Posted in History, Philosophy, Thomas Aquinas, tagged aristotle, autonomy, Descartes, epistemology, metaphysics, Modernism, presuppositions on July 31, 2008 | 2 Comments »
The ambience of faith within which the believer engages in philosophy has seemed to some to entail that the believer cannot truly engage in philosophy at all. This criticism is rooted in quite modern notions of how philosophy begins. Unlike the assumptions … that the philosopher begins with truths everyone already knows – since Descartes [...]
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I find it interesting that Aristotle did not consider himself to be reasoning autonomously as if all truth is relative to the knower who creates the rules by which that truth is known. He did not think he was God. He was seeking the First Cause of things, through the effects that imply its existence. [...]
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Posted in Augustine, Bible, Doctrine of God, History, John Calvin, Philosophy, Thomas Aquinas, tagged Cornelius Van Til, Exodus, Frame, hermeneutic, Medieval, metaphysics, Reason/Revelation on July 28, 2008 | 4 Comments »
**The purpose of this post is not to give a grammatical historical interpretation of the above mentioned text nor to set up the opinion of the Reformers et al as the bastion of Truth. The purpose is to demonstrate that certain traditions of interpretation were carried on by the Reformers et al, thus marking a [...]
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Posted in 20th Cent. Theologians, Cornelius Van Til, Doctrine of God, History, Medieval Authors, Philosophy, Thomas Aquinas, tagged about, Frame, itinerary, Oliphint on July 19, 2008 | 1 Comment »
I’ll be in Florida all of next week, so I will probably not be posting anything.
However, I do have plans of things to discuss in the weeks following. As you can probably tell by the amount of information on Aquinas on this blog, I really like his stuff. Also, I think Aquinas’s philosophical theology is [...]
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This looks to be a promising read and a great resource for understanding Aquinas’s philosophical theology from – Oxford University Press (June, 2008 ). Here’s a brief description from the publisher:
This book offers an in-depth examination of what divine simplicity means for Aquinas and how he argues for its claims. Simplicity and other divine predicates [...]
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Posted in Bible, Mind/Body, Philosophy, Sacramentology, Thomas Aquinas, tagged 1 Corinthians, baptism, forms, leithart, metaphysics, Wright on July 11, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Peter Leithart and others have noted the post-modern phenomenon of what I shall call the impenetrable ego. In his book on baptism Leithart notes that the idea that the ritual actually affects the person (socially, psychologically, ontologically) seems eerie because we have this idea that “who I am is deep down inside and cannot be touched by [...]
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Posted in Anselm, Bible, History, Metaphor, Mind/Body, Philosophy, Thomas Aquinas, tagged aristotle, epistemology, forms, John, metaphysics, nominalism, realism, skepticism on July 10, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
The whole realist/nominalist argument among the Medieval philosophers often seems arcane and pedantic to us post-moderns. I mean, who cares if the form is in the thing or somewhere else? The whole idea of a form in things is way too “spooky.” Reality is given to us; we don’t need forms right? Well, without answering [...]
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Posted in Bible, Mind/Body, Philosophy, Thomas Aquinas, tagged apologetics, autonomy, contra Gentiles, epistemology, Medieval, Reason/Revelation on July 9, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Rudi Te Velde says that Aquinas did not write the Summa contra Gentiles as a missionary manual for Dominicans to evangelize the Muslims. This timeless work was written to refute certain errors that had come to light in the Medieval context. These errors go beyond that of the Muslim faith.
The list of errors is not restricted to contemporary [...]
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In a previous post I quoted Fergus Kerr who noted that Aquinas’s epistemology presupposed theology. Because the Christian God created the world and creatures in order for them both to interact on an essential level the world can be known by man. Norman Kretzmann’s article “Infallibility, Error, and Ignorance” (in the 1992 Supplementary Volume 17 [...]
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