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GEddie
Guest
For values of “permanence” bounded by the duration of a human body; permanence only of the most meager sense.
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Gorgias
Guest
Many questions from you today, Carl. Let’s see if I can’t address them…
Aquinas’ style is quite different than anything we typically encounter today. He’s writing in a sort of ‘shorthand’, and we need to understand his project if we have any hope of understanding his Summa Theologiae. Aquinas is using the form of ‘disputation’ in this work. If you’ve never encountered this form of academic discourse, a short discussion of this form might help you begin to understand it. In short, a disputation makes some presumptions: first - and most important - it presumes that you’re already familiar with the question and what others have written about it! It presumes that you’ve researched the question, and are familiar with philosophy and the great philosophers. Most importantly, it presumes that it doesn’t have to explain basic concepts, but that you are already conversant with them.
Aquinas deals with lots of topics that would have been familiar to students of philosophy in his day. He quotes a wide variety of sources – Christians and Hebrews, but also Muslim philosophers and non-Christians as well – including Augustine, Anselm, Eriugena and Boethius; Maimonides; Avicenna, Averroes, Al-Ghazali; Aristotle, Plato, and Cicero. Aquinas, in his Summa, assumes you’re familiar not only with these philosophers and theologians, but also with what it is that they’ve written.
Aquinas presumes you’re familiar with medieval philosophical thought. When he speaks of ‘forms’ and ‘types’ and ‘species’, he assumes you know what has been said of these things, not only in antiquity, but also by the medieval philosophers in the West and in Islamic philosophy.
Yes – if you’re not familiar with all these underpinnings, Aquinas can be quite difficult to understand! His style is terse – but that’s because that’s what a ‘disputation’ is all about! It’s not a primer, but a form of writing meant for experienced students of philosophy and theology, so to speak!
A couple of quick thoughts: first off, your quote from “The Beauty of the Triune God”, is by a commentator writing about Edwards’ thought. So, really, you’ve got an academic writing about a theologian writing about Aquinas. That’s quite far removed from what Aquinas wrote! Second, your quote is footnoted as proceeding from ST I.27.1, but that question doesn’t address the question of God’s thought, per se. Rather, it asks the question whether there is procession in God (that is, does anything proceed from God?). So, inasmuch as this author speaks of “God’s thought”, he is speaking – in a certain sense – by analogy, and not in terms of what Aquinas wrote. Given the precision with which Aquinas writes, this lack of precision is somewhat dismaying…
Yes, Aquinas holds that ideas are present in God’s mind. However, that doesn’t mean that God ‘thinks’ as we do.
Exactly… but there’s more to it than that!
Aquinas’ style is quite different than anything we typically encounter today. He’s writing in a sort of ‘shorthand’, and we need to understand his project if we have any hope of understanding his Summa Theologiae. Aquinas is using the form of ‘disputation’ in this work. If you’ve never encountered this form of academic discourse, a short discussion of this form might help you begin to understand it. In short, a disputation makes some presumptions: first - and most important - it presumes that you’re already familiar with the question and what others have written about it! It presumes that you’ve researched the question, and are familiar with philosophy and the great philosophers. Most importantly, it presumes that it doesn’t have to explain basic concepts, but that you are already conversant with them.
Aquinas deals with lots of topics that would have been familiar to students of philosophy in his day. He quotes a wide variety of sources – Christians and Hebrews, but also Muslim philosophers and non-Christians as well – including Augustine, Anselm, Eriugena and Boethius; Maimonides; Avicenna, Averroes, Al-Ghazali; Aristotle, Plato, and Cicero. Aquinas, in his Summa, assumes you’re familiar not only with these philosophers and theologians, but also with what it is that they’ve written.
Aquinas presumes you’re familiar with medieval philosophical thought. When he speaks of ‘forms’ and ‘types’ and ‘species’, he assumes you know what has been said of these things, not only in antiquity, but also by the medieval philosophers in the West and in Islamic philosophy.
