“This is Addicts to Philosophy, your reference channel on philosophical issues, carrying out on YouTube the ancestral mission of this beautiful discipline: corrupting people by teaching them to think.” With this subtle irony, Enric F. Gel, doctor in philosophy from the University of Barcelona, began some of his philosophical dissemination videos on the internet.
The 2022-2023 academic year was the eighty-fourth in the history of Fundación Balmesiana, and the twentieth of Instituto Santo Tomás.
Repertoire of publications appeared in 2022 regarding Aquinas, or his historic influence, in any of the languages of the Iberian Peninsula.
The purpose of this article is to expose some recents attempts pertaining to the formalization of saint Thomas of Aquinas’s metaphysics of participation. Firstly, certain frequent objections related to the use of logic formalization in Philosophy are refuted, as if this supposed a collapse in the univocity of being or in a rationalist type approach. Next, the use of certain modal logic systems in the formalization of the metaphysics of participation of the Aquinian will be briefly explained. Finally, the present author applies the same tools in the formalization of certain transcendentals of the being.
In this article we want to show the rigorous and enlightening contribution that saint Thomas Aquinas makes to the relationship between the two definitions of soul presented by the Stagirite in De anima. At the beginning of Book II of that work, Aristotle gives two definitions of the soul that stand with each other in a demonstrative relationship. Aquinas’ commentary on said passage explains this demonstration keeping in mind Aristotelian epistemology and physics, allowing a scientific understanding of that key piece that is the definition of soul, since the definition and essence of the subject is the principle of science.
The paper deals with Aquinas’ critique of the Averroist and Avicennist interpretations of Aristotle, who stated (i) that the human intellect has a passive aspect in which the intelligible species are received, and an active aspect that abstracts the species from matter; and (ii) that those two aspects of the intellect are separate from matter and therefore are not corruptible as the body is. The position of St. Thomas is examined, which solidly concludes that the intellect is a power of the soul separated from matter, and that man is gifted with all the powers necessary to perform his natural operation, even if man has his intellect by participation from separated substances.
30 years after Veritatis splendor, the understanding of christian moral life continues to challenge moral theology. Since the hermeneutics of moral truth is anthropological and theological, it is necessary to think about the relationship between the dynamism of practical reason and the christian faith in a way that respects both the novelty of revelation and grace, as well as this dynamism itself. From the perspective of virtue ethics, it is possible to assume this challenge to theorize the unity of christian practical reason, pointing out the link between practical reason and the principles of christian life. In this study we present a proposal of understanding the dynamism of christian practical reason from the theological perspective of the ultimate end.
During an inhospitable and difficult moral atmosphere, the article raises the question of sociability and friendship in the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition. The core of the text raises the relations between sociability and friendship; friendship and love; friendship and justice and friendship and charity as adequate moral frameworks, in societies that need to overcome the liberal justice established in the limits of contemporary ethics.
Banal evil is a central notion in Arendt’s thought, not without contradictory interpretations. Bernstein states in an early article that Arendt took such a notion from Jaspers and, in doing so, leads her readers to fall into the misunderstanding of making banal evil and radical evil interchangeable. Banal evil is usually understood as evil derived from the inability to think. However, it also designates a deformed conscience. The incapacity to think influences the deformation of conscience, which is caused by passion and vice, as saint Thomas points out.
