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St. Thomas Aquinas

St. Thomas Aquinas

(Detail from a painting by Fra Angelico, 15th Century)

Introduction

St. Thomas Aquinas (AKA Thomas of Aquin or Aquino) (c. 1225 - 1274) was an Italian philosopher and
theologian of the Medieval period. He was the foremost classical proponent of natural theology at the
the peak of Scholasticism in Europe, and the founder of the Thomistic school of philosophy and theology.

The philosophy of Aquinas has exerted enormous influence on subsequent Christian theology, especially
that of the Roman Catholic Church, but also Western philosophy in general. His most important and
enduring works are the "Summa Theologica", in which he expounds his systematic theology of the
"quinquae viae" (the five proofs of the existence of God), and the "Summa Contra Gentiles".

Life

Aquinas was born around 1225 to a noble family in the small town of Roccasecca, near Aquino, Italy, in
what was then the Kingdom of Sicily. His father was Count Landulph and his mother was Theodora,
Countess of Theate. His uncle, Sinibald, was abbot of the original Benedictine monastery at Monte
Cassino and Aquinas was expected to follow his uncle into that position. At the age of 5, Aquinas began
his early education at a monastery, and at the age of 16 he continued his studies at the University of
Naples.
At Naples, Aquinas soon began to veer towards the Dominican Order, much to the deep chagrin of his
family (who at one point seized and held him captive in an attempt to force him to toe the family line).
However, after the intervention of Pope Innocent IV, he became a Dominican monk in 1242.

In 1244, the promising young Aquinas was sent to study under Albertus Magnus in Cologne and then in
Paris, where he distinguished himself in arguments against the University's celebrated champion
Guillaume de St Amour (c. 1200 - 1272). Having graduated as a bachelor of theology in 1248, he
returned to Cologne as second lecturer and magister studentium and began his literary activity and
public life.

In 1256 Aquinas began many years of travel and lecturing on theology throughout France and Italy, along
with his friend St. Bonaventure of Bagnoregio (1221 - 1274). During this period, he was often called upon
to advise the reigning pontiff and the French King Louis VIII on affairs of state, and to represent the
Dominican Order in meetings and discussions. Despite preaching every day, he found time to write
homilies, disputations and lectures, and continued to work diligently on his great literary work, the
"Summa Theologica".

Aquinas was characterized as a humble, simple, peace-loving man, given to contemplation, and a lover
of poetry. He always maintained self-control and won over his opponents by his personality and great
learning. There were various reports by friars and monks of minor miracles concerning Aquinas (ranging
from levitation to voices from Heaven). He refused to participate in mortification of the flesh, which as a
Dominican Friar he was supposed to observe. He also refused out of hand such prestigious positions as
Archbishop of Naples and Abbot of Monte Cassino (although he was persuaded back to the University of
Naples in 1272).

In 1270, the Bishop of Paris issued an edict condemning a number of teachings derived from Aristotle or
from Arabic philosophers such as Averroës which were then current at the university, and the teachings
of Aquinas were among those targeted. The Dominican Order prudently moved him to Italy while the
investigations proceeded in Paris. In 1274, en route to attend the Second Council of Lyons to attempt to
settle the differences between the Greek and Latin churches, Aquinas fell ill and eventually died at the
nearby Cistercian monastery of Fossa Nuova.

In 1277, three years after Aquinas' death, the Bishop of Paris and the Bishop of Oxford issued another,
more detailed, edict which condemned a series of Thomas's theses as heretical, on the grounds of the
orthodox Augustinian theology which considered human reason inadequate to understand the will of
God. As a result of this condemnation, Aquinas was excommunicated posthumously (a landmark in the
history of medieval philosophy and theology), and it took many years for his reputation to recover from
this censure.

In 1324, fifty years after Thomas Aquinas' death, Pope John XXII in Avignon pronounced him a saint of
the Catholic church, and his theology began its rise to prestige. In 1568, he was named a Doctor of the
Church. In 1879, Pope Leo XIII stated that Aquinas' theology was a definitive exposition of Catholic
doctrine, and directed clergy to take the teachings of Aquinas as t

Aquinas was a Christian theologian, but he was also an Aristotelian and an Empiricist, and he
substantially influenced these two streams of Western thought. He believed that truth becomes known
through both natural revelation (certain truths are available to all people through their human nature
and through correct human reasoning) and supernatural revelation (faith-based knowledge revealed
through scripture), and he was careful to separate these two elements, which he saw as complementary
rather than contradictory in nature. Thus, although one may deduce the existence of God and His
attributes through reason, certain specifics (such as the Trinity and the Incarnation) may be known only
through special revelation and may not otherwise be deduced.

