Daniel D. De Haan

Like many others, I have learned a lot from John Finnis’s works on natural law and St. Thomas Aquinas’s political thought. There are numerous questions I would like to ask and issues I would like to raise in response to Finnis’s Barry Lecture, such as my different reading of Alasdair MacIntyre’s works. But I will focus on one question that targets two of the three topics of his lecture: when is human normativity first known? I argue that, given Finnis’s other commitments, he should answer: it depends on which order of human normativity is in question. Human normativity is first known by a theoretical insight into theoretical goods of human beings from the 1st order of normativity. And human normativity is first known by a practical insight into practical goods within the 3rd order of normativity. This practical insight is informed by the 1st order of normativity’s fields of possibility known by initial theoretical insights, but this practical insight discerns something more concerning human normativity which is not grasped by any theoretical insights. This practical insight from the 3rd order of normativity grasps basic goods of human normativity as being rationally desirable and rationally directive of human actions. If my argument here is sound, then it has shown that with respect to the problem of how we grasp the first principles or basic goods of the natural law, there is less principled distance and disagreement than is commonly supposed between Finnis’s theory of natural law and some rival theories of natural law. Granted, there are still significant disagreements concerning whether the basic goods are incommensurable, pre-moral, and other issues, but I hope my arguments can forge a path toward some significant points of agreement.

In this chapter I address the emergentist credentials of two different forms of staunch hylomorphism: uniformism and pluriformism. In the first section I introduce staunch hylomorphism and identify five features held by its exponents. In section two I distinguish uniform from pluriform versions of staunch hylomorphism. In the third section, I present three varieties of emergentism and employ them to evaluate the emergentist credentials of these two forms of staunch hylomorphism. In the fourth section, I present the basic features of Carl Gillett’s theory of scientific strong emergentism and in section five I turn to examine the staunch hylomorphic credentials of Carl Gillett’s scientific strong emergentism. I argue Gillett’s rich account of emergent entities and their “machretic determinations” is strikingly similar to the claims made by staunch hylomorphism. I conclude with some reasons why machretic strong emergentism should embrace staunch hylomorphism’s realism about forms.

In this essay I identify numerous internal problems with the ethics of authenticity and conclude that it is an aspiration that alienates us from the virtues. I focus on Charles Taylor’s well-known articulation of the ethics of authenticity and show how it avoids some of the criticisms Alasdair MacIntyre has leveled against Bernard Williams’s version of the ethics of authenticity. I then raise several substantive objections against Taylor’s position, arguing that it faces serious difficulties both in his problematic account of the presuppositions of ethical authenticity and in the inherent liabilities of ethical authenticity to degenerate into the very subjectivism and atomistic individualism Taylor rightly demurs. I finish with some suggestions of how authenticity, like pleasure, can be rightly situated within a neo-Aristotelian account of virtuous flourishing.

I have been asked to respond to Therese Cory's contribution, "The Distinctive Unity of the Human Being In Aquinas". In her essay, Cory contends that characterizing Aquinas or his anthropology as being Aristotelian is “problematic” because this “sweeping label” “has distorted and concealed some of the most elegant features of his approach to the human being.” She goes so far as to recommend that “in general one ought to avoid wholesale name-labeling of theories—e.g. ‘Aristotelian, Platonist, Thomistic, Cartesian’.” She proposes an alternative guide for any would-be authentic reception of Aquinas’ anthropology rooted in the “distinctive unity of the human” to be “one distinctive kind of reality.” Her guide focuses on two principles: the horizon principle and the uniformity principle. I shall briskly sketch around ten objections or counter-contentions to Cory’s claims. I will conclude with an alternative proposal that “philosophical characters” are indispensable to philosophical enquiry, including Thomist enquiries aiming to receive and develop

In this essay I identify numerous internal problems with the ethics of authenticity and conclude that it is an aspiration that alienates us from the virtues. I focus on Charles Taylor’s well-known articulation of the ethics of authenticity and show how it avoids some of the criticisms Alasdair MacIntyre has leveled against Bernard Williams’s version of the ethics of authenticity. I then raise several substantive objections against Taylor’s position, arguing that it faces serious difficulties both in his problematic account of the presuppositions of ethical authenticity and in the inherent liabilities of ethical authenticity to degenerate into the very subjectivism and atomistic individualism Taylor rightly demurs. I finish with some suggestions of how authenticity, like pleasure, can be rightly situated within a neo-Aristotelian account of virtuous flourishing.

