Ten Arguments in Search of a Philosopher: Averroes and Aquinas in Ficino's Platonic Theology

Vivarium ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 444-479 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Copenhaver
Keyword(s):  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
The Body ◽  
Substantial Form ◽  
Marsilio Ficino ◽  
Immortality Of The Soul ◽  
Platonic Theology

AbstractIn book 15 of his Platonic Theology on the Immortality of the Soul, Marsilio Ficino names Averroes and the Averroists as his opponents, though he does not say which particular Averroists he has in mind. The key position that Ficino attributes to Averroes—that the Intellect is not the substantial form of the body—is not one that Averroes holds explicitly, though he does claim explicitly that the Intellect is not a body or a power in a body. Ficino's account of what Averroes said about the soul's immortality comes not from texts written by Averroes but from arguments made against Averroes by Thomas Aquinas in the Summa contra gentiles.

Richard Knapwell

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
M.V. Dougherty
Keyword(s):  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
The Body ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Substantial Form ◽  
Robert Kilwardby

The English Dominican friar and theologian Richard Knapwell (Clapwell) (fl. 1284–1286) is best known as an early defender of Thomas Aquinas. He was the first to respond to William de la Mare’s Correctorium fratris Thomae (Correction of Brother Thomas), a Franciscan attack consisting of 117 articles identifying purported errors drawn from several of Aquinas’s major writings. Knapwell’s detailed riposte, composed in the early 1280s, was the earliest and most extensive of a series of polemical Correctoria corruptorii fratris Thomae (Corrections of the Corruptor of Brother Thomas) that would appear, and Knapwell’s contribution is known as the Correctorium “Quare.” Knapwell’s commitment to Aquinas’s writings, however, was not fully evident in his earlier work, as Knapwell had lectured on the Sententiae of Peter Lombard at Oxford sometime between 1269 and 1277, and his surviving notes or Notabilia exhibit an admixture of views taken from Aquinas and Augustine. After writing the Correctorium “Quare,” Knapwell incepted as a master in theology at Oxford in 1284–1285, and not long afterward he produced the De unitate formae (On the unity of form), a disputed question that brought about his condemnation. In that work, Knapwell asserted the theological neutrality of the Aristotelian metaphysical thesis that there is a single substantial form in human beings. The unity of form thesis was opposed by those who posited a plurality of forms, believing that the unity of form thesis was incompatible with a host of theological issues such as whether Christ’s body in the tomb was numerically identical with the body of the living Christ. In October 1284 the Franciscan archbishop of Canterbury John Pecham had renewed the prohibitions of 1277 concerning the unity of form thesis previously set by his Dominican predecessor, Robert Kilwardby. On the basis of Knapwell’s defense of the unity of form in De unitate formae, Pecham excommunicated Knapwell in April 1286. Knapwell traveled to Rome to argue his case before the pope, but the newly elected Franciscan pontiff Nicholas IV responded by silencing him in 1288. Nothing definite is known about his later activities. The extant works of Knapwell (beyond the abovementioned Notabilia, Correctorium “Quare,” and De unitate formae) include six additional disputed questions that pertain mostly to issues of human and divine cognition, and one short Quodlibet of twenty-nine questions on a variety of topics.

Thomas Aquinas (I)

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonia Fitzpatrick
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
The Body ◽  
Entire Study ◽  
Substantial Form ◽  
Bodily Resurrection ◽  
Whole Person ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Structure Of Matter

This chapter restores the place of the body within Aquinas’s theory of the composition of human nature, explaining his account of the body’s autonomy relative to the soul. The central arguments of the entire study are elaborated: theological problems, particularly the bodily resurrection, led Aquinas to emphasize the body’s goodness; Aquinas thinks that the individuality of the whole person had its origins in matter; the individual body’s autonomy is underpinned by its unique ‘dimensive quantity’—a corporeal form, but an ‘accidental’, not a substantial form, which individualizes the body’s matter. These arguments are established through attending to: essence and its relationship to the individual; the beauty of the human body; embryology, heredity, and the structure of matter; and individuation. A theme running through the chapter is Aquinas’s radical remodelling of Peter Lombard’s concept of the ‘truth of human nature’, i.e. that from which the resurrected body will be constituted.

Thomas Aquinas on How the Soul Moves the Body

2020 ◽  
pp. 144-186
Author(s):  
David Cory
Keyword(s):  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Substantial Form ◽  
Causal Contribution ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
The One

It is uncontroversial that Thomas Aquinas has a hylomorphic account of both living and non-living beings. Yet some of his views about living beings, and especially his view that souls (including animal and plant souls) are movers of their bodies, seem to depart from his account of soul as a substantial form, taking a step in the direction of dualism. In this paper, I will (1) propose a new reading of what Aquinas means in calling the soul the mover of the body, and (2) distinguish the causal contribution of souls from that of inanimate substantial form on the one hand and from the action of spiritual substances on the other. The key to my interpretation will be a close analysis of vital motions as self-motions, which is the basis for Aquinas’s attributing a mover role to the soul in the first place.

