[Article] Aquinas On Suppositum, Essence & Universals

  Seth Kreeger PhD Candidate Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology [online only response to daniel wagner, “the logical terms of sense realism”] Download as PDF Having read “The Logical Terms of Sense Realism: A Thomistic-Aristotelian & Phenomenological Defense” I find myself to be quite in agreement with Professor Wagner about the impossibility of nominalism… Read More [Article] Aquinas On Suppositum, Essence & Universals

[Article] Reality and the Meaning of Evil

“Evil is really only a privation.”  This philosophical commonplace reflects an ancient solution to the problem of theodicy in one of its dimensions: is evil of such a nature that it must have God as its author? Stated in this particular way, it also reflects the commonplace identification of the real with natural being—the realm of what exists independently of human thought and perspectives—as opposed to all that is termed, by comparison, “merely subjective” and “unreal”.   If we stick with this way of construing the meaning of “reality”, then by the excellent arguments of the tradition we are also stuck with defending the sufficiency of privation as a response to what evil “really is”.… Read More [Article] Reality and the Meaning of Evil

[essay] Participation and the Divine

How does truth admit of more or less?  The same applies to nobility and being. One might also ask, just what does Thomas means by nobility?  How is it distinct from goodness?  How is the maximum in any genus supposed to cause everything else in that genus?  Is this formal or efficient causality?  Is this a Neo-Platonic argument from participation?  Is the argument undermined by the Angelic Doctor’s outdated and erroneous example of fire as cause of all heat?  Each issue is likely deserving of its own paper.  Yet behind all these questions (except, perhaps, the meaning of nobility), lies a more primary difficulty: the meanings of “more or less” and the “maximum” by which they are denominated. How we answer the above questions depends on our understanding of these two key features of the argument.… Read More [essay] Participation and the Divine