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Category Archives: Philosophy

Philosophy

William and Thomas

16 Thursday Jun 2016

Posted by Fr. Moore in Philosophy

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Thomas Aquinas

Two men, William [W] and Thomas [T], are speaking to each other:

W – I tell you, things can't possibly be as you say. Just listen and I will explain.

T – But you cannot explain; for the two us to come to any agreement there would have to be common ground between us and if things are as you say, then that is not possible. And yet the fact we are having this conversation proves that it is.

W – Well now who's talking nonsense? What on earth do you mean?

T – First, let us get our facts straight. You've said that we cannot know the reality of things outside ourselves, correct?

W – No, that is not what I said.

T – Of course it is! You said that you can't be sure that an oak tree in Oxford is in any way similar to one in Italy.

W – Yes, I did say that.

T – If you can't know that they are similar in any way then how is it that you can refer to both of them as oak trees or as trees at all? If we cannot know there is anything similar about them then we can't know enough to even refer to them with the same word 'tree'. With this way of thinking all of reality begins to break down. What if the individual thing I am referring to with the word 'tree' is actually a cat and what you are referring to with the same word 'tree' is actually a butter knife? If this were the case then our conversation right now would be pure nonsense. And yet this is obviously not true because you do agree that our conversation right now is intelligible, right?

W – No, I don't.

T – ?!?

And thus William proves for us that Nominalists are schizophrenic; using words which truly represent something in reality while denying the existence of that very reality.

 

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The Finite leads to the Infinite

02 Tuesday Dec 2014

Posted by Fr. Moore in Free Will, God's Will, Philosophy, Submission to God

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Dying to Self, Free Will, Happiness, Search for Happiness

I am still attempting to finish my series of posts on ‘chance’ – if there is such a thing – but I am still thinking about how to end it. In the meantime, here is something I just read that is very thought provoking. Also, as we have just started Advent, the following can be subject good to consider. We should be at this time asking ourselves whether or not we live our lives according to the Truth or do we remain within a world of illusion and contradiction. If we do not ask ourselves these questions then we will not be ready when our Lord returns.

First a little background: he is here talking about mankind’s search for the infinite. In examining our own lives we can see this desire at work. We desire the infinite, but if we do not know where to find it then we try fulfill that desire with finite things of this world. What happens when we do this? We enjoy the novelty for a while and then tire of it, put it down, and move onto the next thing that catches our interest. But if we step back from this never ending process, instead of moving on to the next thing, we will see that there is no finite thing that will ever fulfill us. Only the infinite can do that. If we are honest then we have to admit the truth of this experience in our lives and can then recognize that it holds true for all mankind. But when we are confronted with the infinite – God – we can feel threatened because we want to be the masters of our own domain. (And this is connected to the fact that we are born into Original Sin.) Therefore, many people reject God because they want to be ‘free’ to pursue their own idea of happiness, thinking of God as nothing but the ‘fun police’ – only there to squash mankind’s happiness. As a result, those who reject God end up living their lives in a contradiction because they deny the very thing that they are seeking. With this result the following question must be asked: if there is no God then why do we have within us this desire for the infinite? If the finite is all there is and at the same time we desire the infinite, then we are find ourselves in an unintelligible universe. To this Fr. Clarke responds in the following manner.

It can be shown…that there is a lived contradiction between affirming theoretically that the universe or myself is unintelligible and continuing to live and use my mind as though it were intelligible–which we cannot help but do. Thus it is finally up to each one of us either to accept his or her infinite-oriented nature as meaningful and revelatory of the real or as an opaque, illusory surd. But what good reason can one have for choosing darkness over light, illusion over meaning, for not choosing the light? Only if the darkness is more intelligible? But this does not make sense! Why not then accept my nature as a meaningful gift, pointing the way to what is, rather than what is not?

The One and the Many, W. Norris Clarke, S.J., p. 228

You cannot have it both ways: either there is a God, which gives sense to our desire for the infinite; or there is not a God, which makes the desire we find within us into non-sense.

