Patrick Corry

This paper offers a defense against J. L. Schellenberg’s argument from divine hiddenness. The defense proposes a scenario which is possibly actual, and if actual, makes the hiddenness argument fail. The scenario proposed is that the vice of pride is universal (or nearly universal) in human beings. I argue that if one is proud, one cannot be in a state of nonresistant nonbelief about God, and that this is obscured on Schellenberg’s account because of its application of an intellectual model for epistemic resistance inappropriate to contexts of personal relationship. Thus, if pride is universal, there is no nonresistant nonbelief. But if there is no nonresistant nonbelief, the hiddenness argument fails. I further argue that the skeptical scenario is plausible enough to render thehiddenness argument doubtful.

This paper argues that Aristotle in De anima is a direct realist about sense perception: the senses immediately perceive not only accidental qualities but independent beings. This thesis is supported primarily through an analysis of Aristotle’s condensed argument in DA III.1 that there can be no separate sense for common sensibles (such as number, shape, or motion). Against a more common reading of this passage, I argue that Aristotle intends to demonstrate that positing a separate sense for common sensibles entails a contradiction. This reconstruction of Aristotle’s argument in III.1 requires that Aristotle holds that the unity of simultaneous perception is grounded in the unity of objects perceived. I then show that this position helps us to understand the logical progression from DA III.1 to III.2, and to find in III.2 a theory of perception according to which perceptual activity is at once perception itself and the activity of the thing perceived. This principle grounds Aristotle’s position that the senses perceive things themselves directly.

This article proposes a via media between intellectualism and nonrationalism on the question of how, according to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, a virtuous person determines the goal ( telos ) for action ( praxis ). The author argues that, according to Aristotle, the goal is set neither by discursive reasoning nor by well-formed nonrational desires but, rather, by practical intellect ( nous ), which is a capacity for nondiscursive perception ( aisthēsis ) of a singular action as choiceworthy in itself. He argues that for Aristotle the activity of nous completes and perfects the operation of prudence ( phronēsis ) or excellent practical thinking, and that this operation essentially includes a distinctively intellectual desire, which is required both for the correct perception of final actions and for the movement of the deliberating agent to act.