Um estudo sobre a razão prática em Tomás de Aquino, analisada sob a luz de seus primeiros princípios. Parte-se da pergunta de como o ser humano descobre o que é bom e mau para si o que requer cobrir dois momentos distintos de sua obra: o tratamento dado à synderesis e, em seguida, como os princípios por ela apreendidos se articulam e como funcionam na mente humana. Defende-se, por fim, que é um equívoco ler os princípios da lei natural como primariamente normativos no sentido deontológico do termo. São, antes, diretivos, conferindo à razão prática individual os bens de cuja posse depende a felicidade humana. As implicações dessa leitura para a ética de Tomás de Aquino que aparece agora sob forte roupagem eudaimonista são, por fim, analisadas. / The present study focuses on Aquinass exposition of practical reason, analyzed in light of its first principles. We begin with the question of how an individual human being discovers what is good and bad for himself, which is at the root of natural law, that is, rationally grounded morality. This requires covering two distinct moments of Aquinass work: his treatment of synderesis and, after it, how the principles apprehended by synderesis relate to one another and what kind of knowledge they give to the human mind. It is argued that it is a mistake to see the first practical principles as normative in the deontological sense. Rather, they are directive, furnishing practical reason with the goods on whose possession human happiness depends. The implications of this reading for Aquinass ethics are then analyzed and his ethical stance emerges as strongly eudaimonistic.

Esta tese tem como objetivo expor a teoria cartesiana da criação, desenvolvida nas Meditações. Começando pela submissão dos fundamentos da tradição filosófica (o realismo e o idealismo) ao método da dúvida, a crítica cartesiana acabará por atingir a cosmologia cristã, consolidada por Tomás de Aquino sobre o realismo aristotélico, bem como as soluções idealistas favoráveis à existência de verdades, essências e naturezas eternas e incriadas. A partir daí, Descartes desenvolve uma concepção de criação cuja universalidade envolve a ideia de Deus, a coisa pensante, as coisas simples e universais e as coisas materiais. A universalidade da criação é uma exigência da ideia cartesiana de Deus como ser sumamente perfeito. Entendida como perfeição, a onipotência divina requer a dependência absoluta de todas as coisas em relação a Deus enquanto causa eficiente, isto é, causa criadora. Do contrário, há uma clara negação da onipotência e, consequentemente, da perfeição divina. Pretendemos ainda mostrar que a teoria cartesiana da criação é o fundamento da teoria da livre criação das verdades eternas, que alguns intérpretes consideram incompatível com o sistema cartesiano. / This thesis aims to expose the Cartesian theory of creation, developed in Meditations. Submitting the foundations of the philosophical tradition, namely realism and idealism, to the methodical doubt, Cartesian criticism will eventually reaches out the Christian cosmology, consolidated by Thomas Aquinas on Aristotelian realism, as well as the favorable idealistic solutions to the existence of truths, essences and eternal and uncreated natures. From there, Descartes develops a conception of creation whose universality involves the idea of God, the thinking thing, the simple and universal things and the material things. The universality of creation is a requirement of the Cartesian idea of God as a supremely perfect being. Understood as perfection, divine omnipotence requires the absolute dependence of all things in relation to God while efficient cause, that is, creative cause. Otherwise, there is a clear denial of the omnipotence and consequently of the divine perfection. We also intend to show that the Cartesian theory of creation is the foundation of the theory of the creation of the eternal truths, that some interpreters consider incompatible with the Cartesian system.