The disciples of St Thomas Aquinas have organized their enquiries in diverse ways throughout the history of Thomism. The surge of reinvigorated interest in Thomas Aquinas following Leo XIII’s Aeterni Patris inspired a wide variety of purported types of Thomism in the twentieth century. What should Thomists of the twenty-first century learn from their inheritance of past centuries of Thomism? How can they take up Leo XIII’s call vetera novis augere et perficere. I aim to address two issues in this essay. First, to identify a more principled demarcation of approaches to Thomistic enquiry, which eschews the commonplace but problematic and merely sociological classifications of the last century’s ‘schools’ of Thomism. I argue that a more principled and agenda-setting criteria distinguishes “defensive-constructive commentary Thomism” and “tradition-constituted-enquiry Thomism”. The first stresses fidelity to the conclusions found in careful readings of Aquinas’s texts. The second emphasizes fidelity to Aquinas’s systematic forms of enquiry directed to the truth. Second, I then probe the resources these two forms of Thomism have for addressing the epistemological crises facing Thomism, focusing on those concerning how to engage the nova of the sciences and rival philosophical traditions Open Access on New Blackfriars website

The problem of free will is ubiquitously articulated in terms of the (in)compatibility of free will with laws of nature. Peter van Inwagen, David Lewis, Robert Kane, and nearly all other contributors to the problem of free will, conceive it as a potential conflict between the laws of nature and free will. Despite dispositional defenses of compatibilism, the putatively dispositional principle of alternative possibilities among defenders of free will, as well as increased sympathy for dispositional and agent-causation versions of source incompatibilist free will, the standard debates remain beholden to a nomological definition of the free will problem. This is surprising since one of the upshots of the causal powers revolution has been the overthrow of laws of nature. Many exponents of the metaphysics of powers either reject laws of nature altogether, or regard them as abstract descriptions of the real work performed by causal powers. What remains unexplored for dispositionalists is to address the question: how to re-think about the problem of free will without the laws of nature? That is the aim of my essay. I will argue the shift to powers requires not only major revisions to the definitions of determinism, compatibilism, etc. put forth by van Inwagen and others, but also a re-thinking of the power of free will itself in light its manifestations.

Thomas Aquinas distinguishes between passions that are antecedent to the judgment of reason and passions that are consequent to the judgment of reason. The recent interest in Thomas’s moral psychology, and in particular his treatment of the passions, their obedience to practical reason, and the part they play in virtuous, continent, incontinent, and vicious human action, has occasioned a few scholarly studies attendant to his distinction between antecedent and consequent passions. Some of these studies have also taken notice of Thomas’s detailed division of the complex interplay among the concert operations of the senses, passions, reason, and will. Nonetheless, few scholars have highlighted the function of the highest internal sense power, the cogitative power (vis cogitativa), within the dynamic complex of operations and powers that Thomas ascribes to the human person. And so far as I know, no recent study takes the function of the vis cogitativa in Aquinas’s moral psychology as its primary focus. In this paper I aim to fill part of that lacuna by explicating the function of the vis cogitativa as a power of moral perception. I shall show that getting clear on how the cogitative power contributes to moral perception also illumines Thomas’s distinction between antecedent and consequent passions, and accordingly, a host of other connected issues in Aquinas, such as the obedience of the passions to reason, continence and incontinence, and the unity of the virtues through prudence. Needless to say, I shall not venture into the details of each of these intricate topics. The paper is divided into two parts. In the first part I shall summarize the salient points of a few recent studies on Thomas’s doctrine of antecedent and consequent passions. This synopsis will provide the philosophical and exegetical point of departure of the second part by setting in relief a lacuna in these recent interpretations of Thomas’s treatment of the contribution of virtuous passions to practical reason. The second part will aim to complement these studies by filling that lacuna through a detailed exposition of Thomas’s account of the salient functions ascribed to the cogitative power with respect to the operations of practical reason and the obedience of the passions to reason.