Yes – if you’re not familiar with all these underpinnings, Aquinas can be quite difficult to understand! His style is terse – but that’s because that’s what a ‘disputation’ is all about! It’s not a primer, but a form of writing meant for experienced students of philosophy and theology, so to speak!
Oh boy. That’s quite a mouthful, there! To understand it, you need to recognize what, in Aquinas’ terms, a ‘form’ is… and what a ‘form in the mind’ is… and why Aquinas wouldn’t say that a thought (that is, a ratiocination) is an ‘idea’. Yes, Aquinas concurs that God has ‘ideas’ – but that doesn’t mean that God ‘thinks’ (in the way that humans ‘have ideas’).
Aquinas says that “God thinking is his essence”??? Where do you see that?
A couple of quick thoughts: first off, your quote from “The Beauty of the Triune God”, is by a commentator writing about Edwards’ thought. So, really, you’ve got an academic writing about a theologian writing about Aquinas. That’s quite far removed from what Aquinas wrote! Second, your quote is footnoted as proceeding from ST I.27.1, but that question doesn’t address the question of God’s thought, per se. Rather, it asks the question whether there is procession in God (that is, does anything proceed from God?). So, inasmuch as this author speaks of “God’s thought”, he is speaking – in a certain sense – by analogy, and not in terms of what Aquinas wrote. Given the precision with which Aquinas writes, this lack of precision is somewhat dismaying…
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JuanFlorencio
Guest
. If you’ve never encountered this form of academic discourse, a short discussion of this form might help you begin to understand it. In short, a disputation makes some presumptions: first - and most important - it presumes that you’re already familiar with the question and what others have written about it! It presumes that you’ve researched the question, and are familiar with philosophy and the great philosophers. Most importantly, it presumes that it doesn’t have to explain basic concepts, but that you are already conversant with them.
Aquinas deals with lots of topics that would have been familiar to students of philosophy in his day. He quotes a wide variety of sources – Christians and Hebrews, but also Muslim philosophers and non-Christians as well – including Augustine, Anselm, Eriugena and Boethius; Maimonides; Avicenna, Averroes, Al-Ghazali; Aristotle, Plato, and Cicero. Aquinas, in his Summa, assumes you’re familiar not only with these philosophers and theologians, but also with what it is that they’ve written.
Aquinas presumes you’re familiar with medieval philosophical thought. When he speaks of ‘forms’ and ‘types’ and ‘species’, he assumes you know what has been said of these things, not only in antiquity, but also by the medieval philosophers in the West and in Islamic philosophy.
Yes – if you’re not familiar with all these underpinnings, Aquinas can be quite difficult to understand! His style is terse – but that’s because that’s what a ‘disputation’ is all about! It’s not a primer, but a form of writing meant for experienced students of philosophy and theology, so to speak!
Oh boy. That’s quite a mouthful, there! To understand it, you need to recognize what, in Aquinas’ terms, a ‘form’ is… and what a ‘form in the mind’ is… and why Aquinas wouldn’t say that a thought (that is, a ratiocination) is an ‘idea’. Yes, Aquinas concurs that God has ‘ideas’ – but that doesn’t mean that God ‘thinks’ (in the way that humans ‘have ideas’).
Aquinas says that “God thinking is his essence”??? Where do you see that?
A couple of quick thoughts: first off, your quote from “The Beauty of the Triune God”, is by a commentator writing about Edwards’ thought. So, really, you’ve got an academic writing about a theologian writing about Aquinas. That’s quite far removed from what Aquinas wrote! Second, your quote is footnoted as proceeding from ST I.27.1, but that question doesn’t address the question of God’s thought, per se. Rather, it asks the question whether there is procession in God (that is, does anything proceed from God?). So, inasmuch as this author speaks of “God’s thought”, he is speaking – in a certain sense – by analogy, and not in terms of what Aquinas wrote. Given the precision with which Aquinas writes, this lack of precision is somewhat dismaying…
I am sorry to interrupt your conversation, but I thought it would be useful to clarify this: Every philosophical doctrine is a disputation, no matter if the philosopher’s writings do not adopt the stylistic form of a disputation. A philosophical doctrine is a condensation and transformation of multiple discourses which exist within the ocean of heterogeneous discourses. The separation effort is necessarily a disputation, because those heterogeneous discourses are intermixed. Philosophy is disputation.
