Catherine Peters

The debates regarding sex and gender are substantial, pervasive, and fierce. A striking feature of these debates is a lack of clarity regarding terms, especially regarding “sex” and “gender.” While “sex” is often taken to indicate certain biological characteristics related to reproductive roles, proposed definitions of “gender” are varied, often involving a matrix of factors, behaviors, and identities. But these are not merely linguistic disagreements. Language conveys reality, and ideas about “sex” and “gender” have consequences for one’s view of reality. Drawing on Thomistic metaphysics, I argue for a realist view of sex and gender. This view is largely denied by contemporary gender theorists who adopt, instead, a fundamentally nominalist attitude towards both. In such nominalist accounts, “sex” and “gender” are reduced to names with little correspondence to sexual reality. The only counter to this contemporary nominalism, like all past iterations, is a return to reality.

When considering the metaphysical preambles to faith, the existence of God is surely preeminent. While investigation of preambles is often a feature of the generally Christian and particularly Catholic entrée to theology, they also concern the other Abrahamic religions. The present study explores “necessary” and “possible” as metaphysical preambles in the thought of Avicenna. Though compelling, Avicenna’s account has not escaped criticism, most notably from Averroes, who rejected both these concepts and Avicenna’s subsequent argument for God, the Necessary Existent. Rejecting “necessary” and “possible” as metaphysical preambles can have far-reaching consequences, not only for the cogency of Avicennian metaphysics, but for any natural theology that seeks to employ these concepts. The present study, first, defends “necessary” and “possible” as formulated in the metaphysics of Avicenna. Second, it shows how these concepts serve as preambles to arguments for God. Third, it addresses and refutes Averroes’ criticisms.

Peter Geach claims in Good and Evil that there can never be “just good or bad, there is only being a good or bad so-and-so” and thereby denies that goodness can ever be used in a non-relative sense. Although his rejection of absolute goodness might initially seem to be a startling and mistaken departure from the Thomistic understanding, I argue that an examination of Thomas’s texts reveal a strong agreement between them, one grounded in a common rejection of univocal goodness. For both, “good” is relative to the nature of a being. To defend the relativity of goodness, I consider two objections: first, that relativizing goodness leads to subjectivism. Second, that divine goodness is absolute and non-relative. In answering these objections, I show that in both Thomas’s medieval and Geach’s modern accounts “good” is an analogical perfection relative to a nature. In this way, then, goodness is objectively relative.

The author seeks to show how participation serves as a focal point of a Thomistic personalist account of natural law. While Aquinas himself does not invoke the concept of person in his account of natural law, the author argues that participation can and should be understood as a personal act. According to her, justification for this interpretation is found in the commonality of rationality: that which both makes a substance to be a person and renders the participation of man in the eternal law to be a truly natural law.

This study draws attention to the ordering of matter and form argued for in Aristotle’s Physics II, 8 (199a30–32). This argument for hylomorphic teleology relies on the presentation of nature earlier in Physics II, 1. In this way, it highlights the connections between chapter one’s account of nature as matter and form and chapter eight’s defense of final causality. Grounding final causality in the principles of nature reveals its central importance for Aristotle’s view of nature. To clarify the meaning of hylomorphic teleology I contrast my interpretation of Aristotle with that of Wolfgang Wieland regarding the scope and foundation of the final cause, countering his claim that chance and universal final causality are mutually exclusive. I contend that the presentation of teleology in chapter eight supports a diverse interpretation of the final cause, one that admits chance events while not sacrificing the intrinsic ordering of matter to form.

The concept of nature (Gr. phúsis; Ar. ṭabīʿa) lies at the heart of classical physics. Seemingly small differences about nature can blossom into significant disagreements. The present study offers an exposition of certain neglected passages concerning ṭabīʿa in Ibn Sīnā’s al-Samāʿ al-ṭabīʿī(The Physics of the Healing). The pre­dominant view of ṭabīʿa is that it as an active principle, a concep­tion of nature that radically departs from Aristotle’s account of phúsis in Physics I-II. I dispute this interpretation by investigat­ing two neglected texts in the Physics of the Healing. First, these texts indicate that nature should be associated with matter and form (I, 6) and, second, they argue that failing to account for matter and form makes knowledge of nature incomplete (I, 9).