Perhaps a more exact title for this book might have been God and Reason in Medieval Universities, for its major focus is on the way that reason, especially in the form of logic and natural philosophy, became a permanently and pervasively established feature of human inquiry across the various faculties. Indeed the central thesis of the book is that despite the distorting characterizations of the Middle Ages as a period of faith at best and darkness at worst, it was actually (...) a period in which human reason achieved an unprecedented preeminence that was the necessary condition for the development of early modern science. According to Grant, “in all the history of human civilization, reason had never been accorded such a central role, one that involved so many people over such a wide area for such an extended period”. (shrink)

When Norman Kretzmann died in August of 1998, he left unfinished what was to have been a three volume presentation of Aquinas’s natural theology according to the first three books of the Summa contra gentiles. This second volume, the successor to The Metaphysics of Theism, thus stands as his final work. Kretzmann’s hope was to present Aquinas’s natural theology in such a way as to show its contemporary philosophical relevance and viability; it was not to be a historical reconstruction or (...) a commentary, but rather a critical appreciation or even a rethinking of Aquinas’s achievement. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Thomas Aquinas’s “Summa Theologiae”: A Guide and Commentary by Brian DaviesBrian J. Shanley, O.P.Thomas Aquinas’s “Summa Theologiae”: A Guide and Commentary. By Brian Davies, O.P. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xv + 454. $105.00 (cloth), $31.95 (paper). ISBN: 978-0-19-938062-6 (cloth), 978-0-19-938063-3 (paper).The purpose of this book is to provide guidance to a nonspecialist reader of Aquinas’s Summa theologiae. It is not meant as a (...) substitute for the text itself, but rather as a companion for a reader in order to offer explication for the most important arguments, a sense of the context of the whole, a quick survey of the terrain of a treatise, some historical context when necessary, and a prod to critical thinking. Davies’s ambition is daunting. As the subtitle indicates, he intends the book to be both a guide and a commentary. If it were only a guide, it would focus on the truly critical themes in some depth in order to aid the reader through the various parts without commenting on everything. If it were only a commentary, its purpose would be largely expository and exegetical. It is hard to do both functions well on a work as large and complex as the Summa theologiae.After a brief overview of Aquinas’s life and a short commentary on the meaning of sacra doctrina, Davies turns to the topic of God. Given his previous work on Aquinas, it is not surprising that the strongest and longest section of his book concerns the Prima pars. Davies does a nice job of parsing the existence of God and mapping out the Five Ways in a manner suitable to his audience. He then turns to the question of how God does not exist, and makes it plain that the main thrust of Aquinas’s treatment is apophatic, or negative. It is surprising that Davies never mentions the influence of Pseudo-Dionysius on Aquinas and generally downplays the Neoplatonic strains in Aquinas’s theology. I would have thought that divine simplicity and goodness deserve more consideration, and I would have liked to see Davies give more insight for the reader on how to parse some of Aquinas’s metaphysical terms (especially the real distinction in created beings and how this is the main marker of the ontological gap between God and creation). When Davies turns to how we name or use language about God, he signals to his readers that he is entering into an area that has been much debated. Not surprisingly, while he does a reasonable job of trying to explain how analogical predication works to a nonspecialist reader, specialists will have much to quibble about. At the heart of his explanation of analogy is the claim that analogy is primarily “a linguistic phenomenon in which one and the same word is used to speak of different things with connections of meaning that can be traced in each use of the word” (69). Analogy in Aquinas is more than a theory about language; it is embedded in a metaphysics of participation and creation that needs to be adumbrated to understand how analogy works. The subsequent treatment of God’s knowing and willing is reliable, though more attention might have been paid to the practical model of divine knowing. When it comes to the Trinity, [End Page 306] Davies does a solid job of trying to explain that most complicated doctrine of Aquinas to a nonspecialist.Davies misses the opportunity to explore the fundamental contrast that Aquinas draws between God’s causal immanence in all things as Creator and his special, interpersonal, Trinitarian indwelling through grace, as the treatise on the Trinity segues into the treatise on creation. When turning to creation, Davies notes that the fundamental metaphysical principle behind Aquinas’s account is that “the existence of something that does not exist by nature has to be caused” (110), although he seems diffident about its validity (“like it or not”) and never mentions participation. Sometimes he speaks about God’s causality in creation as “causally accounting for their esse” (ibid.) even as he notes that God... (shrink)

The ascendancy of aesthetics as a philosophical discipline / Daniel Dahlstrom -- Western philosophy of religion in the last hundred years / Eugene Thomas Long -- Western challenge to the development of the history of Chinese philosophy / A.S. Cua.

The contributors to the volume are Seth Benardete, Michael Gillespie, Leon Kass, Robert B. Pippin, Robert Rethy, John M. Rist, Brian J. Shanley, O. P., Susan ...