At the center of all medieval Christian accounts of both metaphysics and ethics stands the claim that being and goodness are necessarily connected, and that grasping the nature of this connection is fundamental to explaining the nature of goodness itself. In that vein, medievals offered two distinct ways of conceiving this necessary connection: the nature approach and the creation approach. The nature approach explains the goodness of an entity by an appeal to the entity’s nature as the type of thing it is, and the extent to which it fulfills or perfects the potentialities in its nature. In contrast, the creation approach explains both the being and goodness of an entity by an appeal to God’s creative activity: on this view, both a thing’s being and its goodness are derived from, and explained in terms of, God’s being and goodness. Studies on being and goodness in medieval philosophy often culminate in the synthesizing work of Thomas Aquinas, the leading Dominican theologian at Paris in the 13th century, who brought together these two rival theories about the nature of goodness. Unfortunately, few have paid attention to a distinctively Franciscan approach to the topic around this same time period. My dissertation provides a remedy to this oversight by means of a thorough examination of John Duns Scotus’s approach to being and goodness—an approach that takes into account the shifting tide toward voluntarism (both ethical and theological) at the University of Paris in the late 13th century. I argue that Scotus is also a synthesizer of sorts, harmonizing the two distinct nature approaches of Augustine and Aristotle with his own unique ideas in ways that have profound implications for the future of medieval ethical theorizing, most notably, in his rejection of both the natural law and ethical eudaimonism of Thomas Aquinas. After the introduction, I analyze the nature of primary goodness—the goodness that Scotus thinks is convertible with being and thus a transcendental attribute of everything that exists. There, I compare the notion of convertibility of being and goodness among Scotus and his contemporaries. While Scotus agrees with the mainstream tradition that being and goodness are necessarily coextensive properties of everything that exists, he argues that being and good are formally rather than conceptually distinct. I argue that when the referents of being and good are considered, both views amount to the same thing. But when the concepts of being and good are considered, positing a formal distinction does make a good deal of difference: good does not simply add something to being conceptually, but formally: it is a quasi-attribute of being that exists in the world independently of our conception of it. Thus Scotus’s formal distinction provides a novel justification for the necessary connection between being and goodness. Furthermore, I argue that Scotus holds an Augustinian hierarchy of being. This hierarchical ranking of being is based upon the magnitude or perfection of the thing’s nature. But since goodness is a necessarily coextensive perfection of being, it too comes in degrees dependent upon the type of being, arranged in terms of the same hierarchy. This account, while inspired by Augustine’s hierarchical nature approach, is expressed in terms of Aristotelian metaphysics. But this necessary connection between being and goodness in medieval philosophy faced a problem: Following Augustine, medievals claimed that “everything that exists is good insofar as it exists.”’ But how is that compatible with the existence of sinful acts: if every being, in so far as it has being, is good, then every act, insofar as it has being, is good. But if sinful acts are bad, then we seem to be committed to saying either that bad acts are good, or that not every act, in so far as it has being, is good. This first option seems infelicitous; the second denies Augustine’s claims that “everything that exists is good.” Lombard and his followers solve this problem by distinguishing ontological goodness from moral goodness and claiming that moral goodness is an accident of some acts and does not convert with being. So the sinful act, qua act, is (ontologically) good. But the sinful act, qua disorder is (morally) bad. Eventually, three distinctive grades of accidental or moral goodness will be applied to human acts: generic, circumstantial, and meritorious. I argue that Scotus follows the traditional account of Peter Lombard, Philip the Chancellor, Albert the Great, and Bonaventure in distinguishing ontological goodness from moral goodness, and claiming that only the former converts with being, while the latter is an accident of the act. Aquinas, in contrast, writing in the heyday of the Aristotelian renaissance, focuses instead on the role of the act in the agent’s perfection and posits his convertibility thesis of being and goodness in the moral as well as the metaphysical realm. Thus, when one begins a late medieval discussion with Aquinas, and then considers what Scotus says, it seems as though Scotus is the radical who departs from the conservative teachings of Aquinas. And this is just false: we need to situate both Aquinas and Scotus within the larger Sentence Commentary tradition extending back to Peter Lombard and his followers in order to understand their agreement and divergence from the tradition. Next, I turn the discussion to Scotus’s analysis of rightness and wrongness. I first explore the relationship between rightness and God’s will, and situate Scotus’s account within contemporary discussions of theological voluntarism. I argue Scotus holds a restricted-causal-will-theory —whereby only contingent deontological propositions depend upon God’s will for their moral status. In contrast to Aquinas, Scotus denies that contingent moral laws—the Second Table of the 10 Commandments (such do not steal, do not murder, etc.)—are grounded in human nature, and thus he limits the extent to which moral reasoning can move from natural law to the moral obligations we have toward one another. In conjunction with these claims, I argue that Scotus distinguishes goodness from rightness: An act’s rightness will depend on its conformity to either (1) a necessary moral truth or (2) God’s commanding some contingent moral truth. The moral goodness of an act, in contrast, involves right reason’s determination of the suitability or harmony of all factors pertaining to the act. In establishing this, also argue that much of the disparity among contemporary Scotus scholarship on the question of whether Scotus was a divine command theorist or natural law theorist should be directly attributed to a failure to recognize Scotus’s separation of the goodness of an act from the rightness of an act.

