Eleonore Stump

Recent work on the subject of faith has tended to focus on the epistemology of religious belief, considering such issues as whether beliefs held in faith are rational and how they may be justified. Richard Swinburne, for example, has developed an intricate explanation of the relationship between the propositions of faith and the evidence for them. Alvin Plantinga, on the other hand, has maintained that belief in God may be properly basic, that is, that a belief that God exists can be part of the foundation of a rational noetic structure. This sort of work has been useful in drawing attention to significant issues in the epistemology of religion, but these approaches to faith seem to me also to deepen some long-standing perplexities about traditional Christian views of faith.

Some defenders of the principle of alternative possibilities (PAP) have responded to the challenge of Frankfurt-style counterexamples (FSCs) to PAP by arguing that there remains a flicker of freedom -- that is, an alternative possibility for action -- left to the agent in FSCs. I argue that the flicker of freedom strategy is unsuccessful. The strategy requires the supposition that doing an act-on-one''s-own is itself an action of sorts. I argue that either this supposition is confused and leads to counter-intuitive results; or, if the supposition is acceptable, then it is possible to use it to construct a FSC in which there is no flicker of freedom at all. Either way, the flicker of freedom strategy is ineffective against FSCs. Since the flicker of freedom strategy is arguably the best defense of PAP, I conclude that FSCs are successful in showing that PAP is false. An agent can act with moral responsibility without having alternative possibilities available to her

Dialectic is a standard and important part of the logica vetus (or old logic) in medieval philosophy. It has its ultimate origins in Aristotle's Topics,its fundamental source in Boethius's De topicis differentiis,and its flowering in its absorption into fourteenth-century theories of consequences or conditional inferences. The chapter on Topics in Garlandus Compotista's logic book is the oldest scholastic work on dialectic still extant. In this paper I show the differences between Boethius's Theory of Topics and Garlandus's in order to illustrate the role of Topics in early scholastic logic. I argue that for Garlandus Topics are warrants for the inference from the antecedent to the consequent in a conditional proposition and that he is interested in Topics because of his overriding interest in hypothetical syllogisms. I conclude by discussing briefly the relationship between Garlandus's use of Topics and twelfth-century accounts

The editors comment that the core of this book is formed by the papers presented as a special session at the Ninth International Congress of Medieval Philosophy, honoring Norman Kretzmann’s contribution to the study of medieval philosophy. They decided to publish these papers with other essays devoted to issues in Aquinas’s moral theory specially commissioned from a group of Kretzmann’s colleagues, friends, and former students. The book, consisting of ten essays and a list of Kretzmann’s publications on Aquinas, is dedicated to Kretzmann, who died just months before the volume appeared.

In their rich and impressive book Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility, John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza offer an account of moral responsibility in terms of guidance control. On their view, an agent has guidance control in virtue of acting on a moderately reasons-responsive mechanism which is his own, and guidance control is “the freedom-relevant condition necessary and sufficient for moral responsibility.” It is an advantage of this account, they think, that it is compatible with both the truth and the falsity of causal determinism. All of these claims raise questions which are worth pursuing. In this very brief paper, I can consider just one aspect of their account, namely, their rejection of incompatibilism.

In this chapter, a Thomistic account of faith is blended with recent neurobiological research to explore just why we might consider the trust-based, testimonial acquisition of knowledge to be the result of a _virtue_. The motivating worry is that, typically, taking others’ word through trust is apparently easy and passive; why think of this as any kind of success through ability, as a virtue would be? The chaptercontends that it is our empathic capacities working together with our wills that allow us to perceive and actively, appropriately respond to goodness or trustworthiness in others. The consequence is that coming to testimonial knowledge is indeed an _accomplishment_ on the part of one who trusts. It is then suggested that similar processes may be at work in the acquisition and growth of a person’s faith in God.

Although Thomistic philosophy has often been equaled to a Christianized Aristotelianism, Eleonore Stump weakens this common conception through the unraveling of the notions of virtue and passion within the Thomistic ethics, and comparing these with their Aristotelian counterparts.The exposition of the Thomistic theory of virtue serves as a starting point to the development of the classification of the passions that Thomas Aquinas presents. Given their different cultures, one pagan and the other Christian, Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas construct two different theoretical apparatus, dependant on their own fundamental final realities: non-personal metaphysics for the former, and Trinity for the latter. In the case of Aquinas, the perfection of virtues and the passions do not only depend on rationality, but God plays a main role in this respect.

