Brian Kemple

This text should have been written by John Deely (1942–2017). But we all pass from this coil with our life’s work left unfinished—leaving thereby to others the choice of whether or not that work is continued. During our last conversation, knowing that his time in this life was limited, John expressed to me a wonder and a trepidation whether the human soul really is immortal. I repeated to him, in paraphrase, words he had once said in class: “It is an experiment we all make, but only once.” He chuckled and said that’s true. Reflecting at the distance of nearly seven years and having since oft-read C.S. Peirce’s brief essay, “Immortality in the Light of Synechism”, it occurs to me that the immortality of the individual soul is the wrong question, if we understand it strictly as materially individuated: for we are all of us sustained more by relationality than substantiality, by our common and shared intentionality, and though we may not know with certitude his final resting place, we do here—I hope—sustain something of the soul that belonged to John Deely. I hope this doesn’t “go off the rails”. All the contents are fully attributable to the author, Doctor Brian Kemple. Should you wish to get this text republished, get in touch with the author or the editorial committee of the Studia Poinsotiana. Insofar as possible, we will be happy to broker your contact. Studia Poinsotiana The first-ever peer-reviewed scholarly publishing venue offering an encyclopedic web of understanding concentrating on John of St. Thomas (Poinsot).

Ens Primum Cognitum in Thomas Aquinas and the Tradition presents a reading of Thomas Aquinas' claim that "being" is the first object of the human intellect. Blending the insights of both the early Thomistic tradition (c.1380--1637AD) and the Leonine Thomistic revival (1879--present), Brian Kemple examines how this claim of Aquinas has been traditionally understood, and what is lacking in that understanding. While the recent tradition has emphasized the primacy of the real (so-called ens reale) in human recognition of the primum cognitum, Kemple argues that this misinterprets Aquinas, thereby closing off Thomistic philosophy to the broader perspective needed to face the philosophical challenges of today, and proposes an alternative interpretation with dramatic epistemological and metaphysical consequences.

Thomas Aquinas holds not only that prudence, the virtue of right practical reasoning, is necessary for living well, but emphatically asserts that it “is the virtue most necessary to human life.” This essay argues that the force of Thomas’ assertion should not be understood as simply contradicting the objection—that “it seems that prudence is not a virtue necessary to living a good life”—with vigor, but rather, as we intend to show, that although all the moral virtues are necessary for the good life, there is a superior importance to the need for prudence, as that whereby the parts of virtuous living are not merely stacked up like building blocks of moral righteousness, but coalesced into a complete whole. To make clear the reasons for this preeminent necessity, we shall first consider the parts and constitution of prudence itself, its relationship to the other virtues, and conclude with its principal act, praeceptum.

While there is an absence of treatises devoted to the question of ens ut primum cognitum, there is no shortage of brief and implicit treatments; indeed, nearly every Thomist of the past seven centuries seems to have at least something to say about the notion that being is the first of our intellectual conceptions. Most recent Thomist thinkers—including Gilson—assume this ens to be nothing other than the ens reale of things entitatively considered, operating as they do out of a framework within which realism and idealism are presumed to be exhaustive and mutually exclusive attempts to answer the question of human knowledge. It is the intent of this essay to examine how Gilson arrives at his position, which he calls “metaphysical realism,” and to point to some of the difficulties it entails.