Beauty, according to Thomas Aquinas, is attributed to those things that please when seen (quae visa placent).¹ The significance of this lapidary description is obscure, especially as it pertains to aesthetic perception and Aquinas’s doctrine of beauty. If taken literally and univocally, does this description exclude beauty that is heard, tasted, smelled, or felt? What about the intelligible beauty of poetry, a rhetorical argument, a perfect mathematical demonstration, a person of exemplary moral character, or the intellectual vision of God? Furthermore, what could it mean for vision, a power of sensory apprehension, to be pleased—pleasure being a passion in a sensory appetite? Alternatively, if this description of beauty is just a colorful metaphor, then it tells us very little about the details of Aquinas’s understanding of human aesthetic perception of beauty. A similar series of questions concern the beautiful itself, the object of that visa placent. Is beauty a mere per se sensible that is confined to the proper sensible of color and such visible common sensibles as motion, rest, number, magnitude, and shape? What about the myriad forms of embodied intelligible beauty found throughout nature and art? Such forms of beauty seem to be neither mere per se sensibles nor strictly immaterial intelligibilities, but fully enmattered and yet intelligible manifestations of beauty, like the beauty of the Crucified. My primary concern in this essay is to address these exegetical questions by fleshing out the implications of Aquinas’s explicit remarks and positions on beauty and human perception with a view to a constructive Thomist account of aesthetic perception. In this essay, I draw upon a number of erudite studies on beauty and aesthetics in Aquinas, studies that have already completed the exegetical heavy lifting required for saying something constructive about Aquinas and aesthetic perception. I will define “aesthetic perception” in the course of addressing the parade of questions introduced earlier. Before we clarify the psychology of aesthetic perception and the experience of admiring beauty, we first must say what Aquinas took beauty to be. Once beauty as an object of perception enters more clearly into view, we can then apply Aquinas’s psychological taxonomy to differentiate which operations and powers enable us to admire beautiful objects.

Among Thomas Aquinas’s 13th and 14th century critics, some of them targeted his Aristotelian view that the human intellect does not cognize individuals of a material nature. To many of his readers, Aquinas’s stance on this point seems to be indefensible for it is an obvious fact that we think about individuals. In this essay, I argue Aquinas’s view has been misunderstood, both by his critics and by many Thomists that have come to his defense. I distinguish two impor- tant aspects of Aquinas’s approach to this problem. First, I highlight the co-operative function different cognitive powers perform with respect to the unified cognitive operations of the human being. Second, I examine in detail Aquinas’s account of human sensing, perceiving, understanding, reasoning, thinking, and cognizing individuals by the co-operative cognition of their ex- ternal senses, the cogitative power (vis cogitativa), and the possible intellect. I show that a proper understanding of the coordinated operations of the pos- sible intellect and cogitative power reveals that Aquinas in fact has a complex and coherent account of how the human being – but not the possible intellect – perceives, thinks, understands, and reasons about individuals.

