Timothy Brian Noone

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE ORIGINALITY OF ST. THOMAS'S POSITION ON THE PHILOSOPHERS AND CREATION TIMOTHY B. NOONE The Catholic University ofAmerica Washington, D.C. AS IS WELL KNOWN, Thomas Aquinas stands out from his contemporaries in his apparent willingness to defend the possibility of an eternal but created universe, although, like all orthodox Christian believers, he affirmed that the world had a temporal beginning in the light of Scriptural teaching. That Thomas Aquinas defended the possibility of an eternal creation was amply demonstrated over a decade ago by Fr. John Wippel, who pointed to Aquinas's discussion of creation and endless temporal duration in the De aeternitate mundi, a work written in 12 71 or earlier.1 More recently, Professor Mark Johnson wrote an article in which he concluded that, no matter what doctrine the historical Aristotle may have held, St. Thomas consistently attributes a doctrine of creation to Aristotle.2 Most recent of all have come a pair of important studies by Wilks and Macintosh defending the coherence of Thomas's claim that the 1 John F. Wippel, "Did Thomas Aquinas Defend the Possibility of an Eternally Created World? (The De aeternitate mundi Revisited)," The Journal of the History of Philosophy 19 (1981): 21-37; on the date for Aquinas's De aeternitate mundi, see James A. Weisheipl, "The Date and Context for Aquinas' De aeternitate mundi," in Lloyd P. Gerson, ed., Graceful Reason: Essays in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy Presented to Joseph Owens, C.S.S.R., Papers in Medieval Studies, 4 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1983), 270. Arguments for an earlier dating can be found in Thomas Bukowski, "An Early Dating for Aquinas' De aeternitate mundi," Gregorianum 51 (1970): 277-303 and more recently, "Understanding St. Thomas on the Eternity of the World: Help from Giles of Rome?" Recherches de theologie ancienne et medievale 58 (1991): 113-25. The main thesis of this paper is unaffected by the dating of the De aeternitate mundi. 2 Mark F. Johnson, "Did St. Thomas Attribute a Doctrine of Creation to Aristotle?" The New Scholasticism 63 (1989): 129-55. 275 276 TIMOTHY B. NOONE world could be both eternal and created, while another pair of studies by Aersten and van Veldhuijsen have begun to explore from a more historical perspective the importance of Aquinas's formulation of the doctrine of creation for understanding his thought and its distinctiveness.3 The present paper is intended not so much to challenge the conclusions of any of these admirable studies as to put their findings into a wider historical framework through which we may hope to discover what is unique in Aquinas's doctrine of creation. In reading the Scriptum super Sententias of Thomas Aquinas, one is immediately struck by the novelty of Aquinas's claim that the philosophers and thus reason itself may reach the conclusion that the world is created. Such a claim seems quite different from the account of the philosophical knowledge of creation given by several of St. Thomas's immediate predecessors and contemporaries. What, then, emboldens Aquinas to make such a claim? Is Aquinas's reading of the philosophers so original and so superior to that of his contemporaries that he is capable of seeing in the philosophers a doctrine of creation that they missed? Or does Aquinas's originality on the philosophical demonstrability of creation have more to do with a reformulation of the doctrine of creation? Or does Aquinas both have an original interpretation of the philosophers and a different understanding of the doctrine of creation? In an attempt to answer these questions, the present paper will survey early and mid-thirteenth century views on the philosophers and the doctrine of creation and compare those views to Aquinas's position in the Scriptum super Sententias. The thirteenth-century authors included in this survey are chosen for their prominence in thirteenth-century thought, not 3 See Ian Wilks, "Aquinas on the Past Possibility of the World's Having Existed Forever," The Review of Metaphysics 48 (1994): 299-329; J. J. Macintosh, "St. Thomas and the Traversal of the Infinite," The American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 68 (1994): 157-77; J. A. Aertsen, "The Eternity of the World: The Believing...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Nach der Verurteilung von 1277: Philosophie und Theologie an der Universität von Paris im letzten Viertel des 13. Jahrhunderts; Studien und TexteTimothy B. Noone, Ph.D., M.S.L.Jan A. Aertsen, Kent Emery, Jr., and Andreas Speer, editors. Nach der Verurteilung von 1277: Philosophie und Theologie an der Universität von Paris im letzten Viertel des 13. Jahrhunderts; Studien und Texte. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2001. Pp. x + 1033. Cloth, DM 498.00In this masterful volume of essays, we have one of the most thorough examinations of the Parisian condemnation of 1277 since the appearance of the groundbreaking study by Roland Hissette (Enquête sur les 219 articles condamnés à Paris le 7 mars 1277) in 1977. Presenting the work of some 38 contributors, the volume allows the reader to have access to a wide variety [End Page 339] of interpretations of the condemnation as well as studies devoted to its context and impact upon later thought. Indeed, the studies range from assessing the character of the period around the condemnation by comparing it with the thought of the early Scholastic author William of Auvergne to detailing rememberances of the condemnation among sixteenth century authors.Though no radically new approaches to the condemnation emerge from the volume, many of the new research findings presented modify and amplify the standard interpretations. For example, Prof. Marrone's article indicates that the period just prior to the condemnation may well be one that, on balance, was surprisingly receptive to Aristotelian learning, even in the case of an "Augustinian" author such as St. Bonaventure; consequently, Marrone argues, there may well be some truth in the now mainly discarded Duhemian thesis that the Church restored a more non-Aristotelian manner of thinking through the condemnation (297-98). Prof. Courtenay's study, moreover, suggests that the Parisian theological faculty may well have reached its institutional zenith, at least in terms of the independence of its judgments and the reverence shown its opinions, in the period just prior to the condemnation, inasmuch as in the succeeding period the faculty became increasingly an instrument in the hands of royal authority.Of the many fine studies included in the volume, the following especially deserve mention. Prof. Emery's detailed analysis of the image of God in the recesses of the mind (abditum mentis) in the teaching of Henry of Ghent gives an overarching and convincing account for Henry's eventual rejection of intelligible species and the continuity of his illuminationist theory from his earlier to his later writings. Prof. Pini shows in his study of Giles of Rome how Giles avoided explicit discussion of the eternity of the world following his 'exile' from Paris, but managed to advance his own metaphysical ideas on the nature of creatures as a result, a possibly happy, though doubtless unintended, consquence of the condemnation. Prof. Aertsen analyzes the thought of Thomas Aquinas and Henry of Ghent regarding their views on whether God's essence may be an object of knowledge and their respective doctrines of the distinction between essence and existence. Prof. Dumont's study of the textual history of Scotus's doctrine of the will and his demonstration that the Subtle Doctor's later writings veer back towards a more voluntaristic position is a landmark contribution to Scotistic scholarship as well as a solid indication of how the autonomy of the will, a matter of tremendous concern in the condemnatory documents, remained a sensitive topic into the early fourteenth century at Paris.Significant additions to our knowledge of medieval authors and their works are also found in the volume. Profs. Goris and Pickavé present a partial edition of the anonymous Commentary on the Sentences found in Bruge, Stadtbibliothek, MS 491, showing how its discussion of angelic knowledge continued the earlier discussion of Henry of Ghent and Godfrey of Fontaines, while itself serving as a principal source for William Peter Godinus's influential Lectura Thomasina. Prof. Brown's edition and study of the part of Prosper of Reggio's prologue to his Commentary on the Sentences also points to the importance of Henry of Ghent and Godfrey of Fontaines, but this time apropos of one of their...

In this second edition of his critically acclaimed Introduction to Medieval Logic, Alexander Broadie has once again given general readers a clear and concise account of two fundamental areas of medieval logic: the theory of terms and the theory of consequences. Confining himself, in the main, to the major developments in logic from 1250 to 1500, Broadie presents medieval logic in a way that is more systematic than historical; yet his approach is remarkable for the manner in which it manages to convey material of an extremely technical nature in nontechnical prose.

In this slim volume, Klocker intends to offer a different and more sympathetic reading of Ockham's philosophical and theological ideas than that afforded by what Klocker terms the "traditional view." According to the latter view, chiefly found in the writings of Etienne Gilson and Anton Pegis, Ockham's thought is fundamentally skeptical, a medieval precursor of the philosophical skepticism of Hume in the eighteenth century. Klocker proposes instead to present Ockham's thought as inspired by the condemnations of 1270 and 1277 and concerned, as were the authors of the condemnatory documents, to preserve the freedom of the Christian God. Accordingly, the central thesis of this book is that the unity in the often negative and critical thought of Ockham is the constructive goal of articulating a philosophical vision of the universe in which the freedom of God both to create the universe and to intervene for His own purposes in the created order is assured.