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1. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 78 > Issue: 4
Peter M. Candler, Jr. Reading Immemorially: The Quaestio and the Paragraph in the Summa Theologiae
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What is the theological logic of the particular textual apparatus of the Summa theologiae, and what kinds of implications arise when the text is adapted to a modern format? In this essay, I argue that the peculiar use Thomas makes of the quaestio protests against any attempt to reify the “responses” of Thomas into self-contained monologues, as is often done in recent attempts to render the Summa intelligible to modern readers. Yet doing so undermines not only the historical contexts of the work, but much more importantly, it transforms what is essentially an itinerary of the soul’s return to God into a panoptic map of the commonplaces of theology. I suggest that for Thomas, the ordo disciplinae of the Summa corresponds to the circuit of the reader’s return to God as the source and end of all that is. The textual form, therefore, is not separable from the manuduction of the soul towards beatific vision.
2. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 78 > Issue: 4
Stephen Theron Justice: Legal and Moral Debt in Aquinas
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It is worthwhile to study Aquinas’s now classical treatment of the virtue of justice at the point where he distinguishes legal obligation, owed directly to the other, from moral obligations to give something to the other in virtue of what is due to oneself, one’s own decency of character (honestas). To fulfill these moral obligations is itself, on his view, a “legal” obligation to God. We might say it is directly owed to a proper order of decency requiring us at least quasi-legally, at second level, to be moral in the sense of kind, merciful, truthful, affable, and so forth. The distinction provides an argument against legally compelling a whole population to act thus morally towards others (thus incidentally diluting the sense of properly legal obligation), which is also an argument for supporting measures for refining moral awareness in schools and elsewhere. There is some concluding discussion of obligation as attaching primarily to the ends of action.
3. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 78 > Issue: 4
Guy Mansini On the Impossibility of a Demonstration of Theological Determinism
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The argument according to which there can be no demonstration that divine creative causality precludes human freedom unfolds in the context of St. Thomas’s understanding of choice and of the relation of God to the world. The gist of the argument is that any demonstration of the nature or characteristics of some effect from the cause of that effect supposes some knowledge of the nature ofthe cause. To the contrary, we know nothing of the nature of the divine causality, which is one with the divine being, and therefore etc. Before the argument, there is a word on God and second causes; on necessity and contingence; on transcendent causality; and on why it seems that creation precludes human freedom.
4. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 78 > Issue: 4
John Arthos “The Word is not Reflexive”: Mind and World in Aquinas and Gadamer
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Hans-Georg Gadamer’s appropriation of Augustine’s analogy of the inner word, the verbum interius, is by now a well-known theme in philosophical hermeneutics. But what has received scarcely any attention is the Thomist side of Gadamer’s appropriation. Two thirds of Gadamer’s analysis of the verbum interius in his magnum opus, Truth and Method, is devoted to Aquinas, who employs Augustine’s verbum in developing a theory of the mind. In particular, Gadamer gives great emphasis to the Thomist insistence on the “non-reflective” character of the inner word. Both Gadamer and Aquinas in their different historical contexts needed to combat subjectivism, which is what Aquinas is doing by insisting on the non-reflective character of the inner word. In this paper I examine this point ofconvergence to understand why their anti-subjectivism created such a deep common accord, and how this relates their projects to each other. How is the Scholastic involvement of the mind in the world analogous to the circular relation between language and understanding in hermeneutics, and where is the diff erence?
5. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 78 > Issue: 4
Jason J. Howard Kant and Moral Imputation: Conscience and the Riddle of the Given
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This article examines a largely neglected theme in Kant scholarship, which concerns the importance of conscience in understanding Kant’s account of moral imputation. It is my contention that conscience, contrary to many traditional interpretations of Kant, plays a central role in grasping the lived experience of moral agency insofar as it brings into light the burden that autonomy places upon us. When approached from this angle, Kant’s account of conscience, far from undermining the coherence of his position, actually bolsters it by showing his sensitivity to the ambiguity that underlies our moral experiences as embodied agents. The reason that conscience plays such a pivotal role for Kant stems from its intermediating function, which serves to reflect both the ontological reality of freedom, as well as that of the summum bonum, the relationship between happiness and virtue. What the Kantian account of conscience attests, then, is that it is only in discerning the limits imposed by our own facticity—our vulnerability as willing beings—that the weight of autonomy can properly reveal itself as the inexorable trial of being free.
6. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 78 > Issue: 4
Jeffrey L. Kosky Philosophy of Religion and Return to Phenomenology in Jean-Luc Marion: From God without Being to Being Given
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The phenomenological project of Jean-Luc Marion’s Being Given (namely, to free phenomenological possibility to the unconditional self-giving of all phenomena) should be distinguished from the theological project of his God without Being (to think God unconditionally and absolutely). In freeing phenomenological possibility to the self-giving of all phenomena (on the model of the saturated phenomenon), and in proposing a new figure of the subject who receives phenomena (the gifted), Marion’s phenomenology provides the conceptual means for a philosophy of religion that admits the phenomenonality of unconditional revelation. And yet, thereremain striking parallels between the unconditional, self-giving phenomenon as it is described in the phenomenology of Being Given and the unconditional, self-giving God of the theological God without Being. This essay concludes by offering a framework for interpreting these parallels without claiming that the saturated phenomenon transforms phenomenology into theology and without claiming that phenomenological givenness limits revelation to its philosophical possibility.
7. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 78 > Issue: 4
Christopher H. Toner Just War and Graduated Discrimination
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Th is paper investigates the question of legitimate targets in war and the traditional jus in bello principle of discrimination, which is generally interpreted to mean that a bright line must be drawn between combatants and noncombatants, and that only the former may be attacked directly.Michael Walzer and John Rawls have proposed a “supreme emergency exemption” to this principle, which permits the targeting of innocent people in emergencies such as that of Britain in late 1940. Rejecting this, the paper offers as an alternative a principleof “graduated discrimination.” This principle distinguishes three classes: innocents, combatants, and noncombatant belligerents (noncombatants are belligerent if they contribute directly to the enemy’s war effort). It holds that the bright line must still be drawn, but between innocents and belligerents, and that, among the latter, noncombatants may be attacked in severe conditions—even, in supreme emergencies, if their belligerent role is simply providing the regime with a popular mandate.
book reviews
8. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 78 > Issue: 4
Constant J. Mews The Cambridge Companion to Abelard
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9. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 78 > Issue: 4
Jeffrey Koperski The Design Revolution: Answering the Tough Questions About Intelligent Design
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10. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 78 > Issue: 4
Gordon Rixon Transcendent Experience: Phenomenology and Critique
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11. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 78 > Issue: 4
Joshua Parens Spinoza’s Book of Life: Freedom and Redemption in the Ethics
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12. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 78 > Issue: 4
Gerard Casey Les Anges et la Philosophie: Subjectivité et Fonction des Substances Séparée à la Fin du XIIIe Siècle
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books received
13. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 78 > Issue: 4
Books Received
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contents of volume
14. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 78 > Issue: 4
Contents of Volume 78 (2004)
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