is discussed in the context of the hermeneutic turn in legal and political philosophy. In particular, the different outcomes of two differing forms of legal hermeneutics (i.e., nihilistic and ontological connected to the Aristotelian and Thomistic tradition) are presented in relation to the controversial interpretations of “identity politics.” In the end, there is a discussion of a crux problem in order to determine which of the two conflicting traditions is the better candidate for proposing a just way to fulfill the need of radically modifying the myth of representation in the postmodern situation.
According to Aquinas, the appropriate way in which the free will can be induced to act is by presenting it a persuasive good. This is relevant to Christian culture, which introduces the value of argumentation as an effective tool for persuasion. Thomas Aquinas was convinced that one could not be persuaded to believe except by argument, seeing the theology as argumentative. Against later voluntarism, the intellectualist position promotes a culture of persuasion on rationale, from which the tradition of disputation and Summa Theologiae grows. While the first studies of persuasion in the context of Aquinas’s anthropology and the gift of counsel as a persuasive goal-directing gift have appeared, this article will present three ways in which persuasion is present in God, angels and humans.
St. Thomas, Kant and Crusius are three of the great objectors to the ontological argument. However, the metaphysical assumptions of their criticisms are very different. Therefore, in this paper I propose to analyze the objections of St. Thomas, Kant and Crusius against the ontological argument and to show that the objections of St. Thomas and Crusius are more similar to each other than to that of Kant.
I go through the main lines of Aquinas’s De Ente argument for the existence of God and show how it can be fortified using contemporary arguments in favor of causal finitism. Aquinas limits himself to arguing that per se causal series need a first member, but with causal finitism in place we can defend the same for per accidens causal series, removing a way out for the critic of the argument.
This paper aims to offer a reconstruction of the First Way (Prima Via) proposed by Thomas Aquinas to demonstrate the existence of God in the Summa Theologiae. The Thomist argument in that work explains, first, what kind of rational discourse can be articulated to talk about God’s existence and essence. After he elaborates on the previous point, Aquinas proposes a series of arguments intended to resolve the question of the existence of a divine being and his attributes In what concerns this present text, we will focus on the first way proposed there in favour of the thesis “God exists” and we will also talk about the discursive context in which this proof appears. Thomas refers to it as the first and clearest proof of them all.
This article offers a metaphysical interpretation of the first way of St. Thomas Aquinas, according to which this argument is in itself sufficient to conclude the existence of a first Cause of being, which is itself pure Actuality. The interpretation offered rests fundamentally on the idea that the hierarchical chain of moved movers that leads to the first Unmoved Mover must be explained in such a way that the reasoning moves from more particular and less fundamental modes of actuality to others that are more universal and fundamental, until one arrives at the ultimate actuality of being.
José María Méndez es un sacerdote diocesano de Madrid, economista de formación (Inspector de Finanzas del Estado), doctor en Derecho Canónico y presidente de la Asociación de Estudios de Axiología. Partiendo de la consideración de la teoría económica del valor ha desarrollado una particular Filosofía de los valores que ha expuesto en sus libros y artículos, partiendo de los planteamientos filosóficos –conjugándolos– de N. Hartmann y de M. Scheler. También ha abordado aspectos del liberalismo económico y político en su trabajo intelectual en otra serie de publicaciones. Valores y economía puede que sean sus ejes de reflexión fundamentales.
