Medieval Skepticism And The Claim To Metaphysical Knowledge Volume 6

Medieval Skepticism, and the Claim to Metaphysical Knowledge presents three sets of essays. The first is an exchange between Antoine Côté and Charles Bolyard over Siger of Brabant’s strategy to silence the skeptic by discriminating between nobler and lesser senses and grounding certitude in sense perceptions. Second is another scholarly exchange, between Rondo Keele and Jack Zupko, over what Keele describes as Walter Chatton’s attempt to discredit Ockhamist nominalism by means of both an ‘anti-razor’, employed by Chatton to prescribe ontological commitment, and an argument strategy based on iteration and infinite regress. The last group of essays explores issues that develop out of the metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas. Joshua Hochschild defends several key positions of Thomistic metaphysics against Anthony Kenny’s criticism that Aquinas’s treatment of being is inadequate, incoherent or even sophistic. Similarly, David Twetten, after laying out Aquinas’s nine versions of the proof for the Real Distinction between essence and esse, suggests one way in which Aquinas could meet the Aristotelian’s formidable ‘Question-Begging Objection’. Lastly, Scott M. Williams contends that to preserve God’s perfect knowledge of individual material creatures, Aquinas must alter his account of the unintelligibility of prime matter in the individuation of material creatures.

Contemporary introductions to the theme of self-knowledge too often trace its emergence in the history of philosophy to thinkers such as René Descartes and David Hume. Whereas Descartes conceives of self-knowledge as intimate and first-personal, Hume contends that it is limited to our awareness of our impressions and ideas. In point of fact, self-knowledge is a perennial theme. We may, for instance, trace the lineage of Hume and Descartes on these matters to Aristotle and Plato, respectively. This volume studies philosophical treatments of self-knowledge in the Medieval Latin West. It comprises two sets of papers; the first is taken from an author-meets-critics session on Therese Scarpelli-Cory’s Aquinas on Human Self Knowledge, which advances the thesis that Aquinas’s theory of self-knowledge wherein the intellect grasps itself in its activity bridges the divide between mediated and first-personal self-knowledge. The second set of papers discuss self-knowledge in terms of self-fulfilment. Authors look to Aquinas’s account of how we can know when we have acquired the virtues necessary for human happiness, as well as the medieval traditions of mysticism and theology, which offer accounts of transformative self-knowledge, the fulfilment that this brings to our emotional and physical selves, and the authority to teach and counsel about what this awareness confers.

Skepticism, Causality and Skepticism about Causality studies the interrelated themes of causality and skepticism in contemporary, early modern and medieval philosophy. Thomas Aquinas’s celebrated proofs of the existence of God (the Five Ways of the Summa Theologica) rely in part on an Aristotelian notion of synchronous causality, wherein the things that exist and persist require an accounting that ultimately terminates in the ongoing activity of a first mover, as the existence and persistence of an ecosystem is traceable to the sun. By contrast, in David Hume’s early modern account, causality consists in the regularity of successive events (a rolling billiard ball’s collision with a stationary one is always followed by the movement of the latter). Moreover, Newtonian and Einsteinian accounts respectively suggest that motion, once initiated, requires no explanation. In light of these developments, the first set of essays in this volume re-evaluates the Aristotelian paradigm and its relation to modern science, contending that in some fields (such as ecology, thermodynamics or information theory) contemporary science still preserves some intuitions about causality that support Aquinas’s deliberations. Hume’s skepticism about causality is heir to late medieval and early modern development that transformed not only the notion of causality in general, but also the idea of the causal connections between our cognitive faculties, God, and the world in particular, giving rise to extreme, solipsistic forms of skepticism, such as Descartes’ Demon skepticism. The second set of essays considers whether Aquinas’s thought would be susceptible in some ways to this form of skepticism, and what motivated, just a couple of generations later, the turn to epistemology already involving this sort of skepticism.