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Chance and Absolute Chance

19 Wednesday Nov 2014

Posted by Fr. Moore in Definitions, Philosophy

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Chance, Divine Providence, Philosophical Terms

I have a sermon to write for Sunday, which prevented my posting yesterday and which leaves me no time to write anything original today. But in order to continue with our topic I am posting the definitions for ‘chance’ and ‘absolute chance’. I will have to leave any further explanation until after my sermon is written.

chance, n. and adj. 1. the unforeseen, the unintended. 2. the seeming absence of cause or design. 3. that which is said to happen without a deliberate purpose. 4. the accidental, the irregular, or the unusual in nature’s course. 5. that whose cause is indeterminable. Chance is not properly ascribed to the absence of efficient cause. Antonym – end, intention.

absolute chance, that which is not planned nor foreseen and permitted by any agent. Scholasticism denies this kind of chance occurence.

Dictionary of Scholastic Philosophy, Bernard Wuellner, S.J.

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Definition of ‘Final Cause’

17 Monday Nov 2014

Posted by Fr. Moore in Definitions, Philosophy

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Chance, Efficient Cause, Final Cause, Philosophical Terms

Today’s post is part 2 to yesterday’s post: Lewis on Chance. In that post I mentioned a second opinion by a Catholic philosopher but that will have to wait until tomorrow because there is a term that must be defined before we move on to his opinion. Although, I will be quoting him today because that is where we encounter the term in question.

We frequently use such expressions as, ‘A game of chance,’ ‘This happened by chance,’ etc., to refer to various types of situations in our experience. This seems at first glance to deny the above thesis on the need of final causality to explain all action, as we have just established.

The One and the Many, W. Norris Clarke, S.J.

The term we need to understand here is ‘final cause’. St. Thomas, in his Summa Theologiæ, said “the first of all causes is the final cause.” I know that sounds counter-intuitive and it took me a while to understand it. What helped with my understanding of this term centers on the proper understanding of how St. Thomas is using the word ‘final’. To us it sounds like he is saying that the last in a series of events (the final cause) is actually the first, which makes no sense whatsoever. But that is not how the word final is being used. Instead, final means the end or purpose for something happening. And the final cause is linked to the efficient cause, although they answer different questions. (And here we need another definition: an efficient cause is that which causes an effect.) Fr. Clarke puts it thusly,

The efficient cause answers the question: Which being is responsible for this effect’s coming to be? The final cause answers the question: Why did this efficient cause produce this effect rather than that? For in many cases the same efficient cause can produce several different possible effects. (p. 202)

I suppose you could say that the final cause gives direction to the efficient cause so that there is actually an effect that takes place. Because, if there is more than one possible effect there must be something there to choose from all the options so that this effect happens rather than that one. Therefore, without a final cause – a purpose – would there be anything that ever happened at all?

Tomorrow (maybe), we will see how this applies to Fr. Clarke’s understanding of chance, and then later compare that with what Lewis had to say on the matter.

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The Definition of Definition

11 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by Fr. Moore in Definitions, Philosophy

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Philosophical Terms

Sorry I disappeared for about two weeks. Last week was Fall Break for the Atonement Academy and even though my family and I did not go anywhere it was nice not to have to do anything in particular. The week before that was just busy.

I’ve decided to begin this re-start of blogging with a new category of posts – that being ‘Definitions’. The primary thing that has prompted this is the fact that, due to my increased reading of philosophy, I have had to look up very many terms in order to understand what I am reading. Some of them are terms that I never knew before and some are terms I only thought I knew before I discovered their true meanings.

It may be asked – why bother with such an endeavor? Because if we do not have a common understanding of the meaning behind the words we use then we cannot communicate with one another. If I say something is red in color then the listener, if he speaks English, understands what I am talking about. But when I am reading St. Thomas Aquinas there are many times I do not understand what he is saying because I do not understand what he means by this or that word (or any of them at all sometimes). By writing about these words and what they mean I hope to gain a better understanding for myself and perhaps someone else will as well.

