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58How Many Acts of Being Can a Substance Have?: An Aristotelian Approach to Aquinas’s Real DistinctionInternational Philosophical Quarterly 54 (3): 317-331. 2014.Focusing mainly on two passages from the Summa theologiae, the article first argues that, on Aquinas’s view, an individual substance, which is the proper subject of being, can and normally does have a certain multiplicity of acts of being . It is only “a certain” multiplicity because the substance has only one unqualified act of being, its substantial being, which belongs to it through its substantial form. The others are qualified acts of being, added on to the substantial being through acciden…Read more
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1198The "ratio omnipotentiae" in AquinasActa Philosophica 2 (1): 17-42. 1993.Aquinas says that omnipotence means power for everything possible, which is everything not self-contradictory. This view faces various objections; to many of them, it seems that one could respond more easily by saying that omnipotence is God's power for everything that is not self-contradictory for Him to do. But this is a weak answer, and Thomas's support for it is only apparent. A more satisfactory solution is found in a fundamental restriction on the term "power" that Thomas thinks necessar…Read more
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130Natural Inclination and the Intelligibility of the Good in Thomistic Natural LawVera Lex 6 (1/2): 57-78. 2005.Size is not always a gauge of significance. The issue that I propose to address here centers on a single clause from the Summa theologiae. But it goes nearly to the heart of St Thomas's teaching on natural law. It concerns the way in which Thomas thinks the human mind comes to understand good and evil. The specific question raised by the clause is the role played in this process by what Thomas calls "natural inclination." This question leads to an even more basic one: what it is, for Thomas, tha…Read more
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115Can Atheism be Rational? A Reading of Thomas AquinasActa Philosophica: Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia 11 (2): 215-238. 2002.Does St Thomas Aquinas have anything to teach us on the subject of atheism? We might doubt it, even if we share his basic outlook. The reason would be the very fact that in his day there were so few who did not share it. It was, as they say, an age of faith. The profession of some sort of religious belief, indeed monotheism, was virtually universal, not just in Europe but in practically all of what Europeans then knew of the world. No doubt there were individual cases of "godlessness". The learn…Read more
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REVIEWS-Lawrence Dewan, OP, Wisdom, Law and Virtue: Essays in Thomistic EthicsThe Thomist 73 (3): 497. 2009.
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Is uniqueness at the root of personal dignity? John Crosby and Thomas AquinasThe Thomist 69 (2): 173-201. 2005.
Chicago, Illinois, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Action |
Normative Ethics |
Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Religion |