This chapter argues that the discipline of a daily examination of conscience is a spiritual practice that contributes to a philosophical way of life. The argument draws upon the work of Pierre Hadot, Iris Murdoch, Charles Taylor, Bernard Williams, and Alasdair MacIntyre. The chapter shows how this spiritual practice helps us to harmonize our diverse existential, practical, and theoretical enquiries and stances concerning how to live a good life. Along the way attention is drawn to the importance of understanding ourselves as developing dependent rational animals whose existential, practical, and theoretical stances frequently come into conflict with the stances of others. Here too an examination of conscience can help us navigate these conflicts. The chapter concludes by responding to two challenges to the proposed account of examination of conscience in human life: one concerning the spectre of relativism and the second based on the insufficiency of this spiritual practice for transforming human action.

Many Thomists believe that the principle “nothing can give what it does not possess” is contravened by hylomorphic explanations of the natural evolutionary origins of biological species. Inanimate substances cannot generate animate substances and vegetative substances cannot generate sensitive substances because they lack the ontological perfections required to generate these ontologically superior substances. I shall argue that this construal of what is called the “principle of proportionate causality” (=PPC) presupposes two mistakes. The first is an atomized hylomorphism that overlooks the potentialities and actualities of the natural systems of interacting hylomorphic substances within the Cosmos. Second is the mistaken assumption that this “ontologically superior” construal of PPC is the most plausible and defensible Thomist version of PPC. My major contribution to debates over PPC is twofold. First, I demonstrate that this construal is in fact the more problematic, implausible, and less defensible version of PPC. Second, I show why Thomists should instead endorse the “sufficiently powerful” construal of PPC, which is compatible with naturalistic Thomist explanations of evolution. Clearing away these obstacles will open a pathway forward to more complete Thomist naturalistic explanations of how systems of hylomorphic substances do possess the powers required to generate new ontological species within the Cosmos.

This essay presents a substantive Thomist response to neurophilosophy’s main experimental challenge to free will: the Libet-style experiments on the neural antecedents of conscious voluntary actions. My response to this challenge will disclose that Thomists are rationally justified in rejecting both the conclusions of neurophilosophy skeptics of free will, and more fundamentally, the rival philosophical conceptions of voluntary action and free will that were chosen to be operationalized in these neuroscientific experiments. I show how the Thomists’ alternative conception of human action justifies a significantly different interpretation of Libet-style experiments, one which reveals the psychological phenomenon targeted by these experiments is miscategorized as a voluntary action.

Defenders and critics of divine simplicity rightly look to Thomas Aquinas’s important contributions to this pillar of classical theism (=CT). But few contemporary discussions notice the way Aquinas employs pseudo-Dionysius’s triplex via as a principled heuristic that governs and organizes his theological enquiries concerning divine simplicity. This oversight has led to misinterpretations of Aquinas’s doctrine of divine simplicity (=DDS), which must be situated within his triplex via theology (=TVT). In this chapter I show that, like Aquinas’s DDS, the value of Thomist TVT extends beyond historical exegesis and provides exponents of CT with a fertile alternative to the more well-known Anselmian inspired heuristic of perfect being theology (=PBT). In the first part I introduce two problems for CT that cannot be resolved by PBT and Thomistic accounts of DDS that omit Aquinas’s TVT. In the second part, I explain what Thomistic TVT is and why its integrated threefold way of understanding God via causality, negation, and super-eminence can overcome these problems for CT.

Do humans have abilities to perform scientific experiments? Do humans possess real powers for performing scientific experiments? I shall treat these two questions in turn where the first will bring us to the second. I shall argue that the scientific image of humans must cohere with the manifest image of humans as having the ability to exercise rational embodied control, which constitutes the power to perform scientific experiments. I first argue why rational embodied control is indispensable to the ability to perform a scientific experiment. I then argue that an ontology of causal powers provides the best explanation for this ability to make the causal difference in reality required for scientists to effectively perform scientific experiments and arrive at scientific truths. I then conclude by considering a major objection against the alternative standard causal theory of action, which would also undermine the thesis that scientists perform experiments. I show why neo-Aristotelian causal power realism does not face this objection in its explanation of how scientists exercise real rational embodied causal control within their experiments.

