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253Metafisica ed etica: la riapertura della questione dell'ontologia del beneActa Philosophica 19 (1): 37-58. 2010.Since Hume, there has been broad consensus that if the notion of the good has any intelligible foundation, it is not “ontological”, in the natures of things. Today however this view is being challenged. After a sketch of the positions of Kant and Hume, and a glance at some of the recent challenges, the paper examines a key element in Thomas Aquinas’s ontol- ogy of the good: the notion of nal causality. For Thomas nal causality presupposes formal and e cient causality. Hume’s denial of the inte…Read more
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50Practical Truth and Its First Principles in the Theory of Grisez, Boyle, and FinnisThe National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 15 (2): 303-329. 2015.This article offers an exposition and critical discussion of the account of the truth of practical reason in the natural-law theory of Germain Grisez, Joseph Boyle, and John Finnis. The exposition rests mainly on an article published by these authors in 1987. There they argue that “true” is said of theoretical and practical knowledge in radically diverse senses. They also distinguish, within practical knowledge, between two kinds of truth, practical and moral. This distinction is tied to their u…Read more
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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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1133The "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
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 |