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introduction
1. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 97 > Issue: 4
Russell L. Friedman, Zita V. Toth Introduction: Special Issue on Late Medieval Hylomorphism
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articles
2. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 97 > Issue: 4
Peter John Hartman Durand of St.-Pourçain’s Moderate Reductionism about Hylomorphic Composites
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According to a standard interpretation of Aristotle, a material substance, like a dog, is a hylomorphic composite of matter and form, its “essential” parts. Is such a composite some thing in addition to its essential parts as united? The moderate reductionist says “no,” whereas the anti-reductionist says “yes.” In this paper, I will clarify and defend Durand of St.-Pourçain’s surprisingly influential version of moderate reductionism, according to which hylomorphic composites are nothing over and above their essential parts and the union of those parts, where this union is explained by the presence of two modes: a mode of inherence on the side of form and a mode of substanding on the side of matter.
3. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 97 > Issue: 4
Richard Cross Ontological Commitment in Gregory of Rimini: Hylomorphism and the Complexe Significabile
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This paper discusses two interrelated questions about ontological commitment in the thought of Gregory of Rimini (d. 1358), questions having to do with both hylomorphic composites of matter and substantial form, and with complexe significabilia that typically obtain in cases of substance–accident composition. The first question is that of the existence of real relations: neither hylomorphic composites nor complexe significabilia require real relations tying their various co-located components together. The second is that of the reducibility of such wholes to the sum of their parts: neither hylomorphic composites nor complexe significabilia are anything other than their co-located parts. And all such items can be disunited merely by a divine volition, requiring nothing extramental added to the ontology, and no change in position.
4. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 97 > Issue: 4
Kamil Majcherek Can Something New Be Produced by Moving Things Around?: Local Motion and the Problem of the Metaphysical Status of Artefacts, 1300–1500
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In the late Middle Ages, there was an intense debate about the metaphysical status of artefacts, in particular about whether an artefact is a new thing over and above the natural things that make it up. Realists about artefacts argued for a positive reply. In this paper, I will examine the following objection against artefact realism raised by artefact nominalists: The making of artefacts involves nothing more than local motion of already existing natural things or their parts, and local motion by itself does not lead to the production of any new thing; therefore, the making of artefacts does not involve the production of any new thing. I will look at various attempts by realists to respond to this argument and offer one possible complication for the nominalist view.
5. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 97 > Issue: 4
Roberto Zambiasi Innovative Conceptions of Substantial Change in Early Fourteenth-Century Discussions of Minima Naturalia
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This article contains a case study of some innovative early fourteenth-century conceptions of the temporal structure of substantial change. An important tenet of thirteenth-century scholastic hylomorphism is that substantial change is an instantaneous process. In contrast, three early fourteenth-century Aristotelian commentators, first Walter Burley and then John Buridan and Albert of Saxony, progressively develop a view on which substantial change is linked to temporal duration. This process culminated, in Buridan and Albert of Saxony, with the explicit recognition of the temporally extended nature of some (if not most) instances of substantial change. This article sheds light on this neglected episode in the history of late medieval hylomorphism taking as its point of departure these commentators’ discussions of the issue of minima naturalia, i.e., the issue of the lowest possible limit of any division of substantial forms coming about through the potentially infinite division of the matter they inform. In short: is there a piece of matter so small that no substantial form can possibly inhere in it?
6. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 97 > Issue: 4
Sylvain Roudaut Can Accidents Alone Generate Substantial Forms? Twists and Turns of a Late Medieval Debate
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This paper investigates the late medieval controversy over the causal role of substantial forms in the generation of new substances. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, when there were two basic positions in this debate (section II), an original position was defended by Walter Burley and Peter Auriol, according to which accidents alone—by their own power—can generate substantial forms (section III). The paper presents how this view was received by the next generation of philosophers, i.e., around 1350 (section IV), and how, even though some of the initial theoretical motivations for this view were quickly abandoned, the view was still defended by several philosophers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (section V). It is finally shown that this theory, still discussed by Suárez and early modern scholastics, and despite being generally rejected, contributed in its own way to the evolution of hylomorphism in the late Middle Ages and, to a certain extent, its gradual decline (section VI).
7. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 97 > Issue: 4
Thomas Jeschke Paul of Venice and the Plurality of Forms and Souls: Studying the Reception of Scholastic Hylomorphism in Fifteenth-Century Padua
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In this paper, I focus on Paul of Venice’s plurality of forms and souls, i.e., his “two total souls” theory. I argue that this specific theory is a result of Paul’s reception of various positions originating from fourteenth-century Parisian philosophers like John of Jandun, the Anonymous Patar, Nicole Oresme, John Duns Scotus, and Walter Burley. By receiving these positions and by making use of merely parts of their doctrines, Paul creates a theory of the hylomorphic compound that fits well within an Aristotelian framework of an Averroistic flavor. Although his position is not Averroistic in any strict sense, it mirrors quite well the growing interest in an Averroistic interpretation of Aristotle in Padua at his time. By looking at some of his successors, such as Gaetano da Thiene, Nicoletto Vernia, and Agostino Nifo, I show that Paul is on the borderline between a traditional, scholastic philosophical psychology or hylomorphism of Parisian origin and an Averroist reading of philosophical psychology or hylomorphism, which had its promoters in fifteenth-century Padua.
8. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 97 > Issue: 4
Adam Wood Faculties of the Soul and Descartes’s Rejection of Substantial Forms
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In a 1642 letter to Regius, Descartes elaborates several reasons for rejecting Aristotelian substantial forms including that (1) they are explanatorily impotent, (2) they are explanatorily unnecessary, and (3) they threaten the incorporeality and immortality of the human soul. Various ideas have already been proposed as to why Descartes thought Aristotelian substantial forms are susceptible to these criticisms. Here I suggest one further such idea, centered on the ways Descartes and medieval scholastics thought substantial forms—and souls in particular—are related to their powers.
9. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 97 > Issue: 4
Helen N. Hattab Individuation and New Matter Theories in Late Sixteenth- and Early Seventeenth-Century Protestant Scholasticism
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It is often thought that Aristotelian hylomorphism was undermined in the early modern era by the external challenges that alternative atomist and corpuscularian matter theories posed. This narrative neglects the fact that hylomorphism was not one homogeneous theory but a fruitful, adaptable framework that enabled scholastic Aristotelianism to continuously transform itself from within and resolve new natural philosophical, metaphysical, and theological problems. I focus on the period of the Counter-Reformation and rise of Protestant scholastic metaphysics. During this time accounting for the individuation of substances within a hylomorphic framework consistent with Aristotle’s texts, the doctrine of the Trinity, and Aristotelian physics became both urgent and more challenging. I show that Protestant scholastics who took up influential late sixteenth-century Jesuit accounts of individuation so altered the hylomorphic framework inherited from medieval philosophers that atomism appeared to at least one author as more consistent with Aristotle’s metaphysical commitments.
2022 rising scholar essay contest
10. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 97 > Issue: 3
John Jalsevac Mitigating the Magic: The Role of Memory, the Vis Cogitativa, and Experience in Aquinas’s Abstractionist Epistemology
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Aquinas famously argues that there exists a purely active intellective power—i.e., the agent intellect—in each human agent that is capable of “abstracting” universals, including natures, from sensible phantasms. Robert Pasnau has worried, however, that Aquinas’s thin account of how the agent intellect performs abstraction makes abstraction appear to be little short of “magic.” In this paper I reply to Pasnau’s objection by arguing for the necessity of expanding the standard account of Aquinas’s theory to include the oft-neglected role of the so-called “interior sense powers,” in particular memory and the cogitative power, in his epistemology. I argue that for Aquinas memory and the cogitative power, operat­ing in close cooperation with intellect, are responsible for bridging the ontological and epistemological divide between sensation of the singular and intellection of the universal by producing the pre-intellective, quasi-knowledge of experience (experimentum), which is propaedeutic to abstraction.
11. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 97 > Issue: 3
Christopher W. Love Virtue and the Paradox of Tragedy
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What accounts for our pleasure in tragic art? In a widely-cited essay, Susan Feagin argues that this pleasure has moral roots; it arises when we discover ourselves to be the sort of people who respond sympathetically to another’s suffering. Although critical of Feagin’s particular solution to the tragedy paradox, I too believe that our pleasure in tragedy often has moral roots. I trace those roots differently, however, by placing the concept of virtue front and center. I argue that a noble pleasure arises when we perceive virtue in tragic characters and when we practice it ourselves as audience members. My account draws on insights from the history of philosophy, most notably Aquinas’s conception of the virtues of charity and mercy in the Summa.
articles
12. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 97 > Issue: 3
Michael Szlachta Unde huic fictioni non est respondendum: Thomas Aquinas and the Necessitation of the Will
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William de la Mare suggests in his Correctorium fratris Thomae that it is possible to read Aquinas as saying that the will is necessitated by the intellect. Early defenders of Aquinas thought that this was nonsense (a fictio). However, I analyze Aquinas’s corpus and show that he has a consistent view of the relationship between the will and the intellect according to which the will is indeed necessitated by the intellect, not absolutely but conditionally: it is necessary that, if the intellect apprehends some object as good, then the will wills that object. However, I also argue that, although Aquinas is committed to the necessitation of the will by the intellect, it does not follow that the will lacks alternate possibilities.
13. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 97 > Issue: 3
Kateřina Kutarňová Philip of the Blessed Trinity on Mystical Knowledge: Peculiar Kinds of Species
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This study concerns the theory of mystical knowledge advanced by the practically unknown seventeenth-century Carmelite author Philip of the Blessed Trinity in his work Summa Theologiae Mysticae. Philip introduces “a new kind” of spiritual species representing the intellectibilia to describe how individuals are granted mystical knowledge, and in doing so distinguishes between three kinds of species. Philip’s notion of mystical knowledge is closely related to the topic of contemplation and is profoundly influenced by The Interior Castle of St. Teresa of Avila. The analysis presented here, therefore, represents an original contribution to the ongoing scholarly study of species, (mystical) knowledge, and Teresian spirituality.
14. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 97 > Issue: 3
Matthew Shea Value Incommensurability in Natural Law Ethics: A Clarification and Critique
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The foundation of natural law ethics is a set of basic human goods, such as life and health, knowledge, work and play, appreciation of beauty, friendship, and religion. A disputed question among natural law theorists is whether the basic goods are “incommensurable.” But there is widespread ambiguity in the natural law literature about what incommensurability means, which makes it unclear how this disagreement should be understood and resolved. First, I clear up this ambiguity by distinguishing between incommensurability and incomparability. I show that proponents of New Natural Law Theory hold that basic goods are both incommensurable and incomparable, whereas proponents of Classical Natural Law Theory hold that basic goods are incommensurable but comparable. Second, I critique the leading New Natural Law arguments for the incomparability of basic goods. Throughout the article, I explain why value incommensurability is an essential feature of natural law ethics but value incomparability is not.
15. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 97 > Issue: 3
Daniel Schwartz Suárez’s Republic of Demons: Could There Be an Obligation to Do Evil?
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Suárez was probably the first theologian to propose a political understanding of the order of subordination among the demons. According to Aquinas, this subordination immediately reflects the natural differences in perfection between the demons. Suárez charged that a natural-based order of demonic subordination could not ground the capacity of the demons’ ruler—Lucifer—to use his power to impose civic obligations on fellow demons so as to pursue their joint evil goals. But can there be obligations ad malum? This paper explores a number of possible paths seemingly available to Suárez to defend his controversial view. I argue that the most promising interpretation of Suárez is one according to which the obligations created by Lucifer’s commands are not obligations in conscience but rather what we may call “non-moral obligations.”
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16. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 97 > Issue: 3
Thomas M. Osborne, Jr. Conscience: Four Thomistic Treatments
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17. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 97 > Issue: 3
Heidi M. Giebel The Way of Medicine: Ethics and the Healing Profession
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18. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 97 > Issue: 3
Anthony J. Scordino By Way of Obstacles: A Pathway Through a Work
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19. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 97 > Issue: 3
John J. Conley What Happened to Civility: The Promise and Failure of Montaigne's Modern Project
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20. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 97 > Issue: 3
John F. Crosby The Two Greatest Ideas: How Our Grasp of the Universe and of Our Minds Changed Everything
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