In the target article, Iain McGilchrist draws upon his work, The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (=ME), to develop the relevance of its central claims to religion. Here and elsewhere McGilchrist contends, contrary to some critics, that his construal of the divided brain hypothesis (=DBH) does not make the fundamental philosophical error which is known as the homunculus fallacy. The critics’ charge is this: McGilchrist’s DBH purports to explain certain psychological features of human persons by providing an explanation that is in fact a pseudo-explanation. It is a pseudo-explanation because the DBH’s explanation of these psychological phenomena merely reintroduces the same psychological phenomena as explanatory factors that belong to the two different hemispheres of the brain. This article addresses whether McGilchrist’s position is in fact innocent of the charge of the homunculus fallacy. It is one thing to recognize the principle of contradiction and aim to avoid contradictions, it is another thing to avoid actually contradicting oneself. I show that McGilchrist consistently violates the homunculus fallacy despite his consistent claims to the contrary. I then argue that it is impossible for McGilchrist to articulate the central thesis of ME, namely, DBH, without violating the homunculus fallacy. Indeed, McGilchrist’s DBH requires that the error identified by the homunculus fallacy is not a fallacy at all, but is a deep insight crucial to understanding the making of the western world. Let us begin with the homunculus fallacy.

In this paper I will delineate the psychological operations and faculties required for linguistic apprehension within a Thomistic psychology. This will require first identifying the proper object of linguistic apprehension, which will then allow me to specify the distinct operations and faculties necessary for linguisticapprehension. I will argue that the semantic value of any linguistic term is a type of incidental sensible and that its cognitive apprehension is a type of incidentalsensation. Hence, the faculties necessary for the apprehension of any linguistic term’s semantic value will be the cogitative power and the intellect. The cogitativepower, because it is the faculty of particular intentions, and the intellect, because it is the faculty of universal intentions.

In recent years an old Thomistic debate on the separated soul has been resurrected. All parties to the debate agree that, for Aquinas, the separated soul (anima separata) designates the rational soul of a human person that survives the death of the human and, prior to the resurrection, the rational soul subsists in itself unnaturally apart from the body of which it is the substantial form in statu viae. According to some Thomists, called ‘corruptionists,’ the separated soul is not a person. Contrary to the corruptionists, other Thomists, called ‘survivalists,’ contend that the separated soul is a person. Both views seem to have a point, and neither side seems able to convince the other. Corruptionism is the exegetically stronger position with respect to the texts of Aquinas; survivalism’s strength rests in the clarity with which it draws attention to the person-like features of the separated soul. We aim to carve out a middle way. In this paper, we argue on Thomistic grounds that the separated soul is an incomplete person. We defend this novel position by drawing upon Aquinas’s application of a distinction between a complete and incomplete ‘this something’ (hoc aliquid) to human nature and the rational soul, respectively. We argue that since Aquinas’s metaphysics of personhood is framed by and tracks his quixotic metaphysics of the rational soul as an incomplete hoc aliquid, his metaphysical principles entail that the separated rational soul is an incomplete person. Consequently, our position has the fortuitous result that the views presented by corruptionists and survivalists are both partially correct, but incomplete; the separated soul after death is not a person simpliciter, but it is an incomplete person. Our argument proceeds in two stages. In the first part of the paper we identify and explain Aquinas’s three criteria for personhood: subsistence, rationality of the supposit, and completeness. Satisfying these criteria is individually necessary and jointly sufficient for any being to be a person. Said otherwise, any being that satisfies these criteria also satisfies the Boethian definition of person that Aquinas appropriates, ‘an individual substance of a rational nature.’ The subsistence criterion requires a person be a per se subsistent individual. The rationality of the supposit requires a person be a supposit that performs rational operations in virtue of the rationality of its nature. And the completeness criterion requires that a person be complete or whole. In the second part of the paper, we argue that the separated soul as understood by Aquinas satisfies each of these criteria. Yet, it satisfies them imperfectly and therefore must be qualified as an incomplete person instead of a person simpliciter.

