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Author: Edward Feser Publisher: Ontos Verlag ISBN: 9783868385441 Category : First philosophy Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Scholastic Metaphysics provides an overview of Scholastic approaches to causation, substance, essence, modality, identity, persistence, teleology, and other issues in fundamental metaphysics. The book interacts heavily with the literature on these issues in contemporary analytic metaphysics, so as to facilitate the analytic reader's understanding of Scholastic ideas and the Scholastic reader's understanding of contemporary analytic philosophy. The Aristotelian theory of actuality and potentiality provides the organizing theme, and the crucial dependence of Scholastic metaphysics on this theory is demonstrated. The book is written from a Thomistic point of view, but Scotist and Suarezian positions are treated as well where they diverge from the Thomistic position.
Author: Edward Feser Publisher: Ontos Verlag ISBN: 9783868385441 Category : First philosophy Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Scholastic Metaphysics provides an overview of Scholastic approaches to causation, substance, essence, modality, identity, persistence, teleology, and other issues in fundamental metaphysics. The book interacts heavily with the literature on these issues in contemporary analytic metaphysics, so as to facilitate the analytic reader's understanding of Scholastic ideas and the Scholastic reader's understanding of contemporary analytic philosophy. The Aristotelian theory of actuality and potentiality provides the organizing theme, and the crucial dependence of Scholastic metaphysics on this theory is demonstrated. The book is written from a Thomistic point of view, but Scotist and Suarezian positions are treated as well where they diverge from the Thomistic position.
Author: Philipp W. Rosemann Publisher: Leuven University Press ISBN: 9789061867777 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 372
Book Description
The principle, omne agens agit sibi simile, "every agent causes something similar to itself," is fundamental to Scholastic metaphysics, and especially natural theology. In fact, it is only upon its vasis that inferences can be made from creaturely characteristics to the nature of the Creator. However, omne agens agit sibi simile, is taken for granted even by an author such as Saint Thomas Aquinas, who never feels any need to justify its validity, in spite of the fact that "there is hardly a phrase which occurs more often in Saint Thomas," as Etienne Gilson remarked. Tracing the historical roots of omne agens agit sibi simile is an indispensable first step in trying to explain the import of this principle in Scholastic Thought. The first part of the book is devoted to this task. it argues that the mediaeval metaphysics of causal similarity is rooted in a conception of the cosmos which goes back to the Presocratics, and according to which being is essentially circular, or self-reflexive. This conception was further elaborated by Plato, Aristotle, the Neoplatonists, and their mediaeval successors. The second part examines omne agens agit sibi simile in Thomistic metaphysics. Without neglecting Aquinas's sources, it attempts to elucidate the structure of his thought in the light of contemporary philosophical questions. It is stressed, for instance, that in Aquinas's thought, causality involves a process of 'concealing revelation" of the cause in and through its effect--an idea which was later to become a central element in Heidegger's philosophy.
Author: Lukáš Novák Publisher: de Gruyter ISBN: 9783110322163 Category : Metaphysics Languages : en Pages : 283
Book Description
Throughout the greater part of the twentieth century, both in the analytic and continental traditions, metaphysics was deemed to be passé. The last few decades, however, have witnessed a remarkable growth of interest among analytic philosophers in various traditional metaphysical topics, such as modality, truth, causality, etc. which resulted in the emergence of various forms of analytic metaphysics. The new forms of metaphysics differ from its traditional forms mostly in their methodology (we may notice various applications of contemporary formal logical techniques) and in the range of proposed solutions to particular problems. Besides these and other differences, however, there are also many similarities and there are even some who intentionally develop traditional metaphysical themes using the contemporary analytical methods. All these developments call for detailed exploration, which is the general goal of the present publication Metaphysics: Aristotelian, Scholastic, Analytic. The publication is the fruit of the conference which took place in Prague in 2010 and which had for its aim to bring together those willing to explore relations between the traditional and contemporary concerns, both from among the leading analytic philosophers working in metaphysics and the historians of philosophy devoted to the study of the metaphysical tradition. The specific focus of the conference was a re-examination of topics such as categories, metaphysical structure, substance and accident, existence, modalities, and predication.
Author: Francisco Suarez Publisher: CUA Press ISBN: 0813234026 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 465
Book Description
Francisco Suárez (1548-1617) was one of the most important philosophers and theologians of Early Modern Scholasticism. Although Suárez spent most of his academic career as a professor of theology, he is better known today for his Metaphysical Disputations (Salamanca, 1597). The present volume contains a facing-page English translation of Metaphysical Disputation I, which is introductory and devoted to the nature of metaphysics itself. In it, Suárez first specifies this science’s object and nature (Sections 1 and 2) and then discusses its unity (Section 3), its end, utility and functions (Section 4), its status as the most perfect natural science and true wisdom (Section 5), and finally the thesis that it is the science most of all desired by means of a natural appetite (Section 6). Those interested in late scholastic conceptions of metaphysics and their influence on the better known metaphysical systems of the seventeenth century – e.g., Descartes’s – will find the volume especially useful. The Latin text contained in this volume introduces a significant number of corrections to the text of the Vivès edition, the one standardly used by scholars of Suárez, and thus more faithfully reproduces the text of the first edition. The volume also contains a lengthy introduction that provides a detailed survey of the disputation’s principal claims and arguments.
