•  24
    Religious Life and Understanding
    Review of Metaphysics 22 (4). 1969.
    In a further bit of irony, disaffection with higher education has shifted that peculiar mode of understanding that we call religious into a rather privileged position. To be sure, many of those people who call themselves religious would not engage in this sort of understanding, but that need not detain us here. The central point of these reflections will be an attempt to display a mode of understanding which one might properly call religious. I shall undertake this from a frankly philosophical p…Read more
  •  71
    Albert Speer's life offers a paradigm of self-deception, and his autobiography serves to illustrate Fingarette's account of self-deception as a persistent failure to spell out our engagements in the world. Using both Speer and Fingarette, we show how self-deception becomes our lot as the stories we adopt to shape our lives cover up what is destructive in our activity. Had Speer not settled for the neutral label of "architect," he might have found a story substantive enough to allow him to recogn…Read more
  •  6
    Metaphysics in Islamic Philosophy (review)
    New Scholasticism 60 (3): 375-377. 1986.
  •  8
    Portraying Analogy (review)
    New Scholasticism 59 (3): 347-357. 1985.
  •  19
    The Principle of Analogy in Protestant and Catholic Theology (review)
    International Philosophical Quarterly 4 (4): 624-626. 1964.
  •  34
    Review of abu Hamid al-ghazali, On the Boundaries of Theological Tolerance (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2004 (2). 2004.
  •  39
    Creatio Ex Nihilo Recovered
    Modern Theology 29 (2): 5-21. 2013.
    Creatio ex nihilo sounds like a philosophical teaching, but philosophy has been utterly unprepared to offer proper expression for an origination which presupposes nothing at all! Yet each of the Abrahamic faiths insists on such an origination, so it proved serendipitous when sufficient contact opened between these diverse religious traditions to allow thinkers to assist one another in what proved to be a shared task—and indeed gain assistance from others as well, as Sara Grant elucidates the sui…Read more
  •  44
    Participation and Substantiality in Thomas Aquinas
    International Philosophical Quarterly 37 (1): 101-104. 1997.
    This book offers a philosophical analysis of the main themes and problems of Aquinas' metaphysics of creation, centred on the concept of participation, the systematical meaning of which is examined in a critical discussion of the prevailing views of contemporary Thomas scholars.
  •  15
    Knowing the Unknowable God
    Noûs 26 (4): 507-509. 1992.
  •  77
    As an exercise in comparative philosophical theology, our approach is more concerned with conceptual strategies than with historical although the animadversions of those versed in the history of each period will assist in reading the texts of each thinker. We need historians to make us aware of the questions to which thinkers of other ages and cultures were directing their energies, as well as the forms of thought available to them in making their response; but we philosophers hope to be able to…Read more
  •  20
    Being and Goodness (review)
    Faith and Philosophy 9 (4): 538-543. 1992.
  •  27
    Is Christianity True? (review)
    Faith and Philosophy 14 (2): 265-266. 1997.
  •  10
    Augustine and the Limits of Politics (review)
    Augustinian Studies 28 (2): 165-167. 1997.
  • Freedom and Creation in Three Traditions
    International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 37 (3): 181-183. 1995.
  •  4
    Substance
    Philosophical Studies (Dublin) 21 137-160. 1972.
  •  11
    Creator/Creatures Relation
    Faith and Philosophy 25 (2): 177-189. 2008.
    Can philosophical inquiry into divinity be authentic to its subject, God, without adapting its categories to the challenges of its scriptural inspiration, be that biblical or Quranic? This essay argues that it cannot, and that the adaptation, while it can be articulated in semantic terms, must rather amount to a transformation of standard philosophical strategies. Indeed, without such a radical transformation, “philosophy of religion” will inevitably mislead us into speaking of a “god” rather th…Read more
  •  9
    Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas (review)
    New Scholasticism 62 (2): 228-229. 1988.
  • John von Heyking, Augustine and Politics as Longing in the World (review)
    Philosophy in Review 24 70-72. 2004.
  •  43
    The Unknowability of God in Al-Ghazali: DAVID B. BURRELL
    Religious Studies 23 (2): 171-182. 1987.
    The main lines of this exploration are quite simply drawn. That the God whom Jews, Christians, and Muslims worship outstrips our capacities for characterization, and hence must be unknowable, will be presumed as uncontested. The reason that God is unknowable stems from our shared confession that ‘the Holy One, blessed be He’, and ‘the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth’, and certainly ‘Allah, the merciful One’ is one ; and just why God's oneness entails God's being unknowable deserves …Read more
  •  32
    As an exercise in comparative philosophical theology, our approach is more concerned with conceptual strategies than with historical “influences,” although the animadversions of those versed in the history of each period will assist in reading the texts of each thinker. We need historians to make us aware of the questions to which thinkers of other ages and cultures were directing their energies, as well as the forms of thought available to them in making their response; but we philosophers hope…Read more
  • Aquinas and Islamic and Jewish thinkers
    In Norman Kretzmann & Eleonore Stump (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, Cambridge University Press. pp. 60--84. 1993.
  •  17
    Evil and Suffering in Jewish Philosophy (review)
    International Philosophical Quarterly 37 (3): 360-362. 1997.
  •  35
    Response to Cross and Hasker
    Faith and Philosophy 25 (2): 205-212. 2008.
    It is not often that one is graced with a mini-symposium upon reception of an article for publication, and for this I am grateful to Bill Hasker, who had to wait until after his editorship to respond to my provocative piece, and equally grateful to Richard Cross, whom Bill solicited for an assist. Since my piece called for a “radical transformation of standard philosophical strategies,” and Bill addressed that perspectival issue from the outset, while Richard focused on some axial semantic and e…Read more
  •  26
    Creation, metaphysics, and ethics
    Faith and Philosophy 18 (2): 204-221. 2001.
    This essay explores the ways in which specific attention (or lack thereof) to creation can affect the manner in which we execute metaphysics or ethics. It argues that failing to attend to an adequate expression of “the distinction” of creator from creatures can unwittingly lead to a misrepresentation of divinity in philosophical argument. It also offers a suggestion for understanding “post-modern” from the more ample perspective of Creek and medieval forms of thought