In this study, I outline a heuristic for Thomist philosophical anthropology. In the first part, I introduce the major heuristics employed by Aquinas to establish the objects, operations, powers, and nature of his anthropology. I then identity major lacunae in his anthropology. In the second part, I show how an integrated approach to commonsense, experiential, experimental, and metaphysical psychologies can fill these lacunae and contribute to the enquiries of a contemporary Thomist philosophical anthropology.

I contend that the classical approach of Thomists to internecine Thomist debates about the requirements for initiating the enquiries of natural philosophy and metaphysics generates an epistemological crisis which this classical approach cannot overcome on its own terms. Furthermore, the failure of this classical approach to resolve these intractable debates has all too often distracted and stymied Thomists from contributing to the real enquiries of philosophy of nature. This explains, in part, why the most cogent and influential defenders of a return to Aristotelian ideas concerning nature and their relevance to modern science, has come from analytic philosophers unconcerned with these classical Thomist debates. But Thomism need not render itself irrelevant to the philosophy of nature; or so I argue in this essay. I first present a surview of how a classical interpretation of Aristotle’s division of theoretical sciences generated these debates about the relationship between the subjects of metaphysics and natural philosophy. I then argue neither Wippel’s ingenious efforts to secure the autonomy of metaphysics from natural philosophy nor the arguments for the existence of an immaterial being of the natural philosophy first proponents succeed. Hence, the intractable stalemate between these Thomists. Drawing upon the insights of Alasdair MacIntyre I argue for an alternative approach that overcomes this epistemological crisis and helps to secure the relevance of Thomism to the enquiries of philosophy of nature.

In Necessary Existence and the Doctrine of Being in Avicenna’s Metaphysics of the Healing Daniel De Haan explicates the central argument of Avicenna’s metaphysical masterpiece. De Haan argues that the most fundamental primary notion in Avicenna’s metaphysics is neither being nor thing but is the necessary ( wājib), which Avicenna employs to demonstrate the existence and true-nature of the divine necessary existence in itself. This conclusion is established through a systematic investigation of how Avicenna’s theory of a demonstrative science is employed in the organization of his metaphysical science into its subject, first principles, and objects of enquiry. The book examines the essential role the first principles as primary notions and primary hypotheses play in the central argument of Avicenna’s metaphysics.

Thomas Aquinas consistently defended the thesis that the separated rational soul that results from a human person’s death is not a person. Nevertheless, what has emerged in recent decades is a sophisticated disputed question between “survivalists” and “corruptionists” concerning the personhood of the separated soul that has left us with intractable disagreements wherein neither side seems able to convince the other. In our contribution to this disputed question, we present a digest of an unconsidered middle way: the separated soul is an incomplete person.

This thesis is concerned with answering the question, what is the central argument of Avicenna’s Metaphysics of the Healing that brings its opening ontological approach to the subject of first philosophy to its ultimate theological goal and conclusion? This dissertation contends that it is the function of the fundamental scientific first principles of metaphysics, and in particular the fundamental primary notion necessary, to provide the intelligible link that Avicenna employs to demonstrate the existence and true-nature of the divine necessary existence in itself on the basis of his doctrine of being. This conclusion is pursued through a systematic and cumulative line of inquiry that begins in Part I with Avicenna’s logical–cum–epistemological doctrine of conceptualization and assent, the heuristic order of the basic scientific questions, and his theory of a demonstrative science. The thesis then moves from the wider concentric circles concerned with logical matters into a series of narrowing concentric circles pertaining to the scientific order of the MH. Part II presents a close analysis of the Metaphysics of the Healing’s novel reception and reorganization of Aristotelian metaphysics according to Avicenna’s theory of demonstrative science, which consists in a subject, scientific first principles, and objects of inquiry that includes the species, proper accidents, and the science’s ultimate goal which is the aitiological–cum–theological inquiry into the causes of being. Part III transitions into a still narrower set of concentric circles that provide a detailed explication of the formal and material aspects of the scientific first principles of the Metaphysics of the Healing. Finally, the main argument of the thesis reaches the central point and question of the dissertation in Part IV, which establishes the fundamentality of the primary notion the necessary in the ontology, aitiology, and theology of the Avicenna’s Metaphysics of the Healing. Part IV concludes that the principal function of the fundamental primary notion the necessary is to provide the intelligible link that connects Avicenna’s doctrine of being with the divine necessary existence in itself.