His two great works are the "Summa Contra Gentiles" (often published in English under the title "On thr
Truth of the Catholic Faith"), written between 1258 and 1264, and the "Summa Theologica"
("Compendium of Theology"), written between 1265 and 1274. The former is a broadly-based
philosophical work directed at non-Christians; the latter is addressed largely to Christians and is more a
work of Christian theology.

Aquinas saw the raw material data of theology as the written scriptures and traditions of the Catholic
church, which were produced by the self-revelation of God to humans throughout history. Faith and
reason are the two primary tools which are both necessary together for processing this data in order to
obtain true knowledge of God. He believed that God reveals himself through nature, so that rational
thinking and the study of nature is also the study of God (a blend of Aristotelian Greek philosophy with
Christian doctrine).

From his consideration of what God is not, Aquinas proposed five positive statements about the divine
qualities or the nature of God:
God is simple, without composition of parts, such as body and soul, or matter and form.

God is perfect, lacking nothing.

God is infinite, and not limited in the ways that created beings are physically, intellectually, and
emotionally limited.

God is immutable, incapable of change in repect of essence and character.

God is one, such that God's essence is the same as God's existence.

Aquinas believed that the existence of God is neither self-evident nor beyond proof. In the "Summa
Theologica", he details five rational proofs for the existence of God, the "quinquae viae" (or the "Five
Ways"), some of which are really re-statements of each other:

The argument of the unmoved mover (ex motu): everything that is moved is moved by a mover,
therefore there is an unmoved mover from whom all motion proceeds, which is God.

The argument of the first cause (ex causa): everything that is caused is caused by something else,
therefore there must be an uncaused cause of all caused things, which is God.

The argument from contingency (ex contingentia): there are contingent beings in the universe which may
either exist or not exist and, as it is impossible for everything in the universe to be contingent (as
something cannot come of nothing), so there must be a necessary being whose existence is not
contingent on any other being, which is God.

The argument from degree (ex gradu): there are various degrees of perfection which may be found
throughout the universe, so there must be a pinnacle of perfection from which lesser degrees of
perfection derive, which is God.

The teleological argument or argument from design (ex fine): all natural bodies in the world (which are in
themselves unintelligent) act towards ends (which is characteristic of intelligence), therefore there must
be an intelligent being that guides all natural bodies towards their ends, which is God.

Aquinas believed that Jesus Christ was truly divine and not simply a human being or God merely
inhabiting the body of Christ. However, he held that Christ had a truly rational human soul as well,
producing a duality of natures that persisted even after the Incarnation, and that these two natures
existed simultaneously yet distinguishably in one real human body.

Aquinas defined the four cardinal virtues as prudence, temperance, justice and fortitude, which he held
are natural (revealed in nature) and binding on everyone. In addition, there are three theological virtues,
described as faith, hope and charity, which are supernatural and are distinct from other virtues in that
their object is God. Furthermore, he distinguished four kinds of law: eternal law (the decree of God that
governs all creation), natural law (human "participation" in eternal law, which is discovered by reason),
human law (the natural law applied by governments to societies) and divine law (the specially revealed
law in the scriptures).

For St. Thomas Aquinas, the goal of human existence is union and eternal fellowship with God. For those
who have experienced salvation and redemption through Christ while living on earth, a beatific vision
will be granted after death in which a person experience

Spinoza

Although he is usually counted, along with Descartes and Leibniz, as one of the three major Rationalists
of the 17th Century, his writings reveal the influence of such divergent sources as Stoicism, Jewish
Rationalism, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Descartes and a variety of heterodox religious thinkers of his day, and
he made significant contributions in virtually every area of philosophy. His pursuits were eclectic and his
thought was strikingly original, which makes him somewhat difficult to categorize.

His first published work, the "Principia philosophiae cartesianae" ("Principles of Cartesian Philosophy")
of 1663, was a systematic presentation of the philosophy of Descartes, to which he added his own
suggestions for its improvement, and it already contained many of the characteristic elements of his
later work. The "Tractatus Theologico-Politicus" ("Theologico-Political Treatise") of 1670 was an
examination of superficial popular religion in general and a vigorous critique of the militant
Protestantism practised in Holland at the time. He argued that Christians and Jews could live peaceably
together if they would only rise above the petty theological and cultural controversies that divided them.
The core of Spinoza's ethical views was encapsulated in his early "Tractatus de intellectus emendatione"
("Treatise on the Improvement of the Understanding").