But Philosophy is a disputation which proceeds in order. There must be a beginning in the homogeneous discourse. Do the basic concepts constitute the beginning? If Philosophy was an axiomatic discipline, I would say “yes, exactly, that is the beginning”; and everyone who intends to study any philosophical doctrine would have to become familiar with the entire ocean of discourses. But Philosophy is not axiomatic. Philosophy pretends to be a homogeneous discourse about reality.
So, when you identify “idea” and “form” as some of the basic concepts in St. Thomas piece of discourse, I think Carl would be happy if you responded to the question “to which aspect of reality do these concepts respond?”. Because if you respond, he will not have to look for Augustine, Anselm, Eriugena and Boethius; Maimonides; Avicenna, Averroes, Al-Ghazali; Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, Adam and Eve.
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JuanFlorencio
Guest
But life and “our” body are processes too, right? Is the “I” something that “belongs” to the body or is the body something that “belongs” to the “I”? Or are “they” different aspects of the same process? Or are “they” a harmony of heterogeneous processes?
Is everything there is a process to you?
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GEddie
Guest
I’d say that our body is part of what belongs to what we call the “I,” although, given the relative passivity of our bodies (ninety percent of what happens in a body is outside the mind’s control), we might consider the body as an aspect of the “me” rather than the “I.”
The body belongs to the “I” or the “me” because without it, there is neither, just a helpless ghost, if that.
The body can be thought of as a process (a co-process with the mind) because his/her apparent solidity is continuously generated. The cells now comprising your skin were not there a week ago, for example. The dust in your home comes in part from material that was once in your skin.
Together, the co-processes of mind and body compose the process we call “human life.”
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JuanFlorencio
Guest
If we consider that we are temporal beings, not precisely in the sense that we are temporally finite, then we could say that we are processes. Processes in relative harmony and relative conflict. Or, when you conceive the processes that appear before you, do you conceive that some processes influence and are influenced by others. Leibniz conceived that there was no influence between different processes. What do you think?
Or is it like Spinoza said: all this is just different modes of the same substance (though replacing “substance” by “process”)?
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GEddie
Guest
Of course processes influence each other. But I don’t know what Leibnitz meant by process.
The process of your breathing, and the process of plant photosynthesis, are separate but support each other (as an example).
The process of sunlight impinging on your skin raises the temperature at the surface of your body, which triggers a nervous response, opens the sweat glands, rushes blood to your skin, etc (a new process).
I am not certain how you distinguish between “temporal being” and “temporally finite” as to my mind, they go together.
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fisherman_carl
Guest
I think Aquinas defines an idea as the form of a thing. My understanding of an idea might be to have or grasp the concept of a thing in my mind. I can have an idea about how an airplane flies if i grasp the concepts in the theory of flight.But Carl, what is an idea in a mind? Is a mind a kind of container which accommodates those special objects orderly or disorderly? Is an idea an object or a certain conscious disposition to act?
How do you conceive an idea? (What is your idea of “idea”?).
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fisherman_carl
Guest
I am somewhat familiar with Aristotilean forms having read Edward Feser’s books ‘Aquinas’ and ‘The Last Superstition’. I still don’t get what Aquinas is saying in the above quote though. I only vaguely grasp some of it. (Nor do I completely understand everything Feser says).Many questions from you today, Carl. Let’s see if I can’t address them…
Yes, Aquinas holds that ideas are present in God’s mind. However, that doesn’t mean that God ‘thinks’ as we do.
