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Metaphysics Through Semantics: The Philosophical Recovery of the Medieval Mind (edited book)Springer. 2023.
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8Ad Fontes: What Can a Philosophical Association Do?Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 95 1-16. 2021.
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16“Real Presence” Is Not Enough: Recovering the Lost Semantics of TransubstantiationIn Gyula Klima (ed.), The Metaphysics and Theology of the Eucharist: A Historical-Analytical Survey of the Problems of the Sacrament, Springer Verlag. pp. 433-454. 2023.Catholic doctrine makes metaphysical claims about the Eucharist, but the distinctive language of “transubstantiation” is often treated as an historically contingent, and disposable, way of articulating these claims. Attempts to translate the metaphysics implied by “transubstantiation” into other terminology should begin by attending to the semantic assumptions of those who first articulated it. This chapter argues that the notion of substantial predication in realist semantics helps communicate …Read more
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33Living Well without Knowledge: Uncertainty in the Moral Philosophy of Thomas AquinasRevista Portuguesa de Filosofia 79 (1-2): 405-428. 2023.Thomists typically emphasize and defend Aquinas’s “realist” approach to knowledge as an alternative to modern skepticism, but Aquinas is attuned to the common experience of uncertainty, and gives principled reasons for the limits of knowledge across various domains, including especially in the realm of human action. Virtue in general, and Thomistic practical wisdom specifically, can be understood as a habit for responsibly managing choice in the face of imperfect knowledge, unpredictable circums…Read more
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275Analogy, Semantics, and HermeneuticsMedieval Philosophy & Theology 11 (2): 241-260. 2003.Cajetan's treatment of analogy in De Nominum Analogia is well known as the most influential and sophisticated theory of a central issue in Thomistic philosophy. The late twentieth century saw that theory subject to a family of criticisms. If the critics are correct, Cajetan's analogy theory is also significant historically for exposing weaknesses latent in medieval semantic assumptions. According to the critics, the Aristotelian assumptions that words signify by means of discrete “concepts,” and…Read more
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16To help frame the Festschrift for Gyula Klima (Metaphysics Through Semantics: The Philosophical Recovery of the Medieval Mind), this appreciation offers perspective on the scholar's person and project. Drawing on biographical details and reflecting on signal contributions, it seeks to honor a distinguished philosopher who deserves to be celebrated by friends and introduced to a new generation of readers. Download with frontmatter from: link[dot]springer[dot]com/content/pdf/bfm:978-3-031-15026-…Read more
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67Metaphysics Through Semantics: The Philosophical Recovery of the Medieval Mind / Essays in Honor of Gyula Klima (edited book)Springer Verlag. 2023.Gyula Klima’s distinctive work recovering medieval philosophy has inspired a generation of scholars. Klima’s attention to the distinctive terms, problems, and assumptions that constitute alternative historical conceptual frameworks has informed work in philosophy of language and logic, cognition and philosophical psychology, and metaphysics and theology. This volume celebrates Klima’s project by collecting new essays by colleagues, collaborators, and former students. Covering a wide range of th…Read more
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459Describes a Neoplatonic hierarchy of the cardinal virtues extending to immaterial beings, and compares its appropriation by Bonaventure and Aquinas.
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925John Paul II’s Gamble with ‘the Meaning of Life’Studia Gilsoniana 10 (3): 491-515. 2021.One of John Paul II’s remarkable innovations was his embrace of the question of “the meaning of life.” The question of “the meaning of life” was never asked before the 19th century, and it was slow to be integrated into Catholic discourse. When the question of life’s meaning emerged, it effectively replaced a prior question, about the purpose or te-los of life, with a very different set of theoretical assumptions. From the traditional per-spective, the question of life’s meaning is highly suspic…Read more
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1330Piety without Metaphysics: The Moral Pedagogy of Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural ReligionUrbaniana University Journal 73 (3): 73-99. 2020.Urbaniana University Journal 73.3 (2020): 73-99. A close reading of Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion reveals that it is not what it appears. Rather than a work of natural theology, meant to show something about arguments concerning the existence and nature of God, the Dialogues turn out to embody a moral pedagogy exemplifying and attempting to instill a conception of piety and religion as virtues. This paper defends this interpretation by reviewing three alter…Read more
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861Thomas Aquinas, Magister Ludi: The Relation of Medieval Logic and TheologyHungarian Philosophical Review 64 (4): 43-62. 2020.This paper seeks to articulate the relationship between medieval logic and theology. Reviewing modern scholarship, we find that the purpose of medieval logic, when it is even inquired about, has proven difficult to articulate without reference to theology. This prompts reflection on the metaphors of logic as a “tool” and a “game”: a tool is not merely instrumental, insofar as it can have its own intrinsic goods and can shape and be shaped by that which it …Read more
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1301Aquinas's Two Concepts of Analogy and a Complex Semantics for Naming the Simple GodThe Thomist 83 (2): 155-184. 2019.This paper makes two main arguments. First, that to understand analogy in St. Thomas Aquinas, one must distinguish two logically distinct concepts he inherited from Aristotle: one a kind of likeness between things, the other a kind of relation between linguistic functions. Second, that analogy (in both of these senses) plays a relatively small role in Aquinas's treatment of divine naming, compared to the realist semantic framework in which questions about divine naming are formulated and resolve…Read more
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451Cajetan on Scotus on UnivocityProceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics 7 32-42. 2007.What role does Scotus‘s understanding of univocity play in Cajetan‘s development of a theory of analogy? In this paper I examine three relevant texts from Cajetan (question 3 of his commentary on Aquinas‘s De Ente et Essentia, his treatise De Nominum Analogia, and his commentary on question 13, article 5 of Aquinas‘s Summa Theologiae) in which Cajetan articulates his understanding of analogy at least in part through dialectical engagement with Scotus‘s arguments about univocity.
