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Well, this is what philosophy is all about. I think this guy has the most convincing case for Aristotelian hylomorphism as the best explanation compared with other theories. This other guy's book is also a great introduction to why Aquinas' metaphysics is "the best."
Ultimately, you have to make these decisions after reflecting on your own how the world works.
Check this out. It has an 80 page summary of his views.
I recommend Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide by Edward Feser. I found it very informative while at the same time being easy to understand.
>Any quick TLDR for the point why the Bible is reliable to get my head in the right space?
For a Catholic take, you could start by listening to some of Brant Pitre's discussions of this, e.g. here (there are others online, this is just one I was able to find quickly). I'd highly recommend his book as a follow up. It's not lengthy nor is it a difficult read.
As others have said, Thomism is based on Aristotelian philosophy, not Aristotelian physics. The fact that the physics is incorrect doesn't imply that the philosophy is incorrect. In fact there's a book I've read that goes into great detail about this, and in the later chapters argues how modern physics actually supports Thomism over other philosophical systems: What is Physics?: A Defense of Classical Theism. The physics discussed is quite advanced, and the philosophy put forward differs in some areas from Aquinas' work, but the book overall is excellent and I highly recommend it.
I think White's <em>The Light of Christ</em> is the best introduction to Catholicism. I've heard good things about <em>Catholicism for Dummies</em> too, but I haven't read it.
In addition to Feser's books (Scholastic Metaphysics and Aristotle's Revenge), David Oderberg's Real Essentialism and Norris Clarke's The One and the Many are worthwhile.
Some classic Scholastic 'manuals' are still worth checking out too, e.g. Benignus's <em>Nature, Knowledge, and God</em>.
The book ”In Christ” in Paul is a really good study of this exact question. I have it at work so I’ll come back tomorrow and share a bit from there.
Edit: It’s cheaper now than when I got it, so go buy it!
"In Christ" in Paul: Explorations in Paul's Theology of Union and Participation
I agree with the other poster about Copleston. That's a good resource.
Also, Hahn and Wiker's <em>Politicizing the Bible</em> covers 1300-1700 and its super interesting.
I would read Aristotle(Nicomachean Ethics) period before After Virtue. The best combination is Aristotle, Macintyre, then Oderberg. But really, any of them are excellent. I tend to think mostly like Oderberg, but they are definitely the best ethicists of this generation.
Because he is one of the greatest minds of the Church and philosophy in general ever!
St. Thomas' best known work, and one of his greatest, is the Summa Theologiae. This work is very dense and if you do not have a foundation in Aristotelian philosophy you will have a hard time following many of the arguments. It is mostly a very dense summary of arguments. For example, the five ways take up a total of about two pages of text. His argument from the Summa Contra Gentiles is over ten pages. It covers the underlying principles which are assumed in the five ways. Further it was written more as an aid for missionaries and thus is less technically written and easier for the layman to understand. So starting with the Summa Contra Gentiles may be good. Reading up on Aristotle's Categories, Physics, Nicomachean Ethics, or Metaphysics depending on which topics of Thomas' works you want to study.
Hey op I’d like to recommend this book for you it’s all about the atonement
I'm not sure if there's anything like a consensus among Catholic philosophers, but some Catholics working in epistemology approve of RE, e.g. see Tyler McNabb's contributions in this volume.
Godel is not a threat because his proof demonstrates that Russell's project in Principia Mathematica is not feasible. When set theory arrived in mathematics the quest was to build a rigorous system based off a finite number of axioms. Godel proved this is impossible. It is a statement about set theory and the limits in constructing axiomatic systems to include all mathematical truths, namely that such a venture is impossible. Check out Nagel's book Godel's Proof. It makes a rather difficult work understandable. Godel's actual paper is very hard to follow.
Thanks. I don't see why this would be inconsistent with anything Pruss said in what I quoted above. If you want more information, though, Pruss has an extended discussion of the relevance of QM to the PSR in his book.
I think most people with a high school education can handle reading straight from St. Thomas. I highly recommend Peter Kreeft's abridged and well-annotated version Summa of the Summa. He has a gift for making the more difficult ideas of Aquinas easier to understand.