This slender volume is a polemical work on two fronts. First and foremost, it is an attempt to distinguish sharply the aim of Aquinas from that of post-Cartesian rationalism with respect to the role of philosophical argumentation in establishing the existence of God. Cartesian rationalism holds that it is possible to articulate presuppositionless, universal, compelling, and purely philosophical reasons to justify a foundational belief in God. Velecky criticizes this view on Wittgensteinian grounds and holds that there are significant affinities between (...) Aquinas and Wittgenstein on the relationship between religious belief and philosophical justification. What counts as a good philosophical case for the existence of God is always relative to the existential situation of the inquirer. So-called proofs for the existence of God are really attempts to formulate corroborating intellectual grounds for a belief that one has already come to on the basis of God's self-revelation, faith, and personal encounter. Belief in the proposition "that God exists" is not a statement reporting the existence of an item encounterable in our normal experience or the conclusion of an argument, but rather expresses the adoption of an entirely distinct perspective on the whole of reality. So when Aquinas describes arguments for the existence of God as preambula fidei, he does not mean that they are prior to faith as epistemologically necessary conditions for belief, but rather that they are logically required by faith in a different sense. It must be possible to locate or refer to the object of religious belief within a universe of philosophical discourse; or, to put it another way, it must be possible to give some content to the notion of divinity. The function of Aquinas's arguments is thus to make the proposition Deum esse intelligible within the universe of broadly Aristotelian discourse. This is especially important if believers want to have any kind of conversation with nonbelievers. Velecky writes: "At the conclusion of the Five Arguments nothing more--and nothing less--has been achieved than that a reasonable philosophical case has been made for a topic of conversation between Christians and others about the basic characterization of something which is thought to be the transcendent cause of all beings and which has left some traces of its transcendence in the world we can experience". Velecky's Wittgensteinian reading of Aquinas is a welcome antidote to the more usual Cartesian reading. But while Velecky is careful to distinguish Aquinas from Wittgensteinian fideism, nevertheless his overall strategy comes dangerously close to pushing Aquinas too far in that direction; Aquinas is neither Cartesian nor Wittgensteinian. (shrink)

This book is the first installment in a projected three volume critical analysis and creative appropriation of Aquinas’s natural theology in Summa contra gentiles I–III. The target audience seems to be contemporary Anglo-American philosophers of religion. Kretzmann wants to promote a greater integration of philosophy and theology through the pursuit of a metaphysics of theism. He claims that theology and philosophy both offer versions of a “Grandest Unified Theory” and what he proposes in this volume is a theology from the (...) bottom up that will establish what can be known of God through reason alone, in order subsequently to pursue a metaphysics from the top down that will begin with God and show the relationship of everything else to God. (shrink)

Clarke acknowledges in his collected essays that he is a "Thomistically inspired" metaphysician rather than simply "Thomistic," because his principal aim is the creative retrieval and completion of Aquinas's metaphysics in the light of contemporary thought. Self-styled Thomists will inevitably and justifiably contest some of Clarke's creative completions of Aquinas, preferring the original to the interpretation, yet they can learn from his efforts at retrieval. While Clarke claims that his main interest is not historical exposition, two early essays show him (...) eminently capable of such writing. One is a classic exposition of how Aquinas transformed the Aristotelian act-potency theory to do the work of explaining the metaphysical composition of esse and essentia within a Neoplatonically inspired participation schema wherein act is considered to be intrinsically unlimited. The second is a general account of participation in Aquinas which displays Clarke's early assimilation of this central theme and his deep grounding in the European scholarship that transformed the landscape of Thomism at the midpoint of this century. (shrink)

"O'Meara masterfully situates Pryzwara in relation to the traditional and contemporary theological, philosophical, ecclesial, cultural, and social contexts within which he wrote." --_William P. Loewe, professor of religious studies, Catholic University of America_ Erich Przywara, S.J. is one of the important Catholic intellectuals of the twentieth century. Yet, in the English-speaking world Przywara remains largely unknown. Few of his sixty books or six hundred articles have been translated. In this engaging new book, Thomas O'Meara offers a comprehensive study of the (...) German Jesuit Erich Przywara and his philosophical theology. Przywara's scholarly contributions were remarkable. He was one of three theologians who introduced the writings of John Henry Cardinal Newman into Germany. From his position at the Jesuit journal in Munich, _Stimmen der Zeit_, he offered an open and broad Catholic perspective on the cultural, philosophical, and theological currents of his time. As one of the first Catholic intellectuals to employ the phenomenologies of Edmund Husserl and Max Scheler, he was also responsible for giving an influential, more theological interpretation of the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola. Przywara was also deeply engaged in the ideas and authors of his times. He was the first Catholic dialogue partner of Karl Barth and Paul Tillich. Edmund Husserl was counted among Przywara's friends, and Edith Stein was a close personal and intellectual companion. Through his interactions with important figures of his age and his writings, ranging from speculative systems to liturgical hymns, Przywara was of marked importance in furthering a varied dialogue between German Catholicism and modern culture. Following a foreword by Michael Fahey, S.J., O'Meara presents a chapter on Pryzwara's life and a chronology of his writings. O'Meara then discusses Pryzwara's philosophical theology, his lecture-courses at German universities on Augustine and Aquinas, his philosophy of religion, and his influence on important intellectual contemporaries. O'Meara concludes with an in-depth analysis of Pryzwara's theology, focusing particularly on his Catholic views of person, liturgy, and church. (shrink)

