Lo necesario, lo superfluo y la medición de la pobreza

El objetivo de este trabajo es unir la aportación de la filosofía escolástica con la técnica de la medición de la pobreza a fin de clarificar cuánto ingreso debe ser normativamente considerado para adquirir “lo necesario” para vivir. La escolástica ha diferenciado –desde Tomás de Aquino- los bienes necesarios, los socialmente necesarios y los superfluos. Sobre los dos primeros se reconocieron derechos de propiedad usufructuaria, pero no sobre los superfluos. Lo que el trabajo investiga es saber si la línea de pobreza absoluta, nacional o internacional (actualmente establecida en $1,90 diarios en PPP de 2011) da buena cuenta de la capacidad para adquirir “lo necesario”. Rechazada esta opción se propone un Índice de Acceso a lo Necesario y se analizan las consecuencias de políticas públicas que conlleva la ambigüedad de “lo necesario”. The goal of this work is to combine the contribution of scholastic philosophy with the technique of poverty measurement in order to clarify how much income should be normatively considered in order to acquire "what is necessary" to live. Scholasticism has differentiated - from Thomas Aquinas - the necessary, socially necessary and superfluous goods. On the first two rights of usufruct property were recognized, but not on the superfluous ones. What the research investigates is whether the absolute poverty line, national or international (currently set at $ 1.90 per day in PPP 2011) gives a good account of the capability to acquire "what is necessary". Once this option is rejected, an Index of Access to the Necessary is proposed and the consequences of public policies that entail the ambiguity of "what is necessary" are analyzed.

De regimine principum

Chapter 5 considers the most important factor in the reception of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, its translation from the speculative domain of scholastic philosophy to political philosophy and statecraft in Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum. Widely copied and translated, this treatise proved the most influential interpretation of the Rhetoric. If in his early commentary Giles had showed little understanding of Aristotle’s distinctive phenomenology of emotions, his mirror of princes, written only a few years later, registers and mobilizes that active political dimension of emotion that is so important to Aristotelian rhetoric. Aristotle’s treatise on the emotions in book 2 of the Rhetoric figures extensively in De regimine principum, as Giles frames his theory of kingship in terms of the communicative strategies essential to rhetoric, “through arguments that are obvious and felt by the senses.” In this treatise, we also see how Giles has internalized the power of enthymematic argument, understanding political discourse as a kind of affective persuasion calling upon beliefs as well as emotions.

Kant’s Theory of Divine and Secondary Causation

This chapter examines Kant’s theory of the relation between God’s causal activity in the world and so-called “secondary” causation, the causality of created beings. The central question he faces here is the traditional one for a theistic metaphysics: How does the activity of God viewed as primordial creator and conserver of the world relate in general to the causal activity, if any, of created beings? His own evolving account of the divine causal role is shaped by his ongoing engagement with three competing theories of divine causation distinguished in late scholastic philosophy, and vigorously debated in the modern period by Malebranche and Leibniz. It is shown here that the most significant milestone in the emergence of Kant’s mature account does not lie in his transition from pre-Critical to Critical philosopher, but in an earlier one from necessitarian to libertarian on human agency.

Nietzsche and Luther: Reading, Counter-Text, Hermeneutics

In what way is Nietzsche's infamous late aphorism, ‘God is dead’, related to a general attack on theology and its intellectual practices? In Twilight of the Idols, he remarks: ‘I'm afraid we're not rid of God because we still believe in grammar.’ Reason, he decries, has become mired in linguistic rules long determined by the requirements of scholastic philosophy, whether of medieval theology or of Immanuel Kant. Nietzsche dismisses these as die Sprach-Metaphysik (‘metaphysics of language’). In this essay I examine Nietzsche's attack on theology via his long-term struggle with the ideas of Luther, once the idol of Goethe's German enlightenment, and now, Nietzsche insists, its arch-enemy. To do this, I re-examine Luther's theology of language, especially in the early Lectures on Romans (1515–1516). Luther's own attack on scholasticism is founded on a theology of reading which has unexpected affinities with Nietzsche. By placing this in a revised genealogy of hermeneutics from Nietzsche to Heidegger, it is possible to see theology as less deterministic and metaphysical.