A podcast geared towards Aquinas without being too technical is Pints with Aquinas by Matt Fradd.
I'm not sure if this is too late to tell you this, but I think /r/philosophybookclub just finished doing Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics as their group book; even though the active discussions are probably over by now, you can still benefit from reading the comments people recently posted about the different parts of the text.
I meant to read it with them but I got caught up in other things, so if you do decide to go back over their threads, let me know and perhaps we can decide on a reading schedule and go over the text together.
Rémi Brague is a French philosopher and historian of philosophy. He is a specialist of medieval Muslim philosophy, but he is also a Catholic. His focus, obviously, is more on intellectual history rather than events and politics, but I'd highly recommend him to anyone interested in the relations, comparisons and conflicts between the Muslim, Christian and Jewish intellectual scenes.
The book I would recommend is The Legend of the Middle Age (awful title by the way, compared to the pretty good but untranslatable pun in the French title - should have gone for "In the middle of the Middle Age"). It's a series of essays on Medieval philosophy with a focus on differences and similarities between Muslim and Christians authors. It deconstruct quite a few myths about the supposedly barbarian Western Middle Age while emphasis (when relevant) what we own to the Muslim thinkers.
https://www.amazon.com/The-Legend-Middle-Ages-Philosophical/dp/0226070816/ref=pd_sim_b_3%7CThe
Is small book "Of the God of the Christians (and One or Two others) is a short and brillant account of the theological differences between Islam, Judaism and Christianity, and contain one of the clearest explanation of the Trinity I've read.
Chesterton's Aquinas is a good introduction, mainly because his writing is so good. Here is the Portuguese edition:
https://www.amazon.com/S%C3%A3o-Tom%C3%A1s-Aquino-Portuguese/dp/9896224951/
Uuu great question! I'd go with Catholicism. According to Balthasar's theological biography of de Lubac, this book basically contains the whole of de Lubac's thought in summary, seminal form. His later works on the Church, the senses of scripture, the Eucharist, etc. all are expansions and developments of the main ideas he first established here [also Chapter 9 contains the most wonderful vision of the Church and Evangelization I've found]. In sum, picking up this book will let you realize why this work inspired so many authors (such as Ratzinger) through its love for the Fathers and the breath of its insights.
[As a final comment, the book is not difficult but it isn't light reading either. If you are looking for something much less theological you can check out Paradoxes of Faith - it's a collection of aforismos by father the Lubac, many of them quite bold, inspiring, and thought provoking in the best sense of the word].
This is a variation of the argument C. S. Lewis makes in the third chapter of his book "Miracles". which is discussed in depth in this book.
Right. As a Christian, it is frustrating to see someone like Russell dismiss revelation so superficially, while criticizing Aquinas who extensively documented every objection he heard of to any of his claims.
It's not exactly a philosophical treatise, but there is a modern work I recommend commonly for understanding whether scripture/revelation is reliable. An atheist man's wife decided to become Christian. He was an investigative reporter, and he thought it was really important to show his wife how mistaken she was, so he used all his skills as a reporter to write the story of why the Bible, particularly belief in the Resurrection, isn't reliable. He read extensively, and he flew around the country talking to experts, all to disprove his wife's new faith.
He published his notes on this investigation under the title, The Case for Christ, and ended up converting to Christianity as well.
This is a good primer to natural law written for people with little to no understanding of it. It is of course written by a Thomist and is slanted towards Catholicism, but it's still friendly to those outside the camp...
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DO this first
Aquinas's Shorter Summa: Saint Thomas's Own Concise Version of His Summa Theologica
https://www.amazon.com/Aquinass-Shorter-Summa-Thomass-Theologica/dp/1928832431
I tutored seminary students in Philosophy.
Yes. There are MANY problems with the assertion that some experiments deny free will. The Libett experiment (and derivatives) have been essentially to not be a proof at all, but rather only that some processes might start before we make our decision (which does not contradict free will)
Raymond Tallis wrote an excellent book about it (and other misuses of neuroscience and evolution) and he coined the terms neurobabble and neurotrash hehe. Since Tallis is an atheist he has not religious axe to grind, btw.
