•  4
    Hegel's theology or revelation thematised
    Cambridge Scholars Press. 2018.
    This book highlights Hegel's application of Absolute Idealism's logical truth, the basis of all mystical insight, to Christian orthodox confession. The systematic interpretation thus yielded illuminates the profound spirituality of this unitary sophia as (the) idea. The truth represented by spontaneous pictorial presentation, in Biblical or other proclamations at other times, is thereby further unveiled, understanding spiritual things spiritually. The book traces philosophy and theology through …Read more
  •  4
    Thomas Aquinas on virtue and human flourishing
    Cambridge Scholars Press. 2018.
    Thomas Aquinas offers teleological systematisation of the habits needed for human flourishing. His metaphysical jurisprudence remodels ethics upon this, rather than on a moral precept. 'Eternal law' governing the world determines 'natural law', reflected in human legislation (a variety of the 'anthropic principle'). Finally, law, unwritten, is infused spirit as self-consciousness, 'universal of universals'. Acquired virtues elicit this, become effusion, represented in religion as gifts or graces…Read more
  •  3
    Thought and incarnation in Hegel
    Cambridge Scholars Press. 2020.
    "God became man that man might become God. This thought, expressed in terms of a sharing of natures, human and divine, is to be found in the most ancient Christian liturgies and still in use, at the Offertory typically. This book shows how Hegel fleshes this thought out, shorn though of picture-language, in conscious or less-than-conscious continuity with this Biblical belief in the power to become the sons of God. This involves some stripping away of the false fleshliness cast over Hegels philo…Read more
  •  2
    Beyond Natural Law
    Philosophy, Culture, and Traditions 4 209-230. 2007.
  •  47
    Morality as Right Reason
    The Monist 66 (1): 26-38. 1983.
    In this paper I wish firstly to argue that moral or practical reasoning is of a different type from theoretical reasoning and not merely an application of it. Secondly I offer some considerations as to why it is nonetheless genuine reasoning which can be right or wrong in the sense of true or false. Thirdly I discuss how in that case we can justify the first principles of practical reason and of the moral systems in which it issues.
  •  14
    The Supposition of the Predicate
    Modern Schoolman 77 (1): 73-78. 1999.
  •  14
    Reality the Measure of Logic and Not Vice Versa
    International Philosophical Quarterly 28 (2): 185-192. 1988.
  •  2
    Duty and the divine
    Neue Zeitschrift für Systematicsche Theologie Und Religionsphilosophie 31 (1): 308-326. 1989.
  •  39
    A general metaphysical account of logic, meaning, and reference that developed from the Greeks through the medievals and up into modem times can be called Aristotelian. “Copernican” claims (Kant, Frege), radically to replace this paradigm as quasi-“Ptolemaic,” actually participated in the prolonged decline of scholasticism, after Aquinas in particular. We need to recognize, or to remember, thepriority of being to truth and not to conflate them. We need to explicate the origin of thinking (abstra…Read more
  • Meaning in a Realist Perspective
    The Thomist 55 (1): 29-51. 1991.
  •  37
    Esse
    New Scholasticism 53 (2): 206-220. 1979.
  •  25
    Subject and Predicate Logic
    Modern Schoolman 66 (2): 129-139. 1989.
  •  25
    Justice
    American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 78 (4): 559-571. 2004.
    It is worthwhile to study Aquinas’s now classical treatment of the virtue of justice at the point where he distinguishes legal obligation, owed directly to the other, from moral obligations to give something to the other in virtue of what is due to oneself, one’s own decency of character (honestas). To fulfill these moral obligations is itself, on his view, a “legal” obligation to God. We might say it is directly owed to a proper order of decency requiring us at least quasi-legally, at second le…Read more
  •  55
    Does Realism Make a Difference to Logic?
    The Monist 69 (2): 281-294. 1986.
    The ancient theory of an identity of some sort between subject and predicate is not merely out of fashion. Rejection of it is just about the cornerstone of the Fregean analysis of propositions in terms of argument and function.
  •  10
    Education and How Not to Corrupt the Young
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 3 (1): 127-132. 1986.
    ABSTRACT The paper has three parts. The first specifies a, notion of philosophy as both a critical discipline and a process of theoria independent of utilitarian or ideological commitment. The second part shows how philosophical paradigms can be ideologically exploited, often unwittingly, by the teacher in a way that sacrifices truth and clarity to utility. Three examples are given, viz. over‐simplification in science‐teaching of the Lockean primary/secondary qualities distinction, misuse of Wit…Read more
  •  2
    New Hegelian essays: Seid, Umschlungen, Millionen
    Cambridge Scholars Press. 2012.
    After this there follows a kind of commentary upon Hegel's choice of Being and his justification for taking Being as starting-point for his Science of Lope. We then pass to consider logical relations generally and in particular Identity, which leads naturally into rational treatment of Trinity in Unity and Unity in Trinity and, after that, Incarnation, "Signs and Sacraments" and some of the at first sight odder manifestations of piety, viewed now philosophically. This is followed by consideratio…Read more
  •  3
    This book is a supplement to the author's earlier New Hegelian Essays. It continues the project of presenting the narrative(s) of religion as intelligible metaphysics, "interpreting spiritual things spiritually", as St. Paul says. After an introductory recall of the unreality of the phenomenal individual except insofar as viewed as "in" God, the Absolute, so that all depend upon all, the first subject to be considered is faith itself, too often seen as the polar and hence negative opposite of re…Read more
  •  25
    Two Criticisms of Double Effect
    New Scholasticism 58 (1): 67-83. 1984.
  •  24
    Justice
    American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 78 (4): 559-571. 2004.
    It is worthwhile to study Aquinas’s now classical treatment of the virtue of justice at the point where he distinguishes legal obligation, owed directly to the other, from moral obligations to give something to the other in virtue of what is due to oneself, one’s own decency of character (honestas). To fulfill these moral obligations is itself, on his view, a “legal” obligation to God. We might say it is directly owed to a proper order of decency requiring us at least quasi-legally, at second le…Read more
  •  9
    Does Realism Make A Difference To Logic?
    New Scholasticism 60 (4): 385-403. 1986.
  •  9
    Classificatory expressions and matters of moral substance
    Philosophical Papers 13 (1): 29-42. 1984.
  •  49
    Western intellectual history, viewed as the way things occurred, simultaneously or in a time sequence, requires interpretation even more substantively than does history in general. This is because as being a history of specifically intellectual activity it is a history of a type of activity that necessarily includes concurrent self-interpretation, as he who understands understands that he understands. There is, though, a sense in which all human activity is intellectual, as, for Aquinas, the int…Read more
  •  24
    Happiness and Transcendent Happiness
    Religious Studies 21 (3). 1985.
    In this paper I first point out that happiness might of its nature be unamenable to the calculating ‘plan of life’ approach, and argue that the incompatible model of a personal search, by no means implying ‘ontological subjectivity’ though, fits in more smoothly with the idea. Secondly, I discuss the arguments assembled by Aquinas for a view of this type. I argue thirdly that although we can show there is some one thing in which all happiness consists, whatever it may be it must be incompatible …Read more
  •  18
    Beyond Natural Law
    New Blackfriars 99 (1082): 481-502. 2018.