I am tasked with addressing philosophical hazards in the neuroscientific study of religion. As a philosopher concerned with the well-being of neuroscientists studying religion, I am inclined to begin with the philosophical hazards of philosophy. I am well aware of the extraordinary difficulties of both tasks, for the hazards are many and it is easy to miss the forest for the trees or the trees for the forest. Instead of focusing on one issue in great detail, I shall hang a number of warning signs around a forest of issues that identify various philosophical hazards which deserve particular caution when it comes to neuroscience and religion. Since I am aiming for breadth over depth, my brief remarks on each issue shall be synoptic, non-exhaustive, contentious and suggestive for additional consideration and reflection. To redress such deficits, I have provided references for further reading.

In this essay I explore the resources Thomas Aquinas provides for enquiries concerning the psychological abilities of nonhuman animals. I first look to Aquinas’s account of divine, angelic, human, and nonhuman animal naming, to help us articulate the contours of a ‘critical anthropocentrism’ that aims to steer clear of the mistakes of a na¨ıve anthropocentrism and misconceived avowals to entirely eschew anthropocentrism. I then address the need for our critical anthropocentrism both to reject the mental-physical dichotomy endorsed by ‘folk psychology’ and to articulate a more adequate ‘commonsense psychology’ that acknowledges most embodied animal behavior is observable psychological behavior. Next, I argue that we can develop Aquinas’s doctrine of estimation and conation to formulate an account of nonhuman animal action that more adequately characterizes the purposeful behaviors of nonhuman animals. To do so, we first need to recognize a wider range of nonhuman animal behaviors that are captured by Aquinas’s ‘estimative sense’, and that all of these behaviors are specified by a finite variety of particular goods confined to the animals’ environmental niches. But we also need to supplement Aquinas’s account of human and nonhuman animal agency by exploring the ontogeny and ecology of how humans and other animals become attuned to affordances within these different environmental niches. I argue that we should look to Aquinas’s account of nonhuman animal capacities in ST I-II 6-17 for subtle insights that can expand our understanding of how nonhuman animals engage in purposeful behavior by exercising analogous nonrational and imperfectly voluntary forms of intention, deliberation, choice, execution, and enjoyment. I conclude with an outline for how future enquiry can seek to explain the nonrational purposeful problem-solving competencies of chimps, canines, corvids, cetaceans, cephalopods, and other nonhuman animal species.

This article, the second of a two-part essay, outlines a solution to certain tensions in Thomist philosophical anthropology concerning the interaction of the human person’s immaterial intellectual or noetic operations with the psychosomatic sensory operations that are constituted from the formal organization of the nervous system. Continuing with where the first part left off, I argue that Thomists should not be tempted by strong emergentist accounts of mental operations that act directly on the brain, but should maintain, with Aquinas, that noetic operations directly interact with psychosomatic operations. I develop a Thomist account of noetic–psychosomatic interactions that expands upon the first part’s rapprochement between the new mechanist philosophy of neuroscience and psychology and hylomorphic animalism. I argue that noetic–psychosomatic interactions are best understood as analogous to the way diverse higher and lower order psychosomatic powers interact by actualizing, coordinating, and directing the operations of other psychosomatic powers. I draw on James Ross’s arguments for the immateriality of intellectual operations as realizing definite pure functions in order to elucidate the way noetic operations uniquely actualize, coordinate, and direct the psychosomatic operations they interact with. I conclude with a conjectural sketch of how this presentation of Thomist philosophical anthropology understands the noetic and psychosomatic deficits brought about by damage to the nervous system.