Exactly… but there’s more to it than that!
Aquinas’ style is quite different than anything we typically encounter today. He’s writing in a sort of ‘shorthand’, and we need to understand his project if we have any hope of understanding his Summa Theologiae. Aquinas is using the form of ‘disputation’ in this work. If you’ve never encountered this form of academic discourse, a short discussion of this form might help you begin to understand it. In short, a disputation makes some presumptions: first - and most important - it presumes that you’re already familiar with the question and what others have written about it! It presumes that you’ve researched the question, and are familiar with philosophy and the great philosophers. Most importantly, it presumes that it doesn’t have to explain basic concepts, but that you are already conversant with them.
Aquinas deals with lots of topics that would have been familiar to students of philosophy in his day. He quotes a wide variety of sources – Christians and Hebrews, but also Muslim philosophers and non-Christians as well – including Augustine, Anselm, Eriugena and Boethius; Maimonides; Avicenna, Averroes, Al-Ghazali; Aristotle, Plato, and Cicero. Aquinas, in his Summa, assumes you’re familiar not only with these philosophers and theologians, but also with what it is that they’ve written.
Aquinas presumes you’re familiar with medieval philosophical thought. When he speaks of ‘forms’ and ‘types’ and ‘species’, he assumes you know what has been said of these things, not only in antiquity, but also by the medieval philosophers in the West and in Islamic philosophy.
Yes – if you’re not familiar with all these underpinnings, Aquinas can be quite difficult to understand! His style is terse – but that’s because that’s what a ‘disputation’ is all about! It’s not a primer, but a form of writing meant for experienced students of philosophy and theology, so to speak!
Oh boy. That’s quite a mouthful, there! To understand it, you need to recognize what, in Aquinas’ terms, a ‘form’ is… and what a ‘form in the mind’ is… and why Aquinas wouldn’t say that a thought (that is, a ratiocination) is an ‘idea’. Yes, Aquinas concurs that God has ‘ideas’ – but that doesn’t mean that God ‘thinks’ (in the way that humans ‘have ideas’).
Aquinas says that “God thinking is his essence”??? Where do you see that?
A couple of quick thoughts: first off, your quote from “The Beauty of the Triune God”, is by a commentator writing about Edwards’ thought. So, really, you’ve got an academic writing about a theologian writing about Aquinas. That’s quite far removed from what Aquinas wrote! Second, your quote is footnoted as proceeding from ST I.27.1, but that question doesn’t address the question of God’s thought, per se. Rather, it asks the question whether there is procession in God (that is, does anything proceed from God?). So, inasmuch as this author speaks of “God’s thought”, he is speaking – in a certain sense – by analogy, and not in terms of what Aquinas wrote. Given the precision with which Aquinas writes, this lack of precision is somewhat dismaying…
I get that God does not think in the way humans do. I don’t think I ever claimed that he did. But, I do think you can say God has thoughts in an analogical sense, just not in a univocal sense. After all, the Bible talks about God’s thoughts. But, there is no process in God’s mind as he is unchanging.
I found this interesting article by Edward Feser which talks about some of what we are talking about. The interesting thing he says is that it is a mistake to try to imagine how the divine mind works. Which is what we have been trying to do here. He also points out the differences between our modern conception of mind and Aquinas’s.
According to Feser even attributing knowledge and intellect to God can only be done in an anological way and not a univocal way. And he says Aquinas defines intelligence as the ability to grasp the forms of other things.
edwardfeser.blogspot.ca/2012/09/the-divine-intellect.html?m=1
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JuanFlorencio
Guest
What is the difference between “concept”, “form” and “idea”?
And being God the creator of everything else, how could His intelligence be the ability to grasp the form of “other things”.
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Gorgias
Guest
Much of philosophy – ancient Hellenic, medieval; continental, etc – takes on the form of dialectic. Yet, not all philosophy is dialectic.
