Tag: Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy

  • The threefold whole

    In his Metaphysics Δ Aristotle says there are two senses of the term “whole”: Whole means that from which none of the things of which it is said to consist by nature are missing; and that which contains the things contained in such a way that they form one thing. The first sense corresponds to our usage… →

  • The metaphysics of gender

    I recently listened to this talk by John Finley titled The Metaphysics of Gender: A Thomistic Approach. Below are my notes of this. I skip the introductory remarks and follow the four-section division of the talk. Note that by “gender” here we do not mean the psychological or social construct introduced by modern feminists. Rather, by… →

  • Common goods

    I had originally intended to tie up the thoughts begun in previous posts on natural and moral goodness, substantial activities, basic goods, and virtual existence, but it has since occurred to me that this would be too ambitious for a single blog post. So, I’ll attempt to approach the topic in installments as I find the time. Those… →

  • Uninstantiatables in Aristotelian Mathematics

    Any successful Aristotelian foundations of mathematics needs to account for mathematical objects that are uninstantiated and even uninstantiatable. Examples include (1) positive whole (or “natural”) numbers larger than the number of objects in reality, (2) negative numbers, and (3) infinities. Uninstantiated natural numbers As the Aristotelian sees things, we abstract quantity and structure from reality,… →

  • How Aristotle starts the Nicomachean Ethics

    In the opening passage of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle seeks to pick out the specific subject of his study for the remainder of the book. His discussion is often misunderstood, but a good understanding of it will serve us well in understanding the study of ethics. We will consider the passage bit by bit with… →

  • From morality to nature and back again

    Below is a talk I recently gave at a local apologetics meet-up. The goal was to introduce and partially defend natural law theory to a group of fellow-Protestants who, as far as I was aware, had not engaged extensively with natural law theory before. The talk was recorded in various parts, with video coming in the second part.… →

  • Lonergan on Aquinas on Causation

    Below is an excerpt from Bernard Lonergan’s incredible book Grace and Freedom, discussing Thomas Aquinas’s views on causation and how they relate to Aristotle’s views on the topic. Except for the term “actio” I’ve replaced Latin phrases with their English translations in square brackets. Causation is the common feature of both operation and cooperation; its… →

  • Virtual existence

    It might not seem like it, but a proper understanding of virtual existence can be significantly helpful when trying to understand the structure of human communities. To this end, I’d like to spend some time thinking about this puzzling notion here. Substances and aggregates again You’ll recall that, in our discussions about substantial activities, we spent… →

  • Actualisation of potentiality as such

    While we’re on the topic of confusing things Aquinas said, we can talk about his analysis of change, which he in turn gets from Aristotle. We’ve noted before that the first step in analysing change is the realisation that it involves the actualisation of a potential: When a hot cup of coffee gets cold, for example,… →

  • Analogy at the foundations of mathematics

    Consider the Benacerraf identification problem in philosophy of maths: there are multiple different ways of “defining” natural numbers in terms of sets, so there is no way of determining which definition is the “correct” one. This is not just a problem about natural numbers but they’re a useful notion to introduce the problem with. In fact,… →