But his major work was the monumental "Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata" ("Ethics"), an abstract
and difficult work, finished in 1676 but only published posthumously in 1677. Each of its five consituent
books comprises a long sequence of numbered propositions, each of which is deduced through a
method consciously modelled on the deductive logic used by the Greek mathematician Euclid in his
seminal work on geometry. Like Euclid, Spinoza started with a small set of self-evident definitions and
axioms, meticulously built up his deductive argument, and concluded each section with a triumphant
"QED" ("quod erat demonstrandum", or "that which was to be demonstrated"). It is sometimes held up
as a supreme example of a self-contained metaphysical system, whose object is nothing less than to
explain everything, the total scheme of reality.
As a young man, Spinoza had subscribed to Descartes' belief in Dualism, that body and mind are two
separate substances. However, he later changed his view (as demonstrated in the "Ethics") and asserted
that they were not separate, but a single identity, and that body and mind were just two names for the
same reality. Starting from Descartes' definition of substance as "that which requires nothing other than
itself in order to exist", Spinoza's conclusion was quite different from that of Descartes: where Descartes
saw the one underlying substance as being God, Spinoza saw it as the totality of everything (in other
words, Nature). All of reality, then, was really just one substance, and all apparently different objects
were merely facets or aspects (what he called "modes") of that underlying substance. In this way,
Spinoza refined Descartes' rather unsatisfactory treatment of the mind-body problem in Philosophy of
Mind by positing that the physical and mental worlds (extension and consciousness) were essentially one
and the same thing. This was therefore a kind of Monism, as opposed to Descartes' Dualism, (more
specifically, it was a historically significant solution known as Neutral Monism).

Following on from this analysis, then, Spinoza saw God and Nature as just two names for the same
reality of the universe, essentially a kind of Pantheism. Thus, he believed that there was just one set of
rules governing the whole of reality, and that the basis of the universe was a single substance, of which
all lesser entities are actually "modes" or modifications. Spinoza's "God" (or "Nature") was therefore a
being of infinitely many attributes, of which extension and thought were but the two that we can
understand. He envisaged a God that was not a transcendent creator of the universe who rules over the
universe by providence, but a God that itself is the deterministic system of which everything in nature is
a part. Thus, for Spinoza, God effectively is the infinite natural world and He has no separate
"personality", nor is he in some way outside of Nature (supernatural).

Spinoza was a thoroughgoing determinist who held that absolutely everything that happens occurs
through the operation of necessity, leaving absolutely no room for free will and spontaneity. For him,
even human behaviour is fully determined, and freedom (or what we presume to be free will) is limited
to merely our capacity to know that we are determined and to understand why we act as we do. Nothing
happens by chance in Spinoza's world, and reason does not work in terms of contingency.

Spinoza's Ethics have much in common with Stoicism in as much as both philosophies sought to fulfill a
therapeutic role by instructing people how to attain happiness (Eudaimonism).

Spinoza's Ethics have much in common with Stoicism in as much as both philosophies sought to fulfill a
therapeutic role by instructing people how to attain happiness (Eudaimonism). He asserted that the
"highest good" was knowledge of God, which was capable of bringing freedom from fear and the tyranny
of the passions, and ultimately true blessedness. However, Spinoza differed sharply from the Stoics in his
rejection of their contention that reason could overcome emotion. He contended that an emotion can
only be displaced or overcome by a stronger emotion, and that knowledge of the true causes of passive
emotions (those not rationally understood) could transform them into active emotions (ones that can be
rationally understood), thus anticipating by over 200 years one of the key ideas of the psychoanalysis of
Sigmund Freud (1856 - 1939).

Spinoza took the Moral Relativist position that nothing is intrinsically good or bad, except to the extent
that it is subjectively perceived to be by the individual. In a completely ordered world where "necessity"
reigns, the concepts of Good and Evil can have no absolute meaning. Everything that happens comes
from the essential nature of objects or of God/Nature, and so, according to Spinoza, reality is perfection,
and everything done by humans and other animals is also excellent and divine. If circumstances
sometimes appear unfortunate or less than perfect to us, it is only because of our inadequate
conception of reality. He asserted that sense perception, though practical and useful for rhetoric, is
inadequate for discovering universal truth.