Ficino, Marsilio (1433–99)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Hankins
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Great Influence ◽  
Philosophical Work ◽  
Marsilio Ficino ◽  
Platonic Love ◽  
Immortality Of The Soul ◽  
Latin Version ◽  
Platonic Theology

With Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Marsilio Ficino was the most important philosopher working under the patronage of Lorenzo de’Medici, ‘Il Magnifico’, in the Florence of the High Renaissance. Ficino’s main contribution was as a translator of Platonic philosophy from Greek into Latin: he produced the first complete Latin version of the works of Plato (1484) and Plotinus (1492) as well as renderings of a number of minor Platonists. He supplied many of his translations with philosophical commentaries, and these came to exercise great influence on the interpretation of Platonic philosophy in the Renaissance and early modern periods. Ficino’s most important philosophical work, the Theologia platonica de immortalitate animae (Platonic Theology, On the Immortality of the Soul) (1474) aimed to use Platonic arguments to combat the Averroists, ‘impious’ scholastic philosophers who denied that the immortality of the soul could be proven by reason. The most famous concept associated with his name is that of ‘Platonic love’.

Thomas Aquinas on Bodily Identity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonia Fitzpatrick
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
The Body ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Substantial Form ◽  
Fundamental Conception ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Mendicant Orders ◽  
Over Time

This is a study of the union of matter and the soul in human beings in the thought of the Dominican Thomas Aquinas. At first glance, this issue might appear arcane, but it was at the centre of Catholic polemic with heresy in the thirteenth century and of the development of medieval thought. The book argues that theological issues, especially the need for an identical body to be resurrected at the end of time, were vital to Aquinas’s account of how human beings are constituted. The book explores how theological questions shaped Aquinas’s thought on individuality and bodily identity over time, his embryology and understanding of heredity, his work on nutrition and bodily growth, and his fundamental conception of matter. It demonstrates how Aquinas used his peripatetic sources, Aristotle and Averroes, to further his own thinking. The book indicates how Aquinas’s thought on bodily identity became pivotal to university debates and relations between rival mendicant orders in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, and that quarrels surrounding these issues persisted into the fifteenth century. Not only is this a study of the interface between theology, biology, and physics in Aquinas’s thought; it also fundamentally revises the generally accepted view of Aquinas. Aquinas is famous for holding that the only substantial form in a human being is the soul; most scholars have therefore thought he located the identity of the individual in their soul. This book restores the body through a thorough examination of the range of Aquinas’s works.

scholarly journals The Vision of God: St. Thomas Aquinas on the Beatific Vision and Resurrected Bodies

Perichoresis ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 19-26
Author(s):  
Robert Llizo
Keyword(s):  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
The Body ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Main Question ◽  
Central Dogma ◽  
Substantial Form ◽  
Beatific Vision ◽  
Vision Of God

Abstract The beatific vision is central to St. Thomas Aquinas’ doctrine of the soul’s enlightenment. In its vision of the essence of God, the soul/intellect achieves its telos, its highest goal. But the resurrection of the body is a central dogma of the Christian faith, so the main question of this essay concerns the manner in which the resurrected body of the blessed benefits from the soul’s apprehension of the beatific vision. For St. Thomas, the physical eyes do not see the beatific vision, since they can only see magnitude and proportion, and God is beyond both. The soul is the body’s substantial form, and a person is not fully a person without the union of soul and body. As the body’s substantial form, the soul/intellect has the beatific vision as its substantial form. The result of the enlightened intellect with the resurrected body will be that the physical eyes will be able to see more readily the glory of God in creation and in redeemed humanity, and more supremely in the incarnate Christ himself.

Il De immortalitate animae di Agostino nella critica più recente

Augustinianum ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-135
Author(s):  
Nello Cipriani ◽  
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
Divine Nature ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Immortality Of The Soul

In De immortalitate animae Augustine is not satisfied with completing his proof of the immortality of the soul – which had been left open in the second book of the Soliloquies –; he also answers some possible objections, demonstrating that the rational soul cannot cease to exist, it cannot die, nor can it change into an irrational body or soul. Furthermore, remaining faithful to the programmatic declaration of never wanting to stray from the authority of Christ (Acad. 3, 20, 43), he specifies the ontological status of the soul by affirming that it is, in itself, mutable and therefore not of a divine nature, as Varro had argued. Nor is it a substance foreign to the body, as the Platonists claimed, because the soul has an appetitus ad corpus and, if it questions itself, it easily discovers that it desires nothing else «except to do something, to know with intelligence or with the senses, or only to live, as far as this is in its power» (nisi agendi aliquid, aut sciendi, aut sentiendi, aut tantummodo vivendi in quantum sua illi potestas est).

Christian Materialism and the Prospect of Immortality

2019 ◽  
pp. 148-161
Author(s):  
Michelle Pfeffer
Keyword(s):  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
The Body ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Life After Death ◽  
Immortality Of The Soul

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries at least thirty English writers developed a materialist position that they argued was consistent with their Christian faith. While their heterodox ideas were connected with developments in natural philosophy and medicine, what they found more pressing was arriving at a genuinely biblical view of the person. These writers attempted to recover what they saw as ‘true’ Hebraic anthropology, which understood the soul to be mortal and material, and held that the resurrection of the body, rather than the immortality of the soul, provided assurance of life after death. These writers deployed existing exegetical methods and hoped to defend Christianity by reforming corrupt doctrines. Thus, while Christianity provided many in this period with reasons to attack materialism, it also provided many with motives to be materialists.

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