Ce travail interroge la constitution d’une métaphysique de la personne humaine dans la pensée de Thomas d’Aquin. Si on s’accorde généralement à reconnaître que la réflexion thomasienne sur la personne a eu une influence décisive sur la compréhension moderne de l’homme comme personne, on constate également que l’expression personne humaine n’est pas familière de l’Aquinate et ne fait l’objet d’aucun développement particulier dans son œuvre. En effet, l’approche métaphysique de la personne humaine dans le corpus thomasien est logée dans les textes théologiques dans lesquels Thomas, suivant une démarche analogique, définit la personne divine en conservant l’affinité avec l'homme. Ce travail de conceptualisation, à la charnière de la théologie et de l’anthropologie, s’inscrit dans le sillage de la thématique chrétienne de l’homme image de Dieu. Dans le monde latin, les diverses composantes de cette riche tradition se rassemblent à la fin du VIe siècle autour de la figure de Boèce. Au détours des analogies sur les mystères de la Trinité et du Christ, Thomas est conduit à repenser la métaphysique de la substance et de la subsistence, héritage de la traduction de la notion grecque d'hypostase effectué par Boèce. Au bout du compte, ces analogies n’aboutissent pas seulement à une métaphysique de la personne subsistant dans la nature humaine, elles fondent ultimement une véritable métaphysique de la personne humaine en définissant une manière humaine de subsister. / This work examines the formation of a metaphysics of the human person in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. On one side it is generally agreed that the Thomistic thought on the person had a decisive influence on the modern understanding of man as a person, on the other side the term human person is not familiar of Aquinas and not subject to any particular development in his work. Indeed, the metaphysical approach of the human person in the Thomistic corpus is found in the theological texts in which Thomas defines the divine person maintening the affinity with man. This work of conceptualization deals with the Christian theme of man image of God using the analogy. In the Latin world, the various components of this rich tradition come together in the late sixth century around the figure of Boethius. From analogies on the mysteries of the Trinity and of Christ, Thomas is led to rethink the metaphysics of substance and subsistence inherited from the translation of the Greek notion of hypostasis made by Boethius. Ultimately, these analogies do not lead only to a metaphysics of the person subsisting in human nature, they found a true metaphysics of the human person by defining a human subsisting way.

Doctorat en philosophie et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Tomáš Adamovič "De magistro" Tomáše Akvinského "De magistro" by Thomas Aquinas Abstract The topic of the submitted Master Thesis is the "De magistro" question from the Disputed Questions on Truth by Thomas Aquinas. The aim of the work is to introduce basic thoughts of this text and present them in a broader context (compared to Plato, Augustine and heterodox Aristotelianisms). The herein applied methods include an analysis of the text, occasionally combined with compilation of Thomas Aquinas and comparison with the works of other authors. In the analysed text, Thomas Aquinas explains his concept of teaching, argues for the statements that a man can be called a teacher, that no one can be called a teacher of himself, that a man can be taught by an angel, and that teaching pertains more to the active life than to the contemplative life. The Thesis is supplemented with some questions of the present author. Keywords teacher, first principles, cognition, Thomas Aquinas, philosophy of education

M.A. (English) / This study applies st Thomas Aquinas's principles of love to William Shakespeare's Hamlet in order to establish the moral bases of the causes and effects of the actions of the characters in the play. The dissertation is divided into two parts comprising six chapters. The first part, chapter one, establishes the availability of st Thomas's precepts in the English Renaissance. The second part, comprising chapters two to six, applies st Thomas's principles relating to charitable and concupiscent love to the characters in the play. st Thomas's philosophy exerted a pervasive influence in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and was accessible to educated circles in England. In view of this influence, it is possible that Shakespeare was influenced by Thomist thought when he wrote Hamlet. In this study, the characters are grouped in terms of the Thomist principles of love that they exemplify in Hamlet, with Horatio providing a moral norm, Claudius being the epitome of evil, and the central character, Hamlet, being a source of moral ambiguity. The cast of supporting characters reflects the nuances of good and evil in the play. The study concludes that, while Shakespeare's characters are governed by established Thomist principles, the translation of moral abstracts into practice elicits moral dilemmas that are difficult to resolve.