At the beginning of Sein und Zeit, Martin Heidegger raises the question “What is the meaning of Being?”. In a celebrated review of Heidegger, Gilbert Ryle observes that, though some would quarrel with the assumption “that there is a problem about the Meaning of Being,” he, for the moment, will not. Why not? Because, says Ryle, the “question of the relation between Being qua timeless ‘substance’ and existing qua existing in the world of time and space seems to me a (...) real one.”. (shrink)

OBJECTIVE: This article describes a method for investigating attitudes towards prioritisation in medicine. SETTING: University of Kuopio, Finland. DESIGN: The method consisted of a set of 24 paired scenarios, which were imaginary patient cases, each containing three different ethical indicators randomly selected from a list of indicators (for example, child, rich patient, severe disease etc.). The scenarios were grouped into 12 random pairs and the procedure was repeated four times, resulting in 12 scenario pairs arranged randomly in five different sets. (...) SURVEY: This method was tested with four groups of subjects (n = 8, n = 47, n = 104 and n = 36). RESULTS: Children and patients with a severe disease were prioritised in all groups. The aged, patients with a mild disease and patients with a self-acquired disease were negatively prioritised in all groups. Poor or rich patients were prioritised in some groups but negatively prioritised in others. CONCLUSIONS: The validity and reliability of this method are good and it is suitable for investigating attitudes towards medical prioritisation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Évangile et Providence: Une théologie de l’action de Dieu by Emmanuel DurandMichael J. Dodds, O.P.Évangile et Providence: Une théologie de l’action de Dieu. By Emmanuel Durand. Paris: Cerf, 2014. Pp. 345. €35.00 (paper). ISBN: 978-2-204-10201-8.Emmanuel Durand offers a refreshing perspective on the question of divine action, so much discussed in recent years in the dialogue between theology and science. While not neglecting the fruit of that discussion, his (...) framing of the question under the headings of “Gospel” and “Providence” opens a new vista that is evident in his opening question: “What theology of Providence is needed today for the Gospel of salvation?” (7).Although contemporary theology readily affirms the biblical proclamation of God’s universal offer of salvation, its account of God’s salvific action on behalf of each person has become “uncertain and problematic.” Discussions of divine “kenosis, self-limitation, retreat, and powerlessness” have led many to the conviction God’s action must somehow be “limited” (8). The result is the paradox of a limited God attempting to offer universal salvation. The remedy lies in the recovery of a correct understanding of “the sovereignty of God”—the God who acts not only in the “intimacy of human hearts” but also in and through the “happy and unhappy contingencies” of human life (8-9).Durand begins by placing the question of divine action in the context of contemporary theology and culture, considering first the relationship between divine and human action, then the question of God’s action in history, and finally the understanding of divine action that has surfaced in the dialogue between theology and science (chap. 1). His next task is to clarify the notion of “action” itself. This entails an account of analogy (chap. 2). The discussion then turns to the “creative reappropriation” (10) of three classical theologies of divine providence, those of St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and John Henry Newman. This involves a careful consideration of the Confessions of Augustine, the Summa contra gentiles of Aquinas, and the sermons of Newman (chaps. 3-5).The flip side of the question of divine action is of course the problem of evil and why a God who is capable of overcoming evil does not do so. Durand proposes not to “resolve” (résoudre) such problems here, but simply to help us “press” (serrer) them (11) as a preparation for listening to what revelation may say of them (chap. 6). The question of evil serves as the background for the discussion of Scripture that follows, where aspects of the books of Wisdom, Luke, and John are considered (chap. 7). Durand concludes with a [End Page 133] constructive proposal for understanding Providence in the world as we find it today, afflicted with evil (chap. 8).Durand begins his book with a discussion of the widespread opinion in contemporary philosophy and theology that divine and human action are somehow opposed to or in competition with each other. He traces this notion to Sartre, arguing that it now seems to pervade our culture despite the efforts of theologians such as Sertillanges to refute it. God’s action in the world is thought to diminish as humanity matures historically. The sovereign God gives place to the suffering God, who can act only through the actions of humans. The contemporary notion of history itself poses problems for divine action. It is difficult to affirm God’s saving and directing action in history, when history itself has lost its direction: “The loss of confidence in the intelligibility of history also jeopardizes the representation of God as sovereign, cause, author, director or guarantor of history” (29). Finally, the ability of science to explain natural events has led some to the conviction that there is simply no room for God to act in the world without interfering with the order of scientific laws. Durand presents a fine summary and critique of the responses to this dilemma that have surfaced in the ongoing dialogue between theologians and scientists, especially under the auspices of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley (31-60).Durand... (shrink)

