God’s relationship to modalities poses a serious problem for the theist. If God determines modalities, then it seems that he can do anything. If, on the other hand, modalities determine God’s actions, then it seems that he is not genuinely free. Conceptualism offers a solution to this problem by maintaining that modalities are determined by what is conceivable for the intellects of the universe that God has chosen to create. Prior to the creation of intellects, there are no modalities restricting God’s choice. Consequently, God is genuinely free. What is more, prior to creation there are no modalities, thus it is not the case that anything is possible. However, there are several problems with conceptualism. In particular, because the necessary features of the modal concepts themselves are independent of the shape of any intellect, no form of conceptualism will succeed as a solution to the problem of modalities.

Comparisons that have been made between the philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Bernard Lonergan on such topics as transcendence, authenticity, and the inadequacies of substance metaphysics are justified, but they must be understood against the background of a disagreement over the meaning and role of ontological difference. A reading of Heidegger that emphasizes the negative or recessive aspect of the ontological “lighting” or “clearing” in being puts this disagreement into sharp relief and forms a charge against Lonergan of “forgetfulness of being.” A response to the charge is offered in the form of three approximations, focusing, respectively, on the way that Lonergan uses the term, “intelligibility,” the role he gives to question, and the way he finds ontological significance in a particular range of intentional acts.

In a series of recently published lectures and essays two Roman Catholic Cardinals—Cardinals Ratzinger and Kasper—have offered significantly different positions of the issue of the relationship of the Universal to the Particular Churches. Cardinal Kasper locates the root of the disagreement in the philosophical foundations of the two views in privileging the Universal over the Particular (or vice versa) as the starting point for ecclesiology. I will explain why I find Josiah Royce’s late work (as informed by C. S. Peirce’s thought) to be a valuable resource for the complexities of such a rich ecclesiological enquiry. I examine the interrelationship between Spirit, Community and the Interpretation of Signs in the mature thought of Royce, I assess his contribution to the preceding discussion, and I offer some insights into his potential value to any ongoing dialogue on the nature and purpose of the Church.

Organized around the central concept of struggle, this paper is an introduction to the later thought of the Czech phenomenologist Jan Patočka (1907–1977), with attention to the circumstances of his life. The first section of the paper presents Patočka’s description of the “three movements” of human existence, with emphasis upon the second, the movement of defense, work, and survival. The second section examines his later conception of philosophy, where he reprised elements of classical Greek thought (the Heraclitean notion of polemos and the Socratic notion of “care of the soul”) for their relevance in the modern world.

This paper is concerned with metaphysical issues surrounding the doctrines of transubstantiation and the real presence. In particular, I am concerned with the nature of the eucharistic change, and with the manner in which Christ is believed to be present in the Blessed Sacrament. My primary goal is to give an account of these doctrines (i) which does not involve the thesis that upon consecration one substance has become identical with another, previously existing substance, (ii) which is consistent with a particulate account of matter and material substances, and (iii) which explains why Christ—in his institution of the Lord’s Supper—is not enjoining us to become cannibals. More generally, my goal is to locate the irreducibly mysterious aspects of these doctrines, and to respond to some intuitively plausible reasons for thinking them to be incoherent, metaphysically impossible, or morally repugnant.

This essay takes its starting point from the position of Aidan Nichols (From Newman to Congar: The Idea of Doctrinal Development from the Victorians to the Second Vatican Council) that doctrinal development depends on wisdom. A key figure for Nichols’s position is Pierre Rousselot, whose idea of sympathetic knowing helps explain how wisdom itself works, namely, as knowledge influenced by love. I focus on Rousselot’s use of the Thomist concept of connaturality as the underlying basis of sympathetic knowing and offer a modern interpretation of Aquinas’s Summa theologiae 2a 2ae, q 45, a 2, the key text on connaturality in ethical and mystical experience (being for affection what Summa theologiae 1a, q 84, a 7 is for cognition). I cite Bernard Lonergan’s “Newman’s Theorem” to show how omitting affection from theological explanation has dominated older interpretations of human intentionality, not only in Aquinas himself but in many of his followers.

Attempting to reconcile a robust sense of human freedom with entrenched Church doctrines, Luis de Molina espoused for the first time a complete formulation of the doctrine of divine middle knowledge. However, it immediately sparked vigorous theological and philosophical debate. The debate has been revived, with Robert Adams as the original leading opponent. Adams’s objection is that the doctrine cannot be true since its (alleged) propositional objects lack the requisite metaphysical grounds for their being true. Breaking with many contemporary Molinists, I offer reasons for rejecting popular counterfactual semantics as a means to assess “conditionals of freedom.” I then discuss an alternative way to assess “conditionals of freedom” inspired by Suárez and revived by Richard Gaskin, anticipate an objection to it and argue that it is not as damaging as it first seems. I conclude that a Molinist can respond to Adams-type objections without relying upon popular semantics.

Thomas Aquinas thinks, in agreement with Cicero and Aristotle, that friends typically will the same things. If this is so, how can we, given our very imperfect knowledge of God’s will, be His friends? I argue that for Aquinas, when we are unable to grasp any goodness in the object of God’s will, friendship does not require from us to will what we know God wills. Willing what God wills without grasping the goodness present in the willed thing—would that be at all possible—fails to increase our likeness to God and harms, rather than contributes to friendship. Aquinas does not drop conformity of wills as a requirement of friendship but believes that we should not aspire to more conformity of wills than it is humanly possible to achieve.