Dr. Maria Harney

This paper develops a philosophical account of ritual as a mode through which essence becomes intelligible via enacted accidents. Bringing Robert Sokolowski’s phenomenological analysis into dialogue with the metaphysical framework of Thomas Aquinas, it argues that ritual practices are not merely symbolic or conventional acts, but structured expressions through which intelligibility is disclosed. For Sokolowski, accidents—though ontologically contingent—are epistemically primary, providing the concrete appearances through which properties and, ultimately, essence become manifest in experience and speech. Aquinas complements this account by explaining how the intellect abstracts essence from sensible particulars, moving from individuated appearances to universal understanding. The paper shows that ritual consists of ordered accidental elements—gestures, words, and actions—that are recognized as expressing properties and thereby disclose a unified intelligibility (ousia). Through this synthesis, ritual emerges as an epistemic and ontological process: an enacted pathway from sensory experience to the apprehension of essence. While Sokolowski clarifies how intelligibility appears within lived experience, Aquinas grounds this disclosure in a metaphysical account of substance, abstraction, and predication. By integrating phenomenology and Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics, the paper argues that ritual functions as a structured medium in which human beings encounter, interpret, and articulate essential meanings. Ritual thus bridges the sensory and the intelligible, revealing how contingent acts participate in the disclosure of stable, underlying realities.

This paper examines the Aristotelian framework of act and potency in relation to human moral agency and evaluates its implications in the context of AI-mediated neuroenhancement. Drawing on Aristotle’s account of energeia as the intrinsic actualization of rational potential grounded in the soul as formal and final cause, the paper argues that human agency consists in a unified process of internally ordered actualization. Against this metaphysical background, contemporary brain–computer interfaces and AI-driven neurotechnologies are analyzed as potential extrinsic efficient causes that not only remove impediments to human functioning but may also participate in, or alter, the process of cognitive and intentional actualization itself. The paper distinguishes between restorative interventions, which re-enable the natural exercise of latent capacities, and augmentative systems, which introduce novel operational structures into cognition and decision-making. While the former can be understood as compatible with Aristotelian metaphysics, the latter risk disrupting the unity of agency by introducing an external principle into the act–potency structure of human action. Such integration raises fundamental questions concerning the locus of agency, the integrity of the rational soul as the source of action, and the grounding of moral responsibility. By bringing Aristotelian metaphysics into dialogue with contemporary developments in artificial intelligence and neurotechnology, the paper argues that AI-mediated enhancement, when it functions as a co-actualizing principle, challenges the classical account of unified moral agency. It concludes that the incorporation of external computational systems into the process of actualization may reconfigure the metaphysical architecture of human action, thereby complicating traditional accounts of responsibility, identity, and the unity of the human person.

The multilayered Allegory of the Cave is a center point in Plato's metaphysical and epistemological framework. It is a synthesis of wisdom that finds practical application. Debates about the Myth's interpretation remain active nowadays, and its relevance continues as long as humans live. The abstract allegory of the Cave is Plato's philosophical outlook on human existence. Knowledge, as one of the allegory's central themes, is also a key element that bridges the abstract idea with the practical application and manifestation into reality. The analysis of Plato's Forms of Good, hierarchy of knowledge, and their connection to the human soul will shed light on the central question of this essay – can Plato's Allegory of the Cave be interpreted as a map of reality, and if we use this map to guide intellectual and moral transformations?

This paper investigates how unity and distinction coexist within a single being by examining Aristotelian metaphysics of act and potency and their development in Thomistic theology. It argues that identity is the persistence of a substance through change, grounded in the actualization of potency by form. In human beings, this unity-in-difference is achieved through the rational soul, which unifies bodily, intellectual, and affective capacities within a composite being. Drawing on Aquinas, the paper contrasts this created, composite unity with divine unity, where God exists as Pure Act without potency or composition. The study further explains how human identity participates analogically in divine unity, while remaining ontologically dependent and metaphysically distinct from God. Finally, the paper clarifies the contrast between human unity and the Trinitarian unity of God, where real distinctions of persons exist without division of essence, thereby highlighting the metaphysical difference between created participation and uncreated simplicity.

This paper argues that all synthetic a priori knowledge, as articulated by Immanuel Kant, depends on the mind’s active power of synthesis, which in turn presupposes the transcendental unity of consciousness (apperception). Through an analysis of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Prolegomena, the paper explains how sensibility, understanding, and reason jointly structure experience via a priori forms, categories, and rules, making necessary and universal knowledge possible. It then applies this Kantian framework to contemporary discussions of Artificial Intelligence, arguing that AI systems, while capable of complex data processing, lack the unified self-consciousness required for genuine synthetic a priori judgment. Because AI operates through empirical correlations and distributed computational processes rather than a singular “I think,” it cannot replicate the active, non-empirical conditions of human cognition. The paper concludes that Kant’s Copernican Revolution remains philosophically significant for clarifying the limits of artificial cognitive agency and the irreducibility of human consciousness.

This paper examines the ethical vision of Maximus the Confessor as a theocentric alternative to both classical anthropocentric ethics and modern normative moral theories. Situating Maximus within the Byzantine synthesis of Greek philosophy and Christian theology, the study analyzes his doctrine of theosis, virtue ethics, and the logoi as a participatory metaphysical framework uniting ethics, cosmology, and Christology. Drawing on Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Neoplatonic, and Patristic sources, Maximus redefines human telos as divinization through the synergy of human freedom and divine grace, rather than eudaimonia, duty, or utility. The paper contrasts this vision with modern ethical systems such as utilitarianism, Kantian deontology, and Rawlsian justice, arguing that their separation of ethics from metaphysics results in moral fragmentation. It further traces Maximus’s influence on Russian Orthodox thought through figures such as Gregory Palamas, Vladimir Solovyov, and Nikolai Berdyaev. The paper concludes that Maximus offers a coherent moral realism grounded in divine participation, capable of addressing modern nihilism, ethical individualism, and contemporary moral challenges by restoring a unified teleological vision of human purpose and cosmic order.

This paper examines the teleological structure of human reason through a comparative analysis of Thomas Aquinas’s doctrine of participation and Ludwig Feuerbach’s theory of anthropological projection, focusing on the perennial question of whether inquiry into God can transcend human-centered cognition. Beginning from the observation that asking “why” presupposes intelligibility and causal explanation, the paper investigates whether this explanatory impulse is rooted in the metaphysical structure of the rational soul or merely reflects psychological and cultural phenomena. Aquinas’s account situates human reason within a metaphysics of creation ex nihilo, where all beings participate in God’s act of being, and the intellect is naturally ordered toward the First Cause and ultimately fulfilled in the beatific vision through divine illumination. Feuerbach, by contrast, interprets theology as anthropology, arguing that God is an inevitable projection of human ideals—reason, will, and affect—externalized to satisfy psychological needs for meaning and infinity. By juxtaposing Aquinas’s participatory epistemology with Feuerbach’s projection thesis, the paper analyzes the limits of human knowledge, the role of abstraction and analogy, and the extent to which human cognition can apprehend God without collapsing into anthropocentrism. A concluding thought experiment concerning the extinction of humanity is employed to test the ontological independence of God from human cognition. The paper argues that while anthropocentrism is unavoidable in the mode of human knowing, Aquinas’s framework preserves divine independence by grounding intelligibility in God as Pure Act, whereas Feuerbach’s account renders theology contingent upon human psychology alone.