To begin this category off it seems that the most logical place to start is with the definition of the word definition itself. I am taking my meaning from a book I recently purchased: The Dictionary of Scholastic Philosophy by Bernard Wuellner, S.J. The section for the word ‘definition’ contains seven different senses in which it can be defined. Therefore, so this post does not get too convoluted, I have chosen just one of those senses to list here.

definition, n. 1. logical and philosophical senses. a proposition either stating the meaning of a term or explaining what an essence is.

But of course this definition leads to the necessity of another definition for the word ‘essence’. In the same book it describes essence as “what a thing is” (and I will stop there because this word deserves its own post). Therefore, when we are defining some particular thing, we are trying to describe what that thing is. I suppose many people would respond to this by saying “Yeah, duh!” Even though this definition of definition may seem obvious but it is not insignificant. The fact that we can define things so that others can understand what we are talking about shows us what kind of universe we live in: that being a universe where we can know what something truly is and are able to communicate that to others. The reason this is so important is because there are other philosophies that would say that we cannot really know anything at all. But if that were true then those who hold such philosophies would not be able to communicate what they mean to anyone else because no one would be able to understand what it was that they were trying to define. In fact, if we could not know things and define them then no one would be able to understand anything at all.

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Body, Soul, and Spirit

10 Sunday Aug 2014

Posted by Fr. Moore in Philosophy, Stratford Caldecott

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Image of God

Most people understand that mankind consists of both a body and a soul. And very often the words spirit and soul are used interchangeably in this understanding of the makeup of mankind. But today I want to make you aware of a distinction between the meaning of the words soul and spirit, which can help us to understand better how we are made in the image of God.

There is within the Tradition of the Church an understanding that man is not just body, and soul; but body, soul, and spirit. This understanding stretches back at least to St. Paul as we see in the verse below.

May the God of peace himself sanctify you wholly; and may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. (1 Thessalonians 5:23, RSV-CE)

In the various writings of the saints there are some that have separated this into three separate 'parts'–body, soul, and spirit–(although to speak in such a way is misleading because man is a unified whole and not a compilation of parts) and some who separated man into body, and soul/spirit with the spirit being a deeper or more important part of the soul. Between these two options the Church seems to favor the latter. In §366 of the Catechism it refers to the soul as the “spiritual soul.” And in §367, when referring to St. Paul's passage above, it states that the “Church teaches that this distinction does not introduce a duality into the soul.”

This third aspect of our makeup–that of the spirit–is important because it helps us to understand ourselves as made in God's image. First of all, when we include spirit with the usual body and soul understanding, then we can see man made with a tripartite nature, which is analogous to God as a Trinity of persons. And from this, according to St. Teresa of the Cross, we can see “the human soul, body, and spirit corresponding to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit respectively. (The Radiance of Being, p.209) But more importantly for us, because we are all fallen and sinful, the inclusion of spirit with body and soul can help us to understand our sinful condition. This is explained below:

…the three parts of the human being explain the threefold concupiscence. They correspond to the three archetypal sins, since Eve took the fruit in Eden because it was (1) good for food, (2) a delight to the eye, and (3) desirable for wisdom–sins enveloping respectively body, soul, and spirit–that had to be overcome at their triple root by Christ in the wilderness and by divine grace operating in the Christian life through fasting, almsgiving, and prayer (and through chastity, poverty, and obedience in the religious state.)

The Radiance of Being, p.207, Stratford Caldecott

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Apples, Cats, and Demonic Thinking

16 Wednesday Jul 2014

Posted by Fr. Moore in Josef Pieper, Philosophy, Pro-Life, St. Thomas Aquinas

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Image of God, Philosophy

Caveat: in my writings about philosophy please understand that I do not consider myself an expert and could be mistaken about what I am writing. I am writing with the purpose of working these things out in my mind and using my blog as a means of recording my thoughts and tracking my progress in this very complicated subject. Of course, I always seek to adhere strictly to the teachings of the Catholic Church and so if any reader ever notices something that could be wrong then please let me know.

