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1. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 93 > Issue: 4
Travis Dumsday The Internal Unity of Natural Kinds: Assessing Oderberg’s Neo-Scholastic Account
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It is often assumed that the essence of a natural kind is complex, being such as to include (or to wholly consist of) multiple fundamental properties. For instance, perhaps the essence of the kind “electron” includes both negative charge and a precise rest mass, where neither of these is derivable from the other, nor derivable from some other foundational property. This assumption raises the ‘unity problem’: how to explain what unifies or holds together these properties. One important answer is developed by David Oderberg. His model draws on insights from both analytic metaphysics and the Scholastic tradition. I provide a summary of his solution to the unity problem and point to a potential worry it faces. I conclude by adverting to an alternative solution that would still fit within Oderberg’s overall system.
2. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 93 > Issue: 4
Jeff Steele, Thomas Williams Complexity without Composition: Duns Scotus on Divine Simplicity
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John Duns Scotus recognizes complexity in God both at the level of God’s being and at the level of God’s attributes. Using the formal distinction and the notion of “unitive containment,” he argues for real plurality in God, but in a way that permits him to affirm the doctrine of divine simplicity. We argue that his allegiance to the doctrine of divine simplicity is purely verbal, that he flatly denies traditional aspects of the doctrine as he had received it from Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas, and that his denial of the doctrine allows him to escape certain counterintuitive consequences of the doctrine without falling afoul of the worries that motivated the doctrine in the first place. We note also an important consequence of Scotus’s approach to simplicity for the correct interpretation of his view of the foundation of morality.
3. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 93 > Issue: 4
Garrett R. Smith The Analogy of Being in the Scotist Tradition
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It is widely believed today that John Duns Scotus’s doctrine of the univocity of being ushered in various deleterious philosophical and theological consequences that resulted in the negative features of modernity. Included in this common opinion, but not examined, is the belief that by affirming univocity Scotus thereby also denied the analogy of being (analogia entis). The present essay challenges this belief by recovering Scotus’s true position on analogy, namely that it obtains in the order of the real, and that complex concepts of creatures are analogically related to complex concepts of God. Scotus’s doctrine is then compared to the later Scotist tradition. The common opinion of the Scotist school from the fourteenth century onward followed Scotus’s position on analogy and considerably expanded upon his scattered remarks.
4. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 93 > Issue: 4
William E. Tullius Edith Stein and the Ethics of Renewal: Contributions to a Steinian Account of the Moral Task
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While Edith Stein never developed an ethics of her own, her work is nonetheless suggestive of an “ethics of renewal,” which appears in nuce in various moments of her corpus. First, in her phenomenological treatises, Stein analyzes the ethical development of personality in the unfolding of the personal “core” as responding to ever higher value domains. During the 1930s, this becomes a project of living out a moral vocation bestowed by God. In Endliches und ewiges Sein, the moral life becomes a work of renewal in connection with the Teresian metaphor of the “interior castle.” Morality, for Stein, emerges from out of an inner, personal work of the soul’s conscious refurbishment according to its essential structure by coming to terms with the value-world and with God. This paper will attempt to develop Stein’s account of the nature of the moral task as renewal and some implications for moral theory.
5. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 93 > Issue: 4
Frans Svensson Descartes on the Highest Good: Concepts and Conceptions
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What is the highest good? In the ethics of René Descartes, we can distinguish between at least seven different answers to this question: (a) God; (b) the sum of all the different goods that “we either possess . . . or have the power to acquire” (CSMK, 324/AT 5, 82); (c) free will; (d) virtue; (e) love of God; (f) wisdom; and (g) supernatural beatitude. In this paper, I argue that each of these answers, in Descartes’s view, provides the correct particular conception, relative to a distinct sense or concept of the highest good. Just as there are seven different conceptions of the highest good, according to Descartes, there are thus also seven different senses or concepts of the highest good.
6. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 93 > Issue: 4
William Matthew Diem Reasons for Acting and the End of Man as Naturally Known: Reconceiving Thomistic Axiology
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Aquinas implies that there is a single end of man, which can be known by reason from the moment of discretion and without the aid of revelation. This raises the problems: What is this end? How is it known? And how are the several natural, human goods related to this one end? The essay argues, first, that the naturally known end of man is the operation of virtue rather than God; second, that the virtue in question is, in the first place, moral rather than intellectual; third, that the sub-rational goods, though naturally desired, are ultimately valuable as instrumental means to further goods; and finally, that there is, for Aquinas, a fundamental paradox at the heart of man’s moral experience, and that the axiology developed in the essay can help us to appreciate this paradox. It will also argue, in passing, that Aquinas’s axiology bears the clear mark of Cicero’s moderate Stoicism.
book reviews
7. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 93 > Issue: 4
John Macias Marxism, Ethics and Politics: The Work of Alasdair Macintyre. By John Gregson
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8. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 93 > Issue: 4
Michael J. Degnan The Quality of Life: Aristotle Revised. By Richard Kraut
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9. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 93 > Issue: 4
Kenneth L. Pearce Necessary Existence. By Alexander R. Pruss and Joshua L. Rasmussen
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10. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 93 > Issue: 4
Paul Seaton Leo Strauss and His Catholic Readers. Edited by Geoffrey M. Vaughan
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11. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 93 > Issue: 4
Contents of Volume 93 (2019)
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