The problem of evil has generated varying attempts at theodicy. To show that suffering is defeated for a sufferer, a theodicy argues that there is an outweighing benefit which could not have been gotten without the suffering. Typically, this condition has the tacit presupposition given that this is a post-Fall world. Consequently, there is a sense in which human suffering would not be shown to be defeated even if there were a successful theodicy because a theodicy typically implies that the benefit in question could have been gotten without the suffering if there had not been a Fall. There is a part of the problem of evil that would remain, then, even if there were a successful theodicy. This is the problem of mourning: even defeated suffering in the post-Fall world merits mourning. How is this warranted mourning compatible with the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly good God? The traditional response to this problem is the felix culpa view, which maintains that the original sin was fortunate because there is an outweighing benefit to sufferers that could not be gotten in a world without suffering. The felix culpa view presupposes an object of evaluation, namely, the true self of a human being, and a standard of evaluation for human lives. This book explores these and a variety of other topics in philosophical theology in order to explain and evaluate the role of suffering in human lives.

The aim of this essay is to sketch the basic outline of Aquinas’s metaethics and its support for his virtue-based ethics. When Aquinas’s central metaethical thesis is combined with his theological views, especially his understanding of the doctrine of divine simplicity, then the theological interpretation of the central metaethical thesis constitutes the basis for a religious ethics that makes God essential to human morality but without tying morality to God’s will. The result is a metaphysically grounded, objective normative virtue ethics which is theological at least in this sense that it is ultimately based in God’s nature.

The understanding of God’s mode of existence as eternal makes a significant difference to a variety of issues in contemporary philosophy of religion, including, for instance, the apparent incompatibility of divine omniscience with human freedom. But the concept has come under attack in current philosophical discussion as inefficacious to solve the philosophical puzzles for which it seems so promising. Although Boethius in the early 6th century thought that the concept could resolve the apparent incompatibility between divine foreknowledge and human free will, some contemporary philosophers, such as William Hasker, have argued that whatever help the concept of eternity may give with that puzzle is more than vitiated by the religiously pernicious implications of the concept for notions of God’s providence and action in time. In this paper, I will examine and respond to Hasker’s arguments against the doctrine of God’s eternity.

On Christian doctrine, God is love; and the love of God is most manifest in Christ’s passion. The passion of Christ thus matters to philosophical theology’s examination of the divine attribute of love. But the passion of Christ is presented in a biblical story, and there are serious methodological questions about the way in which a biblical story can be used as evidence in philosophical theology. And these questions in turn raise deeper epistemological questions. How does any narrative transmit knowledge? And what counts as veridicality in a narrative? This paper deals with some of the questions for philosophical theology and then concentrates on the more general epistemological questions about narratively transmitted knowledge.

Religious faith may manifest itself, among other things, as a mode of seeing the ordinary world, which invests that world imaginatively with an unseen depth of divine intention and spiritual significance. While such seeing may well be truthful, it is also unavoidably constructive, involving the imagination in its philosophical sense of the capacity to organize underdetermined or ambiguous sense date into a whole or gestalt. One of the characteristic ways in which biblical narratives inspire and teach is by renewing their characters’ and readers’ imagination. The texts do so not inexorably but in a similar way as works of art. This paper therefore investigates the ways in which works of art engage and develop the imagination, and thereby enable renewed perceptual and cognitive engagement with the world. The paper introduces predictive processing as a helpful psychological theory for analyzing this dynamic, and outlines questions for further research.

This new Companion to Aquinas features entirely new chapters written by internationally recognized experts in the field. It shows the power of Aquinas's philosophical thought and transmits the worldview which he inherited, developed, altered, and argued for, while at the same time revealing to contemporary philosophers the strong connections which there are between Aquinas's interests and views and their own. Its five sections cover the life and works of Aquinas; his metaphysics, including his understanding of the ultimate foundations of reality; his metaethics and ethics, including his virtue ethics; his account of human nature; his theory of the afterlife; his epistemology and his theory of the intellectual virtues; his view of the nature of free will and the relation of grace to free will; and finally some key components of his philosophical theology, including the incarnation and atonement, Christology, and the nature of original sin.