Metaphysical Themes, Medieval and Modern presents three sets of essays that engage the metaphysics of substance through a study of thought on this theme over the last eight centuries, shedding light on contemporary disputes as well as the history of thought leading into the modern era. Part I grows out of an author-meets-critics panel on Robert Pasnau’s Metaphysical Themes: 1274–1671 (OUP, 2011). Pasnau’s rich study delves into the four centuries wherein later medieval thought gives way to the modern period. Andrew Arlig reflects on Pasnau’s discussion of holenmers, entities such as God and the human soul, that are thought to exist as wholes in more or less disparate things. Paul Symington, on the other hand, treats the substance ontology of Thomas Aquinas in particular through a reflection on Aquinas’s understanding of the ontological status of the various modes or accidents of Aristotelian substances. Part II, “Substance Ontology, Medieval and Modern”, transitions to contemporary substance ontology. Travis Dumsday canvasses the field of debate over what is the substratum of change, contending that the Aristotelian, hylomorphic account of substance that views substances as matter-form composites remains the most robust. Gyula Klima, while agreeing with Dumsday’s conclusion, strengthens his argument with reference to the development of this bundle of problems within the recent history of analytic philosophy. Dumsday concludes with reflections on the relevance of substance ontology to natural theology, which, in turn, is the theme of Part III, “The Natural Theology of Thomas Aquinas”, wherein Alexander Hall and Michael Sirilla consider how Aquinas’s understanding of the divine substance bears on the logic of demonstration in his natural theology, concluding that contemporary Radical Orthodoxy readings that have Aquinas forfeit demonstrative proof that God exists misconstrue him on this point.

This author-meets-critics volume about Robert Pasnau’s After Certainty treats the history of epistemology, from Aristotle to the present. Pasnau presents this history as a gradual lowering of expectations regarding certain knowledge, the culmination of a sea change dating to the early-modern rejection of Aristotelian essentialism. The result, he concludes, is that contemporary epistemology is, more than any other branch of philosophy, estranged from its tradition. Pasnau’s After Certainty draws conclusions that are not just historical, but also systematic, an effort that led to a 2018 Parisian symposium to evaluate the text, collected here as a volume that stands alone as an intriguing work on the history of epistemology or together with After Certainty as an invaluable companion piece.

This volume considers the contemporary relevance of Aquinas’ thought and what parameters should influence its reception. It discusses the reception of Aquinas on creation ex nihilo and offers guidelines for reception in the fields of metaphysics and natural theology. Chapters on physics and philosophy of mind intersect with key modern debates. Contributions interpret Aquinas’ physics in light of contemporary findings and discuss his account of human self-awareness.

This volume considers the Aristotelian virtue-ethics tradition as it develops in the writings of Thomas Aquinas. Part One studies the types of virtues Aquinas believes are held by Christians in a state of grace. Aquinas’s intriguing account is apparently fraught with inconsistencies, which have split contemporary interpreters over not only how to understand Aquinas on this matter, but also as to whether it is even possible to provide a consistent interpretation of his doctrine. This book brings together scholarship that reflects the various sides of the debate. Part Two explores a Thomistic synthesis regarding Aquinas’s account of the good as telos or end that emerges in the seventeenth century, as well as what promise his virtue ethics holds today, arguing that Aquinas’ hylomorphic understanding of human beings as matter-form composites furnishes a robust moral accounting that seems unavailable to alternative, reductive materialist accounts.

Moses Maimonides and John Duns Scotus are key figures as regards the thirteenth-century philosophical tradition that developed out of the Western Christian reception of the Neo-Platonized Aristotelianism of Islamic and Jewish thinkers. Whereas the writings of Maimonides count among the received works that inaugurate and shape this span, the variety of conceptual instruments developed by Scotus arguably signal its end, preparing the way for the emergence of diverse fourteenth-century philosophical worldviews. Maimonides on God and Duns Scotus on Logic and Metaphysics explores the eponymous thinkers’ work across a variety of fields. In the domain of natural theology, Maimonides presses for creation de novo, adapting from the Islamic Kalām tradition what has come to be known as the Argument from Particularity, which deduces intelligent design when science seems, in principle, unable to account for states of affairs that conceivably needn’t obtain (to take an example from modern physics, the strength of the four fundamental forces). Part one of this volume contrasts Maimonides’s and Aquinas’s parallel treatments of this and other proof strategies still employed by contemporary philosophers. Part two, on Scotus, includes discussion of the authenticity of the logical writings attributed to him, the evolution of his thought in this field against the backdrop of various thirteenth-century developments, the types of Aristotelian universals theorized by Scotus, his semantics of theological discourse and ontology of possible entities.