I also think that the arguments for hylomorphism are inadequate in view of that fact that Thomists affirm that the soul can and does exist independently of the body after death. What makes it the "form" of the body and not a substance? As Walls explains,
>Now, given that it can exist independently of the body, it might appear that it should qualify as a substance. However, Aquinas rejected this conclusion, on the grounds that independent existence is only one of two conditions that must be met for something to qualify as an individual substance. The second condition is that a thing must also be a member of a particular species and genus, and thus exist as a whole thing. A disembodied soul is not a proper member of the human species, but rather, is only one part of a human being.28 > >Walls, Jerry L.. Purgatory (pp. 104-105). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
So, as far as I can tell, insisting that the soul is a form and not a substance is simply a way of emphasising that the separated soul is an incomplete human person. But this is something that is already emphasised by modern defenders of Cartesian substance dualism—such as Richard Swinburne in this recent book.
Swinburne addressing this very point in an appendix to that book and his conclusion is that Descartes and Aquinas are really saying the same thing using different terminology; that Descartes is saying it more lucidly; and that if there is a substantive difference, Descartes is right and Aquinas is wrong.
>Yes, but only as a phantasm, which was the point of my above argument.
No, not just as a phantasm and that is also an argument for the immateriality of thought.
>I believe this is also the doctrine held by St. Thomas since he held the real distinction as well.
Aquinas following Aristotle rejects that essences exist as independent beings.
On the topic I would also recommend D. S. Oderberg Real Essentialism
A great resource on the Thomist-Nouvelle Theologies controversies (as well as a balanced assessment of the [very valid] claims of each side) is Catholic Theology by Tracey Rowland. As someone else pointed out here, the main issue traditionalists have with Maritain is that he was a very important architect behind the Dignitatis Humanae view in favor of the possibility of a plural society, which was supposed to be posible under on a minimalist agreement on human rights. Maritain himself had a traditional catholic worldview under which he interpreted human rights to be ontologically grounded on the nature of the person. He however, accepted the compromise of having the United Nations agree simply on basing society on 'human rights' without any attention or conception of their source or ground. Unfortunately, much of modern history shows this to have been a terrible strategy, given that all of these rights and values are now interpreted under a totally subject framework..
> Whether Maritain’s tactic to retain the use of the words, while reformulating their meaning, is the best one seems less viable in the years since his death in 1973. Both rights and values are generally understood in a subjective manner that allows no objective component that would examine the meaning or content of the values or rights proposed by comparing them with natural law, the content of which is not solely formulated by the subjective will.
I was very intrigued by the history of nouvelle theologia and bought this book which is an incredibly balanced historical and philosophical explanation of its background, history and ideas...
I read Peter Kreeft's Summa of the Summa. It's literally the philosophical part of the Summa, but Dr. Kreeft edited out of it objections, articles, etc. that have little to no relevance today--so it's only about 500 pages long instead of the full length monster that it is. Also, Dr. Kreeft filled it with comments (in the form of footnotes) to the brim, actually quite helpful when getting through the heavy handed stuff.
Aquinas does make both such arguments as can be found in ST II-II, Q110, A3 and all parallel passages on the topic such as in the Quodlibets, as well as in the De Malo 15, 1, and SCG III, 122. This book also very clearly shows what Aquinas' argument is from those passages: https://www.amazon.com/Disordered-Actions-Analysis-Homosexual-Activity/dp/3868382186
It really depends upon what the major premise of the PFA is. In blood donation, you're not exactly using the arteries or veins insofar as you cannot really command or even will your arteries to 'pump' blood nor your veins to contain blood. They just do that non-voluntarily as part or automatically you might say apart from any act of the will.
The veins are meant to restore blood and ultimately ordered to the health of the whole body. Sperm and eggs aren't ordered to the health of the whole body, but rather to the making of new human life.
Artificial insemination is wrong because it's bringing a new life into existence by means of the technician or mere production as opposed to the loving embrace of a man and a woman in marriage. So it's more like an injustice against the offspring and so the PFA doesn't exactly or clearly apply here. The PFA isn't meant to cover every area of morality, just as neither is justice or temperance meant to cover every area.
