Fourteenth-Century Western Reception of Aquinas in Meister Eckhart, Hervaeus Natalis, and Durandus of St-Pourçain

Meister Eckhart, Hervaeus Natalis, and Durandus of St-Pourçain represent three different forms that the reception of Aquinas’ teaching adopted during the aftermath of the Correctoria controversy. Eckhart welcomes Aquinas’ insights as conceptual tools, but feels free to adapt them to his own theological programme and imperatives. Hervaeus’ reception of Aquinas’ doctrine is hardly dissociable from that of Durandus, in that it was fashioned in reaction to the latter’s alleged deviation in a context of rising ‘Thomist orthodoxy’ within the Dominican Order. Although Hervaeus’ position relied on an Aristotelian metaphysics which allowed compatibility with Aquinas’ position, his generous use of non-Thomist sources and enhanced interpretation of certain Thomist theses suggest that what was at stake in Durandus’ censure was the preservation of the Thomist doctrinal heritage by investing Aquinas’ teaching with the coherence and soundness that could merit the relative approval accorded to the ‘common opinion.’

Realität als vermeintliche Grenze der Erkenntnis: Hegels Metaphysik im Anschluss an und in Abgrenzung zu Kant

While Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason aims to 'humiliate' reason by declining any possibility of knowledge of things 'in themselves', he does conceive such critique as 'the necessary preparation for a thoroughly scientific system of metaphysics'. In this paper I examine in what sense Hegel's Science of Logic goes beyond that Kantian view without neither relapsing back into dogmatic metaphysics nor turning into a mere pragmatism. I argue that reality in itself is ontologically deficient so that it is already reality itself (and not just the categories of understanding) that makes true knowledge of real things impossible. Nonetheless I contend that there is something in Hegel's Science of Logic that is truly absolute and turns Logic into 'a thoroughly scientific system of metaphysics', namely what Hegel calls the Concept or the Absolute Idea. Furthermore I point out the concrete importance of these metaphysical claims for human theoretical and practical knowledge. This finally provides a new reading of Hegel's Logic as a de-ontologised Aristotelian metaphysics that not just claims to regulate empirical knowledge in a Kantian manner, but to also conceptually constitute reality 'in itself'.

Suárez on the Unity of Material Substances

Many late medieval Aristotelians assumed that a natural substance has several substantial forms in addition to matter as really distinct parts. This assumption gave rise to a unity problem: why is a substance more than a conglomeration of all these parts? This paper discusses Francisco Suárez’s answer. It first shows that he rejected the idea that there is a plurality of forms, emphasizing instead that each substance has a single form and hence a single structuring principle. It then examines his account of the relationship between matter and form. While accepting the thesis that these two parts are really distinct entities, he claimed that there is a special “mode of union” that binds them together. With this account, he defended the essential unity of a natural substance, but he transformed the program of Aristotelian metaphysics: not substances, but entities and modes inside them, are now the basic building blocks of reality.

Aristotle's Formal Identity of Intellect and Object: A Solution to the Problem of Modal Epistemology

In De Anima Book III, Aristotle subscribed to a theory of formal identity between the human mind and the extra-mental objects of our understanding. This has been one of the most controversial features of Aristotelian metaphysics of the mind. I offer here a defense of the Formal Identity Thesis, based on specifically epistemological arguments about our knowledge of necessary or essential truths.

A Proposed Solution of St. Thomas Aquinas’s “Third Way” Through Pros Hen Analogy

St. Thomas’s Third Way to prove the existence of God, “Of Possibility and Necessity” (ST 1, q.2, art. 3, response) is one of the most controverted passages in the entire Thomistic corpus. The central point of dispute is that if there were only possible beings, each at some time would cease to exist and, therefore, at some point in time nothing would exist, and because something cannot come from nothing, in such an eventuality, nothing would exist now—a reductio ad absurdum conclusion. Therefore, at least one necessary being must exist. Generations of critics and defenders have contended over St. Thomas’s proof. This article argues that the principle of pros hen analogy is implicit in the Third Way and that once identified explains the ontological dependency of possible beings, as secondary analogates, on the first necessary being, as primary analogate. Thus, without the necessary being as primary analogate, possible beings simply could not exist. The fact that they do exist is evidence for the existence of the necessary being. St. Thomas makes synthesizes the principle of pros hen analogy, as found in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, with the Neoplatonic principle of participation. Aristotle develops pros hen analogy in contradistinction to univocal and equivocal predication as well as to genus in Metaphysics 4.2, 11.3, 12.3-5. Since Scotus and re-enforced by modern analytic logic, philosophers have almost universally regarded any kind of analogical predication as a sub-category of equivocal predication and, thus, implicitly occlude the possibility of considering pros hen analogy in their readings of the Third Way. Distinction of per se and per accidens infinite regress and of radical and natural contingency are also central to understanding the Third Way. While resolving apparent problems in the Third Way, the article also seeks to rehabilitate the doctrine of pros hen analogy as a basic principle in Thomistic and, indeed, Aristotelian metaphysics.

Lowe, the Primacy of Metaphysics, and the Basis of Categorial Distinctions

This chapter continues and amplifies themes from my paper in the volume Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics entitled ‘Four Categories – and More’, a paper which begins with the words ‘Jonathan Lowe’ and ends with the words ‘I salute him’. It continues my appreciation of and predominant agreement with the methods, tone, and philosophical attitude of Jonathan Lowe, while continuing to demur from several of his key metaphysical theses. I emphasize here our independent convergence on what seems an odd, even an inconsistent view, but is I think deep, important, and under-recognized, namely that the most basic attributes characterizing and linking the fundamental categories of being are not themselves beings.