The Initiation Biblique of Robert-Tricot was first published in 1939, with an enlarged edition in 1948, and was made available to a wider public in 1951 when it appeared in English translation as Guide to the Bible. The third French edition was a thorough-going revision—some chapters were entirely re-written. The most important change was, beyond all question, the chapter on Inspiration by Father P. Benoit. As an exegete and a theologian, keenly aware both of the doctrinal principles involved and of (...) the real difficulties in the Bible, his approach to the question of inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture is truly illuminating; it disposes beforehand of a host of false problems which inevitably bedevil a notion of inspiration that is too rigid and, in fact, ‘unscriptural’. A thorough understanding of Benoit’s theory of Inspiration will rid one of a certain vague uneasiness and will leave one free to savour to the full the beauty and the riches, human as well as divine, of the Bible. The second edition of Guide to the Bible, Vol. I gives us the first nine chapters of the new Initiation Biblique. True to the spirit of the original it is not a mere translation. The bibliography has been consistently brought up to date and the translators have added very many footnotes. Besides, there are appendices which cover the idea of inspiration in Protestantism and Islam, and which give a detailed analysis of the books of the Pentateuch and an extended treatment of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It would be superfluous to emphasise the excellent qualities of the work. The appearance of this new edition should be a reminder to Catholics of our incalculable debt to French biblical scholarship. (shrink)

New Blackfriars, Volume 103, Issue 1106, Page 433-435, July 2022.

New Blackfriars, Volume 103, Issue 1104, Page 165-169, March 2022.

Bioethics today has become a subject of wide public concern. Almost every one of its tenets is being seriously questioned and likely to be reformulated. Moreover, the pressure on bioethics continues to mount as the number of moral conflicts that buffet our society increases. What, then, will bioethics look like a decade from now? In the variety of approaches that have been employed in the practice of bioethics, one has dominated in the United States in the last decade and a (...) half. That approach is "principlism", the use of moral principles to address theoretical issues and to resolve conflicts at the bedside. Recently, however, bioethicists and others increasingly have realized the limitations of principlism and are calling for the development of alternative approaches such as phenomenology, hermeneutics, narrative ethics, casuistry, and virtue ethics. This book maps the debate over principlism and the future direction of U.S. bioethics. Part One consists of a sociological description of U.S. bioethics at the beginning of the 1990s, along with a defense of principlism by one of its major proponents. Part Two maps cross-cultural critiques of principlism, while Part Three covers five alternatives to it. Three essays in Part Four - by a bioethicist, a physician, and a theologian - reflect on the future of U.S. bioethics, principlism, and its alternatives. The Afterword emphasizes the place of religion and theological discourse in the alternative approaches and in the future of bioethics. (shrink)

CHAPTER ONE Augustine the Philosopher There are, according to Augustine in the early work entitled soliloquia, two principal (indeed, strictly speaking, ...

Exposure of man to chemical agents can occur intentionally, as in the treatment of disease, or inadvertently because the environment contains a wide range of synthetic or naturally occurring chemicals. The alkylating agents are a diverse group of compounds (Fig. 1) and comprise a good example of such xenobiotics, since much is known about their occurrence, and their biological effects include carcinogenicity, mutagenicity, toxicity and teratogenicity.Exposure to potentially carcinogenic alkylating agents such as nitrosamines may occur occupationally, from cigarette smoke, from (...) certain foodstuffs and even endogenously through the ingestion of the appropriate precursor chemicals.1 At the other extreme, the cytotoxic effects of agents such as the chloroethylating nitrosamides or mustards have been exploited in the design of certain antitumour drugs.2 The effectiveness of antitumour agents and the other, mostly adverse, biological effects of alkylating agents have been ascribed to their ability to damage cellular macromolecules, in particular DNA. This review concentrates on investigations carried out over the past two years on the role of DNA damage in carcinogenesis, but we shall see how recent advances in this area of research have also led to a better understanding of the mechanisms of the cytotoxic effects of alkylating antitumour agents. (shrink)