Based on this book's version (https://www.amazon.com/Disordered-Actions-Analysis-Homosexual-Activity/dp/3868382186) of the PFA the key premise is "any action not ordered to its natural end [meaning final cause qua instituted by nature] is a disordered action." Extracting blood is the action of well extracting or drawing blood. It's hard to see how it's possible in any sense to have a disordered action of extracting blood unless you were intending to kill someone by doing so, etc. The natural end of extracting blood is something like the mere removal or gathering of blood. That's done in blood donation. So no problem there.
Good book on Thomas and divinization is Daria Spezzano's The Glory of God's Grace: Deification According to St. Thomas Aquinas. I haven't read Sherrard's book.
In addition to what the other poster said, I'd recommend Gaven Kerr's book Aquinas's Way to God, which contains an extended discussion of the esse / essence distinction and its relation to positions in contemporary analytic philosophy.
Gosh, they are all good.
I would probably start with the Apology because it’s sort of an apology of philosophy itself. Most introductory philosophy classes also read Euthyphro, Crito, Meno, and Phaedo as well. That’s where I started personally.
Short answer is that if they have rational souls, they can be saved in the same way as any human.
If this is a topic that interests you, I recommend the book <em>Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial?: . . . and Other Questions from the Astronomers' In-box at the Vatican Observatory</em>.
Alasdair MacIntyre's book <em>The Unconscious</em> – the second edition – is excellent. The second edition features a new foreward/essay by MacIntyre nearly fifty years after the original publishing, and of course by this time MacIntyre had converted to Catholicism, so there's a bit about Thomism, Freud and Lacan.
I gave a quick glance to the website you linked to, but the short answer is probably no. Papal encyclicals and pronouncements are highly authoritative, but infallibile statements require a clear intent from the Pope to definitively define a matter of faith and practice. As the Code of Cannon Law states, in cases of doubt a teaching is to be regarded as non-infallible: “No doctrine is understood as defined infallibly unless this is manifestly evident” (can. 749 §3). The Dictatus Papae not only has an area of doubt regarding whether it was meant to be a definite pronouncement by Gregory VII, but there is also doubt on whether the text itself is Gregory the VIIth's or not! (even if it's probable he held those principles, we don't know the language he'd use to formulate them, and the language used is precisely what tells us if it was meant to be infallibile) There is thus doubt, and it means that it should be taken as non-infallible. The statements themselves may contain infallible truths (such as "God established the Catholic Church". [In a sense if I myself tell a friend of mine "Jesus is true man and true God" I'm saying an infallible truth, even if I'm not the Pope]), but the pronouncement is not rendering those declarations infalible per se.
If you'd be interested in learning about the levels of authority Church teachings have and which of those are infallible, I'd highly recommend you Jimmy Akin's "Teaching with Authority: How to Cut Through Doctrinal Confusion & Understand What the Church Really Says" it's a pretty comprehensive and quite accessible resource for knowinh how the Church teaches 👍🏻. God bless!
Starting from commonly held ground would seem to be a good place to start. Unfortunately this can be difficult with the stereotypical atheist that takes a kind of scientism or radical empiricism for granted. In that case I don't know what can be done but attempt to show them those viewpoints are incoherent on strictly philosophical grounds, e.g. for reasons given by BonJour and Bealer.
Not OP, but have you heard of Blanchette's Philosophy of Being? It sounds like you might find it interesting.
First two sentences in my first reply is an intro book on Catholic doctrine, the second an intro to personalism. Now that I think about it John Crosby wrote this which would also be a good primer.
Personalism is a deep end. I'm in about 100 books.
Faith of the Early Fathers: Three-Volume Set https://www.amazon.com/dp/0814610250/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_gJzeFbGZSJW8W
If sacraments currently exist that were not established during the period of revelation (until the close of the apostolic era), that means that men make the sacraments, which undermines the entire faith. It may be true that the way we divide, categorize, and perform them has evolved but the sacramental functions have existed from the beginning.
One-Minute Aquinas is a good place to start when it comes to getting a basic grip on Thomistic philosophy.
"Catholic" philosophy is a pretty wide term, but Thomas is essential to the Scholastic tradition
Yea, this is the book.
I've read sections of it before. It's a great intro (perhaps the best intro) to Thomistic philosophy. I'll lead a discussion on it this summer.