This paper presents a Thomistic analysis of addiction that incorporates scientific, philosophical, and theological features of addiction. I will argue first, that a Thomistic hylomorphic anthropology provides a cogent explanation of the causal interactions between human action and neuroplasticity. I will employ Karol Wojtyła’s account of self-determination to further clarify the kind of neuroplasticity involved in addiction. Next, I will elucidate how a Thomistic anthropology can accommodate, without reductionism, both the neurophysiological and psychological elements of addiction, and finally, I will make clear how Thomism can provide an ethics and a theology of grace that can be integrated with these ontological and scientific considerations into a holistic theory of addiction.

This article, the first of a two-part essay, presents an account of Aristotelian hylomorphic animalism that engages with recent work on neuroscience and philosophy of mind. I show that Aristotelian hylomorphic animalism is compatible with the new mechanist approach to neuroscience and psychology, but that it is incompatible with strong emergentism in the philosophy of mind. I begin with the basic claims of Aristotelian hylomorphic animalism and focus on its understanding of psychological powers embodied in the nervous system. Next, I introduce the new mechanist approach to neuroscience and psychology and illustrate how it can enrich the more abstract ontological framework of Aristotelian hylomorphic animalism. In the third section of this article I establish in detail the many ways Aristotelian hylomorphic animalism is incompatible with strong emergentism in the philosophy of mind. Based on these fundamental differences I show why a criticism leveled against emergentism by the new mechanist philosophy does not hamper my proposed rapprochement between hylomorphism and the new mechanist philosophy. This conclusion, however, leaves untouched the problem I address in the second article, namely, is the new mechanist philosophy compatible with Aristotelian philosophical anthropology’s contention that intellectual operations are immaterial and interact with the psychosomatic operations of the rational animal?

This paper aims to establish some of the taxonomical groundwork required for developing a robust philosophy of perception on the basis of the Thomistic doctrine of the cogitative power (vis cogitativa). The formal object of the cogitative power will be divided into aspectual, actional, and affectional percepts. Accordingly, the paper contends that there is an internal sense power capable of a non-conceptual and pre-linguistic perceptual estimation of what some particular is, what could be done with respect to it, and what is to be done with respect to it. The argument begins with a synopsis of Thomas Aquinas’s philosophical anthropology. It then presents an extensive taxonomical analysis of three different kinds of cogitative percepts. This analysis is followed by a short exegetical defense of the threefold division of percepts. Finally, the essay concludes with a comparison of the Thomistic doctrine of the cogitative power with recent work in the philosophy of perception.

This paper will argue that the order and the unity of St. Thomas Aquinas’s five ways can be elucidated through a consideration of St. Thomas’s appropriation of an Avicennian insight that he used to order and unify the wisdom of the Aristotelian and Abrahamic philosophical traditions towards the existence of God. I will begin with a central aporia from Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Aristotle says that the science of first philosophy has three different theoretical vectors: ontology, aitiology, and theology. But how can all three be united into a single Aristotelian science? In his Metaphysics of the Healing, Avicenna resolved the impasse by taking the ontological vector as the subject of metaphysics. He then integrated the question of the four first causes into the penultimate stage of his demonstration for the existence of God, thereby placing aitiological and theological questions among the ultimate concerns of a unified Aristotelian metaphysics. In the five ways, St. Thomas integrated Avicenna’s Aristotelian search for the first four causes into the last four of his five ways, by showing that each of the four aitiological orders terminate in an ultimate first cause that we call God. Finally, by appending the proof from the Physics to the beginning of the five ways, St. Thomas was able to show that the ultimate aim of both natural philosophy and metaphysics is the divine first principle, which is the beginning and subject of sacra doctrina.