Maria Carl

One of St. Thomas Aquinas’s most ingenious, yet underappreciated, philosophical innovations is his synthesis of Plato’s dualism and Aristotle’s hylomorphism in his theory of the human person. Aquinas’s view of the person expresses itself in a number of aspects of his thought. In this paper, I explore how his understanding of the passions is a reflection of his account of the unity of the human person. Just as Aquinas’s view of the person reconciles elements of dualism and hylomorphism, his explanation of the passions steers a middle course between intellectualist and physicalist accounts of the human emotions and resists the reductionism characteristic of these dominant kinds of theories. Because Aquinas depicts the passions as engaging the whole person, I conclude the paper with a brief sketch of the significance of the passions for his moral theory

One of St. Thomas Aquinas’s most ingenious, yet underappreciated, philosophical innovations is his synthesis of Plato’s dualism and Aristotle’s hylomorphism in his theory of the human person. Aquinas’s view of the person expresses itself in a number of aspects of his thought. In this paper, I explore how his understanding of the passions is a reflection of his account of the unity of the human person. Just as Aquinas’s view of the person reconciles elements of dualism and hylomorphism, his explanation of the passions steers a middle course between intellectualist and physicalist accounts of the human emotions and resists the reductionism characteristic of these dominant kinds of theories. Because Aquinas depicts the passions as engaging the whole person, I conclude the paper with a brief sketch of the significance of the passions for his moral theory.

One of St. Thomas Aquinas’s most ingenious, yet underappreciated, philosophical innovations is his synthesis of Plato’s dualism and Aristotle’s hylomorphism in his theory of the human person. Aquinas’s view of the person expresses itself in a number of aspects of his thought. In this paper, I explore how his understanding of the passions is a reflection of his account of the unity of the human person. Just as Aquinas’s view of the person reconciles elements of dualism and hylomorphism, his explanation of the passions steers a middle course between intellectualist and physicalist accounts of the human emotions and resists the reductionism characteristic of these dominant kinds of theories. Because Aquinas depicts the passions as engaging the whole person, I conclude the paper with a brief sketch of the significance of the passions for his moral theory.

This dissertation is concerned with the problem of how to establish and justify the principles of natural law ethics. Specifically, this work critically examines the claim that the primary principles of natural law ethics are per se known or self-evident propositions. This is the position held by St. Thomas Aquinas, which he derived from Aristotelian logic and philosophy of science. ;Aristotle held that the starting points or first principles of demonstrative, theoretical science cannot themselves depend on demonstration to be known. Rather, he argued that such principles are immediate and indemonstrable and that they are apprehended through an inductive process which culminates in an intellectual intuition or insight. Aquinas explicitly extends this theory to practical science in his formulation of the primary precepts of the natural law . There Aquinas sets forth the basic goods which are the natural ends of human volition: i.e., life, society, knowledge. These self-evident goods correspond to the various natural inclinations which define the essence of what it is to be human. ;The major contemporary ethicians working within the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition remain unclear about the precise meaning of the notion of self-evidence and disagree about which principles or basic values the criterion of self-evidence in fact justifies. Accordingly, in this work I first explain Aristotle's notion of science and his identification of the indemonstrable first principles of science with essential definitions. Next, I argue that Aristotle properly and unequivocally categorizes the practical sciences, including politics and ethics, as science, and I discuss the nature of practical science and the analogy between speculative and practical science. Third, I examine Aquinas' notion of self-evidence and show how he utilizes this notion to ground the speculative and practical sciences. Finally, I offer an exegesis of Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 94, a. 2 and an account of its significance for Thomas' natural law theory