Author: Tad M. Schmaltz Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 0190070226 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 313
Book Description
In The Metaphysics of the Material World, Tad M. Schmaltz traces a particular development of the metaphysics of the material world in early modern thought. The route Schmaltz follows derives from a critique of Spinoza in the work of Pierre Bayle. Bayle charged in particular that Spinoza's monistic conception of the material world founders on the account of extension and its "modes" and parts that he inherited from Descartes, and that Descartes in turn inherited from late scholasticism, and ultimately from Aristotle. After an initial discussion of Bayle's critique of Spinoza and its relation to Aristotle's distinction between substance and accident, this study starts with the original re-conceptualization of Aristotle's metaphysics of the material world that we find in the work of the early modern scholastic Su�rez. What receives particular attention is Su�rez's introduction of the "modal distinction" and his distinctive account of the Aristotelian accident of "continuous quantity." This examination of Su�rez is followed by a treatment of the connections of his particular version of the scholastic conception of the material world to the very different conception that Descartes offered. Especially important is Descartes's view of the relation of extended substance both to its modes and to the parts that compose it. Finally, there is a consideration of what these developments in Su�rez and Descartes have to teach us about Spinoza's monistic conception of the material world. Of special concern here is to draw on this historical narrative to provide a re-assessment of Bayle's critique of Spinoza.
Author: Jorge Secada Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1139429051 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 349
Book Description
This is the first book-length study of Descartes's metaphysics to place it in its immediate historical context, the Late Scholastic philosophy of thinkers such as Suárez against which Descartes reacted. Jorge Secada views Cartesian philosophy as an 'essentialist' reply to the 'existentialism' of the School, and his discussion includes careful analyses and original interpretations of such central Cartesian themes as the role of scepticism, intentionality and the doctrine of the material falsity of ideas, universals and the relation between sense and understanding, causation and the proofs of the existence of God, the theory of substance, and the dualism of mind and matter. His study offers a picture of Descartes's metaphysics that is both novel and philosophically illuminating.
Author: Edward Feser Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand ISBN: 3868385444 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 308
Book Description
Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction provides an overview of Scholastic approaches to causation, substance, essence, modality, identity, persistence, teleology, and other issues in fundamental metaphysics. The book interacts heavily with the literature on these issues in contemporary analytic metaphysics, so as to facilitate the analytic reader’s understanding of Scholastic ideas and the Scholastic reader’s understanding of contemporary analytic philosophy. The Aristotelian theory of actuality and potentiality provides the organizing theme, and the crucial dependence of Scholastic metaphysics on this theory is demonstrated. The book is written from a Thomistic point of view, but Scotist and Suarezian positions are treated as well where they diverge from the Thomistic position. Edward Feser is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Pasadena City College in Pasadena, California, USA. His most recent books include Aquinas and The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism, and the edited volume Aristotle on Method and Metaphysics.
Author: Aristotle Publisher: Penguin UK ISBN: 0141912014 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 546
Book Description
The Metaphysics presents Aristotle's mature rejection of both the Platonic theory that what we perceive is just a pale reflection of reality and the hardheaded view that all processes are ultimately material. He argued instead that the reality or substance of things lies in their concrete forms, and in so doing he probed some of the deepest questions of philosophy: What is existence? How is change possible? And are there certain things that must exist for anything else to exist at all? The seminal notions discussed in The Metaphysics - of 'substance' and associated concepts of matter and form, essence and accident, potentiality and actuality - have had a profound and enduring influence, and laid the foundations for one of the central branches of Western philosophy.
Author: Robert Pasnau Publisher: OUP Oxford ISBN: 0191501794 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 811
Book Description
Robert Pasnau traces the developments of metaphysical thinking through four rich but for the most part neglected centuries of philosophy, running from the thirteenth century through to the seventeenth. At no period in the history of philosophy, other than perhaps our own, have metaphysical problems received the sort of sustained attention they received during the later Middle Ages, and never has a whole philosophical tradition come crashing down as quickly and completely as did scholastic philosophy in the seventeenth century. The thirty chapters work through various fundamental metaphysical issues, sometimes focusing more on scholastic thought, sometimes on the seventeenth century. Pasnau begins with the first challenges to the classical scholasticism of Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas, runs through prominent figures like John Duns Scotus and William Ockham, and ends in the seventeenth century, with the end of the first stage of developments in post-scholastic philosophy: on the continent, with Descartes and Gassendi, and in England, with Boyle and Locke.