John Peck, SJ

Although the contemporary Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben is not a religious thinker, there is a remarkable affinity between aspects of his thought and that of St. Augustine of Hippo. This paper attempts to show that, like Agamben, Augustine locates the origin of sovereignty in the sovereign’s decision to place some person(s) outside the protection of law. Moreover, both thinkers are alert to the fact that, given the structure of sovereignty, sovereign authority’s decision to deprive persons of legal protection is not subject to oversight, even when the sovereign acts unjustly. In other words, Augustine and Agamben agree that sovereigns murder with impunity. To prove this thesis, the paper first outlines Agamben’s account of how sovereignty constitutes itself, namely, through the exclusion of “bare life.” Next, it examines several texts from The City of God to show that Augustine holds a similar theory regarding the historical origins and character of political authority. Finally, the paper considers how Augustine’s Regula ad servos Dei anticipates Agamben’s call to found political communities outside the purview of law.

St. Augustine and Albert Camus consider the possibility that an agent may perform an unmotivated act. In accord with his intellectualism, Aquinas thinks an act of reason informs every volitional act. Is this view correct? To approach an answer, this paper considers Aquinas' account of angelic fall: since angels are purely intellectual, if Aquinas accounts successfully for their primal sin, this would offer considerable support to his view that there can be no senseless act. After examining Aquinas' views regarding the structure of moral agency, this paper considers the extent of angelic knowledge to determine what could not have been the object of the angels' sin. After treating Aquinas' account of angelic fall, the paper concludes by arguing that one element of the account, namely angelic inconsideratio, renders the account incoherent. This conclusion gives us reason to doubt whether intellectualism clarifies the behavior of more complex agents like Augustine or Camus' Meursault.

Prime Matter Pluralism (PMP) states that while the prime matter of all terrestrial bodies is the same, there is a unique prime matter for each celestial body. Prime matters are distinct in virtue of being in potentiality to different forms. Steven Baldner argues that although Thomas Aquinas endorsed PMP in Summa theologiae I, he ultimately rejected it in his De caelo commentary and De substantiis separatis. Besides exegetical evidence for this claim, Baldner presents a philosophical objection to PMP: according to PMP, distinct prime matters are restricted in their respective potentialities; such restriction requires form, however; therefore, prime matter is not pure potentiality. Since prime matter is pure potentiality, PMP is false. Pace Baldner, I argue that Aquinas endorses PMP as heartily in the later works as in STh I. Moreover, he resisted substantially the same objection to PMP as Baldner’s several times. In particular, Aquinas repeatedly rejected the claim that the restriction of prime matter’s potentiality requires form. In that case, when Aquinas calls prime matter “pure potentiality,” he means that it is formless of itself, not that it is in potentiality to any form whatsoever.

Aristotelians traditionally motivate the doctrine of first (“prime”) matter by claiming that substantial change requires a subject. Without gainsaying that motivation, I propose another: first matter is a necessary postulate for the sort of unity proper to a substance. This motivation arises if one examines a claim that Patrick Toner and Robert Koons share: (TM′) the possession of emergent causal powers is necessary for substancehood. I first explain how TM′ represents the application of “Merricks’s Dictum” (“For a macrophysical object to exist is to have causal powers”) to an Aristotelian framework. Next, I argue that, as Toner’s and Koons’s respective theories use TM′, it is incompatible with the denial that substances have substances as proper parts. In Toner’s hylomorphism, TM′ entails that an entity’s matter and form are independent substances. As part of Koons’s theory, TM′ implies that an entity’s elementary parts are substances. Happily, a hylomorphist need not accept TM′. For example, Aquinas rejects TM′ as incompatible with the doctrine of first matter. An ontology like Aquinas’s that includes first matter navigates the dialectical straight between the dualism and atomism. If she commits to first matter, the hylomorphist can deny that substances have substances as proper parts.