While it is easy to see why both the Jewish and Christian authorities of Spinoza's day felt both appalled
and threatened by his ideas, his philosophy did hold an attraction for late 18th Century Europeans in that
it provided an alternative to Materialism, Atheism and Deism. Three of Spinoza's ideas in particular
strongly appealed to them: the unity of all that exists; the regularity and order of all that happens; and
the identity of spirit and nature.

Leibniz wrote a great deal, but published hardly any of it during his life, his philosophy seeming to take a
back seat to his many other interests and duties. Other than the "Théodicée" of 1710 (the only treatise
Leibniz published in his lifetime), his philosophical writings consist mainly of a multitude of short pieces
(journal articles, manuscripts published long after his death, and many letters to many correspondents),
giving his philosophical thinking a fragmented appearance.

His first philosophical work, the "Discours de métaphysique" ("Discourse on Metaphysics"), written in
1686 but not actually published until the 19th Century, was a commentary on a running dispute between
the French Rationalists Nicolas Malebranche and Antoine Arnauld (1612 - 1694), and led to an extensive
and valuable correspondence with Arnauld (covering, among other matters, one of Leibniz's lifelong
aims, the reunification of the Christian Churches). Between 1695 and 1705, he wrote his "Nouveaux
essais sur l'entendement humain" ("New Essays on Human Understanding"), a lengthy commentary on
John Locke's 1690 "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding", although it too was not published until
1765, long after his death.
The "Théodicée", written in 1710, is as much theological as philosophical. It tries to justify the apparent
imperfections of the world and to tackle the Problem of Evil in a world created by a good God by
claiming that our world is optimal among all possible worlds, and that it must be the best possible and
most balanced world, simply because it was created by a perfect God. The optimism of this idea was
lampooned by Voltaire in his comic novella, "Candide", although the modern observations that led to the
"fine-tuned Universe" argument may seem to support his view.

Perhaps Leibniz's best known contribution to Metaphysics (as exposited in the "Monadologie" of 1714),
is his theory of monads, a form of dualistic Idealism sometimes known as Panpsychism or Parallelism.
Monads are the ultimate elements of the universe: eternal, immaterial, indecomposable, individual,
non-interacting, subject to their own laws, and each reflecting the entire universe in a pre-established
harmony (effectively "programmed" in advance by God, whom he called the "central monad", to
"harmonize" with each other). Unlike atoms, monads possess no material or spatial character, and are
completely mutually independent, so that interactions among monads are only apparent. For Leibniz,
then, everything in the material world that we see and touch are actually only phenomena, merely
appearances or by-products of the real world, which is in fact an infinite array of these non-material
monads. In some ways, this is not unlike the very modern idea of the universe being ultimately
composed of energy.

According to Leibniz's theory, human beings and even God himself are monads, and the existence of God
can be inferred from the harmony prevailing among all other monads (because it is God who wills the
pre-established harmony). Thus, the external world is ideal (in the philosophical sense of Idealism) and
phenomenal (in the philosophical sense of Phenomenology), and its motion is the result of a dynamic
force (the pre-established harmony or, effectively, God) on these simple and immaterial monads.
Although Leibniz claimed to believe in the existence of free will, his programme is essentially a
deterministic one.

Leibniz also used his theory of monads in an attempt to overcome the problematic interaction between
mind and matter arising in the system of Descartes (the so-called mind-body problem in Philosophy of
Mind). Indeed, he developed the theory largely to address it, unimpressed as he was with Spinoza's
earlier solution to this problem, with its lack of individuation and its representation of individual
creatures as merely accidental. In Leibniz's conception of things, there is really no need for the concept
of causality at all, as everything is pre-arranged and organized by the omnipotent God himself. Leibniz's
theory was, however, considered somewhat arbitrary and eccentric, even in his own day.
Towards the end of his life, Leibniz published an essay called "Principles of Nature and Grace, Based on
Reason" (1714), in which he put forth his Principle of Sufficient Reason, which states that there is an
explanation for every fact and an answer to every question, however intractible they may appear.
Following from this, he was perhaps the first philosopher to explicitly ask the question "Why is there
something rather than nothing?", a fundamental and apparently intractible question that others had
shied away from. His answer to this question, perhaps disappointingly, was the rather formulaic one of
God, and when asked for an explanation for God's existence his equally unsatisfactory answer was that
God is a necessary being, such that his non-existence would be logically impossible, a response that
Hume and others took immediate issue with.

mmanuel Kant (1724-1804) is one of the most influential philosophers in the history of Western
philosophy. His contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics have had a profound
impact on almost every philosophical movement that followed him. This article focuses on his
metaphysics and epistemology in one of his most important works, The Critique of Pure Reason. A large
part of Kant’s work addresses the question “What can we know?” The answer, if it can be stated simply,
is that our knowledge is constrained to mathematics and the science of the natural, empirical world. It is
impossible, Kant argues, to extend knowledge to the supersensible realm of speculative metaphysics.
The reason that knowledge has these constraints, Kant argues, is that the mind plays an active role in
constituting the features of experience and limiting the mind’s access only to the empirical realm of
space and time.