The phenomenon of evil in the philosophical concepts of the European Middle Ages

The object of this research is the heritage of the leading representatives of Medieval philosophy, while the subject is the philosophical ideas of the prominent representatives of Patristic and Scholastic philosophy upon the nature of evil. The goal of this work lies in giving holistic assessment to the philosophical ideas on the phenomenon of evil in the Middle Ages, and is achieved by solving the following tasks: 1) assessment of the concept of “the first sin” as the foundation for understanding the phenomenon of evil in Medieval philosophy; 2) determination of the genesis of philosophical ideas of the Middle Ages pertaining to the nature of evil in the logical-historical aspect; 3) description of the impact of such ideas upon further development of the Western European philosophy. The scientific novelty consists in comprehensive examination of the Medieval philosophical concepts dedicated to the phenomenon of evil. In Christianity, evil is viewed as essentially historical phenomenon, stemming from the event of the first sin and being conquered by the will of God. Medieval philosophers underlined the need for determining the ontology of evil, which is called to answer the question on the nature of evil and the role of evil in the universe. Medieval philosophers were also concerned with the problem of Theodicy, i.e. why a good God permits the manifestation of evil. The representatives of Patristic and Scholastic philosophy reasoned over the moral aspect in interpretation of evil, trying to correlate the phenomenon of evil with the free will of a human. The ideas of evil as the absence of good prevailed in the Christian philosophy, which viewed the phenomenon of evil as opposite to being, nothingness. Medieval concepts on the phenomenon of evil had a considerable spiritual and sociocultural impact upon the views of the leading representatives of German idealism, who have embraced not so much the assuredness of Medieval Christian philosophers that evil is the absence of good, but the idea on the equality of good and evil as the fundamentals of the universe and the components of human nature.

At the origins of the neo-scholastic interpretation of kantianism:from C. Baldinotti to J. Kleutgen

The article considers the first experience of interpretation and criticism of the Kantian doctrine of knowledge on the part of neo-scholastic thinkers in 1st half of the 19th century. It is shown that the transition from confessional polemics, which hadn’t philosophical in­terpretation, to the presentation and analysis of Kantian epistemology in Cesare Baldinotti’s treatise “Tentaminum metaphysicorum” (1817), when scholar takes an under­standing of Kantianism as radical skepticism. At the same time, he left unanswered ques­tions about what type of traditional concepts Kantianism refers, and how it can be de­scribed in the language of scholasticism. The first problem was solved by the Italian thinker Gaetano Sanseverino, who tried to correlate Kantianism with models traditionally opposed to scholasticism (like averroism). The second problem was solved by Jaime Balmes and Joseph Kleutgen, who outlined the boundaries of the compromise between scholasticism and Kantianism, trying to describe Criticism in terms of Thomism and show possible intersection points between these doctrines. As a result of these efforts, it becomes clear that the mechanical transfer of solutions developed in medieval scholas­ticism to the problems of modern European philosophy is not a successful polemic strat­egy. It was necessary to update the scholastic philosophy in a modern European context, which was subsequently carried out by Matteo Liberatore and the Neo-Thomists who fol­lowed him.

The formation of the ontological concept of the “status of things” in the beginning of the 16th – the first half of the 17th centuries Jesuit metaphysics and theology

This article is a study of a new type of metaphysics that arose within the tradition of scholastic philosophy and theology of the Jesuits by the middle of the 17th century. The article describes the opposition of the traditional and new understanding of scholastic metaphysics on the example of Fr. Suárez and S. Izquierdo. The formation of the ontological concept of "status of things" is identified as one of the key conditions and signs of this transformation of metaphysics. First, the formation of this concept is explored in the scholastic tradition preceding Izquierdo, namely in Fonseca, Suárez, Hurtado de Mendoza and Fabri, as a history of shifts in meaning and of the emergence of new contexts in which the term "status" was used. Second, we describe the systematic context of the doctrine of the status rerum in the universal theory of objects of human thought in Izquierdo's Pharus scientiarum (1659). Thirdly, we explicate the very concept of the status of a thing in the first philosophy of Izquierdo, its necessary connection with the concept of the objective truth of a thing, and also show the special significance of the first "quidditative status of things" as a whole set of objective truths underlying all demonstrative human sciences. Finally, the article points out that one of the essential features of Izquierdo's new metaphysics is the strengthening of the methodological nature of the universal science recorded in his treatise in comparison with the traditional Jesuit prototype in Suárez.