That’s the whole point: Aquinas does adopt this particular medieval form.
Yes, but that’s a rather big question, don’t you think? “What is idea?” and “What are forms?” are among the deepest, most wide-reaching questions asked in philosophy, especially in the ancient and medieval philosophies from which Aquinas worked.
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JuanFlorencio
Guest
You might remember that according to St. Thomas, it might be that the world is eternal, but still created. So, it would not be temporally finite, but it would be temporal, simply because it changes.
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GEddie
Guest
Point taken, although I am in no way a Thomist, and do not believe the “world” to be eternal.
I think everybody’s thoughts come into internal conflict, driven by the states of their bodies, and by conflict with other persons.
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JuanFlorencio
Guest
No doubt. It is a big question; but the reality to which the question and the different available responses are related is not big. Socrates asks his friends: “What is beauty?”, and one responds: “Beauty?, beauty is a beautiful woman, and a beautiful mare, and a beautiful carafe…”. Then, Socrates goes on: “Very well; however, I did not ask “what is beautiful?”, but “what is beauty in itself?””.Yes, but that’s a rather big question, don’t you think? “What is idea?” and “What are forms?” are among the deepest, most wide-reaching questions asked in philosophy, especially in the ancient and medieval philosophies from which Aquinas worked.
Socrates’ friend was able to identify something which was common in quite different entities. That was good. But Socrates wanted to remark it. He was asking them to define that which things that are dramatically different between them can have in common. They couldn’t. But they were put in front of that reality.
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GEddie
Guest
I don’t hold to that anyway, the treatment of an attribute of physical entities as though it, and not the physical entities, were the real thing.
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Gorgias
Guest
OK. In what way, then?
Maybe another way to put it is, “God has knowledge of particular things.” Is that what you’re trying to say? That would be one way of putting it, without drawing on the analogy of ‘thinking’…
Yeah, but the O.T. routinely uses anthropomorphisms to discuss God.
Except that he says, “To grasp the divine intellect (to the extent that we can grasp it) we have to use our intellects, not our senses or our imaginations.” In other words, we can approach knowledge of the divine intellect (not mind
), but not by sense or image.
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fisherman_carl
Guest
When defining a concept all we can do is use more words, upon which you will ask what are the meaning of these words. Lol.
I think for Aquinas what it means to grasp something is to have the form of the thing in your mind. So while the form of a thing exists in the thing itself, for a mind with an intellect, that form can exist in its mind as well. So for instance while physical objects like a stone can only have one form in them, their own, and so could not possibly be considered intelligent, whereas a mind can hold many forms of other things in them. It can grasp the form of a rock without actually becoming a rock. And all of us with minds can grasp the form of a rock, otherwise we would not be able to talk about rocks.
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fisherman_carl
Guest
So the form of a thing can be described as that what distinguishes it from another type of thing. If everything physical is a composite of form and matter then what distinguishes different things are there form. The form of a rock is different than the form of an orange. We can use various descriptions to describe the form of a rock like its hardness, its density, shape and structure. And these differences distinguish it from an orange. When we grasp in our minds what is a rock, then we grasp its form in our minds.
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JuanFlorencio
Guest
Of course you don’t! You and I are talking about processes. So, what could attributes be? We need to go step by step!
Nevertheless, when I said that Socrates put his friends in front of reality, I did not mean that he showed them beauty in itself. I do not support Plato’s doctrine. Reality was, and is, the fact that we are able to find something common in things which are dramatically different. Nominalists would say that there is no beauty in itself, but that we use a common word to designate something. Same reality, different interpretation.
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GEddie
Guest
Yes, I would agree that there is no “beauty in itself.” Beauty is an attribute, not a “thing” per se.
Which doesn’t make it unimportant; some of the most important “entities” lie within this categories, such as freedom, youth, even life itself. But we shouldn’t be mesmerized by the Platonic forms.
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