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115Recent work on Aquinas' metaphysics (review)British Journal for the History of Philosophy 1-12. forthcoming.The three books reviewed here concern some interrelated elements of Thomas Aquinas' metaphysics: his general theory of efficient causation, his metaphysics of the human act, and his theory of virtu...
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28Sine qua non Causes and Their DiscontentsRes Philosophica 99 (2): 139-167. 2022.For theological reasons, medieval thinkers maintained that sacraments “effect what they figure”—that is, they are more than mere signs of grace; and yet, they also maintained that they are not proper causes of grace in the way fire is the proper cause of heat. One way to reconcile these requirements is to explicate sacramental causation in terms of sine qua non causes, which were distinguished from accidental causes on the one hand, and from proper efficient causes on the other hand. This articl…Read more
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22'They Tend into Nothing by Their Own Nature': Rufus and an Anonymous De Generatione Commentary on the Principles of CorruptibilityIn Lydia Schumacher (ed.), Early Thirteenth-Century English Franciscan Thought, De Gruyter. pp. 199--220. 2021.In this paper, I consider Richard Rufus’ account of generation and corrup- tion. This is a fundamental metaphysical question in the Aristotelian framework. Given that there are things that are corruptible (such as trees and cats and the human body), and things that are incorruptible (such as the celestial bodies and angels), what is it that makes one one, and the other the other? In other words, what is the ultimate explanation (in Rufus' terminology, the principle or principles) of corruptibili…Read more
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37Peter of Palude and the Fiery FurnaceHistory of Philosophy Quarterly 37 (2): 121-142. 2020.According to most medieval thinkers, whenever something causally acts on another thing, God also acts with it. Durand of St.-Pourçain, an early fourteenth-century Dominican philosopher, disagrees. This paper is about a fourteenth-century objection to Durand’s view, which I will call the Fiery Furnace Objection, as formulated by Durand’s contemporary, Peter of Palude. Although Peter of Palude is not usu- ally regarded as a particularly original thinker, this paper calls attention to one of his mo…Read more
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24Perfect Subjects, Shields, and Retractions: Three Models of ImpassibilityVivarium 59 (1-2): 79-101. 2021.According to theological consensus at least from the thirteenth century, at the End of Times our body will be resurrected and reunited with our soul. The resurrected body, although numerically identical to our present one, will be quite different: it will possess clarity, agility, subtility, and the inability to suffer. It is the last of these characteristics that will be of most concern in the present article. There are two reasons why impassibility presents a problem in the medieval framework.…Read more
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11Mark B. Wiebe. On Evil, Providence, and Freedom: A New Reading of Molina (review)Journal of Analytic Theology 6 799-805. 2018.ㅤ
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505Ockham on Divine ConcurrenceSaint Anselm Journal 15 81-105. 2019.The focus of this paper is Ockham's stance on the question of divine concurrence---the question whether God is causally active in the causal happenings of the created world, and if so, what God's causal activity amounts to and what place that leaves for created causes. After discussing some preliminaries, I turn to presenting what I take to be Ockham's account. As I show, Ockham, at least in this issue, is rather conservative: he agrees with the majority of medieval thinkers (including Aquinas, …Read more
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268Peter of Palude on Divine Concurrence: An Edition of his In II Sent., D. 1, Q. 4Recherches de Theologie Et Philosophie Medievales 83 (1): 49-92. 2016.The present text contains a critical edition of Peter of Palude’s question of divine concurrence, found in his Sentences commentary, book II, d. 1, q. 4. The question concerns whether God is immediately active in every action of a creature, and if yes, how we should understand this divine concurrence. Peter, just as elsewhere in his commentary, considers at length the opinions of other thinkers — especially those of Giles of Rome, Durand of St.-Pourçain, and Thomas Aquinas — and develops his own…Read more
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Areas of Specialization
Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy |
Philosophy of Religion |