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2556Form, Essence, Soul: Distinguishing Principles of Thomistic MetaphysicsIn Nikolaj Zunic (ed.), Distinctions of Being: Philosophical Approaches to Reality, American Maritain Association. pp. 21-35. 2012.In a living body, the substantial form, the essence, and the soul play very similar, but non-identical, metaphysical roles. This article explores the similarities and differences to clarify basic points of Thomistic metaphysics.
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659Mental Language in Aquinas?In Gyula Klima (ed.), Intentionality, Cognition, and Mental Representation in Medieval Philosophy, Fordham University Press. pp. 29-45. 2015.Ockham is usually considered the first to hold a proper theory of mental language, but Aquinas is willing to call the concept, or the act of intellect by which something is understood, a verbum mentis or “mental word.” This essay explores the sense in which Aquinas regarded concepts as language-like. It argues that Aquinas's understanding of concepts and their objects meant that his application of syntactic and semantic analysis to them did not and could not lead in the direction of theories of…Read more
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520Substance Made Manifest: Metaphysical and Semantic Implications of the Doctrine of TransubstantiationSaint Anselm Journal 9 (2). 2014.Argues that traditional Catholic understanding of transubstantiation is obscured by modern metaphysics' neglect of the category of substance, and by modern semantic assumptions about how words signify.
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686Proportionality and Divine Naming: Did St. Thomas Change His Mind about Analogy?The Thomist 77 (4): 531-558. 2013.The common view that Aquinas changed his mind about analogy (before and after De Veritate 2.11) is unwarranted. Dialectical context, and clarifications about the logic of analogy and the implications of proportionality, reveal consistency in Aquinas's teaching on the analogy of divine names.
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609The Rest of Cajetan’s Analogy TheoryInternational Philosophical Quarterly 45 (3): 341-356. 2005.The influence of Cajetan’s De Nominum Analogia is due largely to its first three chapters, which introduce Cajetan’s three modes of analogy: analogy of inequality, analogy of attribution, and analogy of proportionality. Interpreters typically ignore the final eight chapters, which describe further features of analogy of proportionality. This article explains this neglect as a symptom of a failure to appreciate Cajetan’s particular semantic concerns, taken independently from the question of syste…Read more
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2The Semantics of Analogy According to Thomas de Vio Cajetan's "de Nominum Analogia"Dissertation, University of Notre Dame. 2001.Thomas de Vio Cajetan's De Nominum Analogia is usually interpreted as an attempt to systematize Thomas Aquinas's views on analogy. This approach ignores historical and philosophical context and fails to make sense of Cajetan's teaching on analogy. ;The present study offers a reinterpretation of Cajetan's treatise, beginning with a reconstruction of the specific questions De Nominum Analogia tries to answer. Traditionally understood as a mean between equivocation and univocation, analogy is usual…Read more
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15Virtue's End: God in the Moral Philosophy of Aristotle and Aquinas (edited book)St. Augustine's Press. 2008.
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245A note on Cajetan's theological semantics in response to Timothy L. Smith's criticisms of CajetanSapientia 54 (206): 367-376. 1999.
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349Did Aquinas Answer Cajetan's Question? Aquinas's Semantic Rules for Analogy and the Interpretation of De Nominum AnalogiaProceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 77 273-288. 2003.Cajetan’s analogy theory is usually evaluated in terms of its fidelity to the teachings of Aquinas. But what if Cajetan was trying to answer questions Aquinas himself did not raise, and so could not help to answer? Cajetan’s De Nominum Analogia can be interpreted as intending to solve a particular semantic problem: to characterize the unity of the analogical concept, so as to defend the possibility of a non-univocal term’s mediating syllogistic reasoning. Aquinas offers various semantic characte…Read more
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371John Buridan: Portrait of a Fourteenth-Century Arts Master (review)Journal of the History of Philosophy 42 (2): 219-220. 2004.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 42.2 (2004) 219-220 [Access article in PDF] Jack Zupko. John Buridan: Portrait of a Fourteenth-Century Arts Master. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003. Pp. xix + 446. Cloth, $70.00. Paper, $40.00. What does the name "John Buridan" call to mind? For many, including medievalists, not much at all—at best, perhaps, a set of apparently unrelated ideas: nominalism; an impetus theory of pro…Read more
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21The Semantics of Analogy: Rereading Cajetan's De Nominum AnalogiaUniversity of Notre Dame Press. 2010.Systematizing Aquinas? : a paradigm in crisis -- Reconstructing Cajetan's question : the semantic intent of De nominum analogia -- Analogy, semantics, and the "concept vs. judgment" critique -- Some insufficient semantic rules for analogy -- Cajetan's semantic principles -- The semantics of analogy : inequality and attribution -- The semantics of proportionality: the proportional unity of concepts -- The semantics of proportionality : concept formation and judgment -- The semantics of proportion…Read more
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373What is truth? From the academy to the vatican (review)Journal of the History of Philosophy 48 (2). 2010.In a 1993 autobiographical essay, John Rist wrote: "Christianity is above all others the religion that speaks of God's presence in history, not only in the past, as in creation and in the incarnation, but continuously into the present and … through the Church into the future. Of course that does not mean that all religious and ethical advances will be made by Christians, let alone by theologians or bishops; God needs no such limitations. What it means is that Christians must claim that the Churc…Read more
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442Review of the English translation of Bernard Montagnes' influential 1963 monograph on analogy in Aquinas. (Pre-publication copy -- please cite final version.)
Areas of Specialization
Medieval Logic |
Medieval Metaphysics |
Thomas Aquinas |
Ancient Greek Political Philosophy |
Political Theory |