Catholic University of America
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 2009
Notre Dame, Indiana, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy
  •  81
    Knowing as Being? A Metaphysical Reading of the Identity of Intellect and Intelligibles in Aquinas
    American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 91 (3): 333-351. 2017.
    I argue that Thomas Aquinas’s Identity Formula—the statement that the “intellect in act is the intelligible in act”—does not, as is usually supposed, express his position on how the intellect accesses extramental realities (responding to the so-called “mind-world gap”). Instead, it should be understood as a claim about the metaphysics of intellection, according to which the perfection requisite for performing the act of understanding is what could be called “intellectual-intelligible being.” In …Read more
  •  26
    Este artículo pretende dilucidar la expresión utilizada por Tomás de Aquino “vuelta al fantasma”, con la intención de esclarecer lo que entiende por “vuelta”. Se argumenta que el marco conceptual subyacente al “giro intelectual” se encuentra en dos fuentes islámicas que fueron ampliamente influyentes en la psicología filosófica latina del siglo XIII, y que presentan conceptos técnicos específicos de la “vuelta” como un tipo de dependencia. Las obras son: Liber de Causis, de autor anónimo; y Libe…Read more
  •  27
    A Brief Defense of the Third Person Perspective in Moral Philosophy
    Comparative and Continental Philosophy 9 (3): 279-283. 2017.
  •  8
    Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas III by John F. Wippel
    Review of Metaphysics 76 (2): 371-372. 2022.
    In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas III by John F. WippelTherese Scarpelli CoryWIPPEL, John F. Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas III. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2021. ix + 321 pp. Cloth, $65.00; eBook, $65.00This volume is the third in what can now be considered informally a series of volumes collecting some of John F. Wippel's most important writings. (Two previous volumes, Metaphys…Read more
  • Epistemology. The nature of cognition and knowledge
    In Eleonore Stump & Thomas Joseph White (eds.), The New Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, Cambridge University Press. 2022.
  •  524
    Embodied vs. Non-Embodied Modes of Knowing in Aquinas in advance
    Faith and Philosophy 35 (4): 417-46. 2018.
    What does it mean to be an embodied thinker of abstract concepts? Does embodiment shape the character and quality of our understanding of universals such as 'dog' and 'beauty', and would a non-embodied mind understand such concepts differently? I examine these questions through the lens of Thomas Aquinas’s remarks on the differences between embodied (human) intellects and non-embodied (angelic) intellects. In Aquinas, I argue, the difference between embodied and non-embodied intellection of extr…Read more
  •  23
    Jensen, Steven J. Good and Evil Actions (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 65 (4): 877-879. 2012.
  •  45
    Aquinas on Human Self-Knowledge
    Cambridge University Press. 2013.
    Self-knowledge is commonly thought to have become a topic of serious philosophical inquiry during the early modern period. Already in the thirteenth century, however, the medieval thinker Thomas Aquinas developed a sophisticated theory of self-knowledge, which Therese Scarpelli Cory presents as a project of reconciling the conflicting phenomena of self-opacity and privileged self-access. Situating Aquinas's theory within the mid-thirteenth-century debate and his own maturing thought on human nat…Read more
  •  32
    Review (review)
    Vivarium 54 (1): 117-121. 2016.
  •  14
    Jensen, Steven J. Good and Evil Actions (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 65 (4): 877-879. 2012.
  •  1147
    Medieval accounts of diachronically unified consciousness have been overlooked by contemporary readers, because medieval thinkers have a unique and unexpected way of setting up the problem. This paper examines the approach to diachronically unified consciousness that is found in Augustine’s and Aquinas’s treatments of memory. For Augustine, although the mind is “distended” by time, it remains resilient, stretching across disparate moments to unify past, present, and future in a single personal p…Read more
  •  8
    Review (review)
    American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 89 (1): 159-163. 2015.
  •  124
    Rethinking Abstractionism: Aquinas’s Intellectual Light and Some Arabic Sources
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 53 (4): 607-646. 2015.
    The thesis of this paper is that Thomas Aquinas offers an alternative model of abstraction (the Active Principle Model) that overcomes the standard objections to abstractionism and expands our view of what an abstractionist theory might look like. I contend that this alternative model of abstraction has been invisible in plain sight, in Aquinas’s references to the mind’s abstractive mechanism as an “intellectual light.” Such language is not metaphorical but rather technical, signaling that intel…Read more
  •  18
    Memory in Augustine’s Theological Anthropology. By Paige E. Hochschild (review)
    American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 89 (1): 159-163. 2015.
  •  4
    Averroes and Aquinas on the Agent Intellect's Causation of Intelligibles
    Recherches de Theologie Et Philosophie Medievales 82 1-60. 2015.
    This article examines two medieval thinkers—Averroes and Aquinas—on the kind of causation exercised by the agent intellect in “abstracting” or producing intelligibles from images in the imagination. It argues that abstraction in these thinkers should be interpreted in causal terms, as an act whereby images in the imagination, through the power of the agent intellect, educe their intelligible likeness in a receptive intellect. This Averroan-Thomistic causal approach to abstraction offers an int…Read more
  •  24
    Richard Cross
    New Content is Available for Vivarium. forthcoming.