Kant responded to his predecessors by arguing against the Empiricists that the mind is not a blank slate
that is written upon by the empirical world, and by rejecting the Rationalists’ notion that pure, a priori
knowledge of a mind-independent world was possible. Reason itself is structured with forms of
experience and categories that give a phenomenal and logical structure to any possible object of
empirical experience. These categories cannot be circumvented to get at a mind-independent world, but
they are necessary for experience of spatio-temporal objects with their causal behavior and logical
properties. These two theses constitute Kant’s famous transcendental idealism and empirical realism.

Kant’s contributions to ethics have been just as substantial, if not more so, than his work in metaphysics
and epistemology. He is the most important proponent in philosophical history of deontological, or duty
based, ethics. In Kant’s view, the sole feature that gives an action moral worth is not the outcome that is
achieved by the action, but the motive that is behind the action. And the only motive that can endow an
act with moral value, he argues, is one that arises from universal principles discovered by reason. The
categorical imperative is Kant’s famous statement of this duty: “Act only according to that maxim by
which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”
Jeremy Bentham was an English philosopher and political radical. He is primarily known today for his
moral philosophy, especially his principle of utilitarianism, which evaluates actions based upon their
consequences. The relevant consequences, in particular, are the overall happiness created for everyone
affected by the action. Influenced by many enlightenment thinkers, especially empiricists such as John
Locke and David Hume, Bentham developed an ethical theory grounded in a largely empiricist account of
human nature. He famously held a hedonistic account of both motivation and value according to which
what is fundamentally valuable and what ultimately motivates us is pleasure and pain. Happiness,
according to Bentham, is thus a matter of experiencing pleasure and lack of pain.

Although he never practiced law, Bentham did write a great deal of philosophy of law, spending most of
his life critiquing the existing law and strongly advocating legal reform. Throughout his work, he critiques
various natural accounts of law which claim, for example, that liberty, rights, and so on exist independent
of government. In this way, Bentham arguably developed an early form of what is now often called "legal
positivism." Beyond such critiques, he ultimately maintained that putting his moral theory into
consistent practice would yield results in legal theory by providing justification for social, political, and
legal institutions.

Bentham's influence was minor during his life. But his impact was greater in later years as his ideas were
carried on by followers such as John Stuart Mill, John Austin, and other consequentialists.

Nietzsche was a German philosopher, essayist, and cultural critic. His writings on truth, morality,
language, aesthetics, cultural theory, history, nihilism, power, consciousness, and the meaning of
existence have exerted an enormous influence on Western philosophy and intellectual history.

Nietzsche spoke of "the death of God," and foresaw the dissolution of traditional religion and
metaphysics. Some interpreters of Nietzsche believe he embraced nihilism, rejected philosophical
reasoning, and promoted a literary exploration of the human condition, while not being concerned with
gaining truth and knowledge in the traditional sense of those terms. However, other interpreters of
Nietzsche say that in attempting to counteract the predicted rise of nihilism, he was engaged in a
positive program to reaffirm life, and so he called for a radical, naturalistic rethinking of the nature of
human existence, knowledge, and morality. On either interpretation, it is agreed that he suggested a
plan for “becoming what one is” through the cultivation of instincts and various cognitive faculties, a
plan that requires constant struggle with one’s psychological and intellectual inheritances.
Nietzsche claimed the exemplary human being must craft his/her own identity through self-realization
and do so without relying on anything transcending that life—such as God or a soul. This way of living
should be affirmed even were one to adopt, most problematically, a radical vision of eternity, one
suggesting the "eternal recurrence" of all events. According to some commentators, Nietzsche advanced
a cosmological theory of “will to power.” But others interpret him as not being overly concerned with
working out a general cosmology. Questions regarding the coherence of Nietzsche's views--questions
such as whether these views could all be taken together without contradiction, whether readers should
discredit any particular view if proven incoherent or incompatible with others, and the like--continue to
draw the attention of contemporary intellectual historians and philosophers.