In this dissertation, I argue for the philosophical consistency of Aquinas’ hybrid view of human souls - that is, the idea that human souls, and only human souls, are at once substantial forms and subsistent things. I contend that the best way to understand the ontological status of human souls according to Aquinas is by means of the concept of ‘subsistent parts’. Since Aquinas characterizes souls as parts of substances, I propose a mereological analysis of the different types of part in Aquinas, and I conclude that souls should be seen as metaphysical parts of substances. An influential contemporary view holds that Aquinas’ doctrine is inconsistent on the grounds that nothing could be an abstract (form) and a concrete (subsistent) at the same time. I respond to this view by denying the widespread notion that substantial forms are purely abstract entities. I hold that the best way to make sense of Aquinas’ twofold approach to human souls is by saying that substantial forms possess an element of concreteness which is accounted for by the fundamental relationship between form and being. Finally, I address the question of taxonomy: how can we classify Aquinas’ view of the soul-body relation in light of the concepts that are currently used in philosophy of mind. I argue that the notion of a subsistent part entails the concept of ‘part-dualism’, which I present as standing midway between substance-dualism and nonreductive materialism, and also as being ontologically richer than property-dualism. I conclude this dissertation with a refutation of the idea championed by some prominent scholars that the existence of the soul is sufficient for the existence of the person.

Thesis advisor: James F. Keenan / The queer natural law is an ethical framework at the intersection of queer theory, queer theology, and the natural law ethical tradition largely used in Roman Catholic moral theology. As a framework, queer natural law adopts the eudaimonist, realist, and teleological emphases of the natural law virtue ethics tradition exemplified by Thomas Aquinas and restored by revisionist natural lawyers, and it refines the operations of these normative emphases through queer theory’s critical investigation of conceptual normativity. Conceived as a dynamic dialectical enterprise, queer theory offers to the natural law tradition a toolset for a more comprehensive assessment of human nature, specifically by taking a critical look at the operation of heteronormativity in normative frameworks. Symbiotically, the natural law tradition offers to queer theory a scaffold for conceiving of an ethics based in equality and nondiscrimination that allows queer theory’s ethical impulses to avoid postmodernity’s tendency towards circularity in ethical reasoning, precisely by grounding queer theory’s ethical motivations in a participatory discourse based in universal human goods. Using sexuality as a test case, this dissertation proceeds in four chapters. In the first, the notion of a queer natural law is explained in more detail. In the second, an account of human flourishing compatible with the queer natural law is articulated. In the third, a review of two natural law accounts of sexuality—magisterial and revisionist—is conducted. In the fourth and final chapter, differences between a revisionist natural law account of sexuality and a queer natural law account of sexuality are explored, defending the queer natural law thesis that the telos of sex is inter/personal pleasure. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

Man as homo moralis in Thomas Aquinas and according to it in evolutionary psychology In my thesis I want to compare two different views on human nature: The view of a Christian, enhanced by the theological ethics, and the view by a non-believer who deals with the origin and goal of the human life. These two points of view will be represented by the philosophy and theology of Thomas Aquinas on one hand and the evolutionary ethincs on the other hand. My goal is especially to point out the the difference between two views on the human being: typically religious one and typically secular one, and their opinion on the origin and purpose of it. I will try to answer the question on existence of such field, which is not explorable by tools of natural (evolutionary) ethics and which points to the "theological" dimension of human nature. On the other hand I will ask whether the traditional concepts of human nature can get by the exploration of the modern science and whether they can be enhanced by it. The outcome of my work should finally be above all practical: how to argue in behalf of the Christian point of view, dealing with the topics of bioethics or Human Rights as general. Keywords Human nature, finality, virtues, freedom, human dignity, Thomas Aquinas, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary ethics,...