The intellect receives its measure from objects; that is, human knowledge is true not of itself, but it is true because and insofar as it conforms to reality.

St. Thomas Aquinas, ST I, II, 93, 1 ad 3

What on earth does this mean and why is it important you ask? This may sound convoluted but actually it is what I would call common sense. My understanding does not come from my own reading of St. Thomas but from those who are much more intelligent than I. In this case the quote, and my understanding of it, comes from Josef Pieper’s book Living the Truth, from Ignatius Press (1989) on page 124.

What St. Thomas is trying to tell us is that we know as being true only when our knowledge conforms to the reality that exists outside of our own minds. Here is an example of what I mean: if I see a red apple on my desk then I can truly know that it is a red apple through my senses. The apple really exists and I know this because I can touch it. And even it I did not touch it I could know that it is there through my sight. Also, my sight tells me it is red in color. Some might argue that the words red and apple are arbitrary and could be called by other names. This is true. For instance, it could be that in our language red is actually called blue and apples are actually called oranges but that doesn’t change the fact that in our language as it is red means something definite and apple means something definite. What I mean is that the things we call red apples are an objective reality that we have assigned the name red apple.

But this does not mean that it is our naming of the thing that makes it what it is. Instead, we all know what a red apple is because we have been taught what it is and we have experienced it through our senses or our intellect. If someone is speaks the English language and picks up a red apple and calls it anything other than a red apple then his knowledge of that object is wrong. But this is only true of those who have learned the Truth of the thing in question. If they have never seen a red apple (which is hard to imagine) then they would not know what to call it. But suppose someone had been taught the wrong word for it. Perhaps they were referring to an apple as a cat. Clearly this would be wrong but the person does not know any better. The solution would be to politiely correct the person and tell them that it is not a cat but an apple. You may even have to go so far as to prove it by showing them pictures of a cat and pictures of apples and then getting other people to corroborate what you are saying. In the end you would suppose that common sense would prevail – right?

But that is not the way our society acts any longer. Although most people would still be willig to accept what a cat is and what an apple is there are other parts of objective reality that they completely discard. For them human knowledge is true of itself, by which St. Thomas means (I think) that the truth is whatever we want it to be. A prime example of what I mean can readily be seen in people’s treatment of the unborn. What is the unborn baby, objectively speaking? It is nothing less than the offspring of two other human beings and, therefore, could be nothing other than a human being. Right? That seems to make sense to me. But in the minds of those who are pro-death it must be something else. How else could they acquiesce in terminating its life? There are only two possible answers to this last question. First, they might think that the unborn baby is something other than a human being: you know – the whole ‘it’s just a clump of cells’ mentality. But from what I’ve read most people, even those who are pro-death, do not believe that any more. (And even if they do believe the ‘clump of cells’ lie it doesn’t seem rational because if it is not a human at conception then at what point does it become one?)

So that leaves just the second possibility – the people in our country, at least those who are pro-death, are no longer rational. In other words, they have no common sense. If they don’t believe the ‘clump of cells’ lie but instead understand that it is a baby and they either approve or actually are involved with abortion then not only are they irrational in their thinking they are also antithetical to their own human nature. And there is another word we can use for that – it is called demonic.

The fact is that to be human means, in part, to be rational. As St. Thomas said, “human knowledge is true not of itself, but it is true because and insofar as it conforms to reality.” There is an objective reality outside ourselves which we did not create and which we do not get to redefine – it is what it is. And we can most certainly come to know that objective reality. Therefore, we cannot redefine the unborn as a non-person in order to dispose of it, and still think of ourselves as fully human. Instead, to be truly rational human beings we must accept the objective reality that that which proceeds from two humans must itself be human.

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Fr. Moore

Fr. Moore

Parochial Vicar Our Lady of the Atonement San Antonio, Texas FrMoore@truthwithboldness.com

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