The Dignity of Being a Substance: Person, Subsistence, and Nature

2015

Submitted as a term paper for the course Personalism, Holy Apostles College and Seminary, Fall 2016. This paper seeks to establish, following Bonaventure, that our understanding of what personhood is must start with where it did in history, that is, with the Trinity. From there, it looks at Bonaventure's anthropology of the powers of the soul, both at the level of Image and raised to the level of Similitude. Finally, it seeks to respond to Norris Clarke's claim in "Person and Being" that receptivity is a transcendental of being by offering Bonaventure and the Franciscan Tradition on personhood as supplying what he is searching to say, but without the problems of confounding the orders of Person and Nature in the Trinity.

National Taiwan University Philosophical Review, 2022

This article develops an argument in defense of the claim that Aquinas holds that there are some kinds of activities which can be performed only by persons. In particular, it is argued that Aquinas holds that only persons can engage in the activities proper to a rational nature, e.g., the activities of intellect and will. Next, the article turns to discuss two implications of this thesis concerning Aquinas’s concept of a person. First, the thesis can be used to resolve a prominent scholarly debate concerning Aquinas’s views on the possibility of human persons surviving their bodily deaths. Second, it also points to a problem with a leading interpretation of Aquinas’ account of the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. Finally, the article concludes by discussing how a correct interpretation of Aquinas’s views on these matters is related to a broader scholarly debate concerning the history of the Western concept of a person.

www.emilange.de, 2018

In his essay >On Human Nature< Roger Scruton (S.) defends as a philosopher the double thesis that the concept of a person is central to our understanding in general and that personhood is the nature of humans. At the same time he evidently sympathizes with Roman Catholic faith and, at least in a hesitating way, admits of the personality of angels and of God (46). Such a position is bound to incorparate conceptual tensions and my critical discussion will concentrate on the conceptual and leave out the more specific moral and cultural-critical elaborations of S.'s account. I. This is one way in which the double thesis is rendered: When we refer to rights, deserts, and duties; what we owe to each other; and such fundamental ideas as freedom, justice, and the impartial spectator, we are making use (directly or indirectly) of the concept of the person, which provides the shared perspective from which we address virtual all such issues. Human communities are communities of persons … ...getting clear about the concept of the person is, for us, an intellectual priority. Those who build a universal political doctrine on the foundation of human rights are in need of a theory that tells them which rights belong to our nature-our nature as persons-and which are the product of convention. That theory will be a theory of persons. … (108) Its first part is the stressing of the centrality of the concept of a person. Its second part-talk of "our nature as persons"-in S. seems to be an implication of morality because of the reference to human rights. But in fact S. from the start invests the concept of a person as bearer of rights, deserts, and duties and does not seem to see any requirement to distinguish between levels in the concept of a person. He therefore-like most anglophone philosophers having written about it-does not reach bedrock in the clarification of the concept, which is where, when having reached it, conceptual clarification must start. The concept of a person is one of the (two) basic anchors in our understanding. 1 At the foundational level it is a formal one corresponding to the concept of an object. 'Object' is a nominalization of the indefinite pronoun 'something'; correspondingly 'person' is a nominalization of 'somebody, someone'. The conceptual system we operate in our ordinary language is built on the contrast of these formal concepts.

Religious Studies Review, 2018

The Oxford Handbook of the Reception of Aquinas, ed. Levering and Plested, 2021

This chapter proposes that Aquinas's philosophy of the human person is fundamentally motivated by his vision of the distinctive unity of the human way of life, illustrated by (a) his account of the human soul as the " horizon " of the bodily and spiritual worlds, and (b) his definition of the human being as 'rational animal'. Commitment to this vision is essential for any attempt to revive Aquinas's anthropology today. In this chapter, I also problematize the standard way of labeling Aquinas's anthropology as "Aristotelian," and make a case for rejecting such labels, not only in evaluating his own work, but also in evaluating receptions of Aquinas's own thought.

Kritike: An Online Journal of Philosophy, 2009

Dois Pontos, 2021

Thomas Aquinas defines the human soul with the same words of Aristotle: it is the substantial form of a human body potentially alive. However, one of the problems of the Thomistic psychology, according to D. Abel, consists in classifying the human soul by means of terms that are commonly used to name hylomorphic compounds, namely, substance and hoc aliquid. If the human soul is part of a hylomorphic compound, how could it be named as substance and hoc aliquid? The aim of this paper is to show the strategy that underlies this classification used by Aquinas. We suggest that it dates back to Aristotle when he attributes different meanings to the words substance and hoc aliquid. Aquinas' novelty consists in expanding this semantic field by introducing a meaning that refers exclusively to the human soul, that is, the peculiar sense.

This paper analyzes the emergence of the concept of "person" in early Christian trinitarian theology and christology. In spite of the substantialist turn of some medieval thought, the paper highlights resources in modern thought to help understand the human person in more relational terms.

Aim and Method: It appears as if a deified humanity with infinite appetite for consumption and experience, endless expectations of what the union of science and technology can accomplish, and neither recognizing nor setting limits on its freedom, is close to the terminus of an historical progress which is also the destruction of the conditions of human life on earth. The natural and engineering sciences which have enabled this seem capable now only of measuring our steps toward this extinction, or proposing solutions of extreme and incalculable danger. The philosophical, theological, social, and humanistic disciplines which were or are implicated in creating both this self-confident divine Anthropos and its cynical nihilist despair have been made, or have made themselves, powerless to move it. However, as the Encyclical “Laudatio si” indicates, this global world order was largely a creation of the Christian West and spread or imposed from and by it. It behooves us then to investigate how it came about and what its essential elements are. The history this class covers will not bring all the essentials into view but some cruxes will appear. Exposing these is its aim. My method in this seminar will differ from what I usually do: I shall not work with members on discerning the logic and argument of a single text. In fact, we shall read no text completely. Instead we shall look at portions of several texts from Plato, Aristotle, Philo of Alexandria, Plotinus, Augustine, Boethius, Eriugena, and Aquinas as embedded in my interpretations of them (and the interpretations of a few others) in order to discern the character of an historical development. The following contain most of my argument and most of the texts we shall examine: 1. “Placing the human: Reason as Participation in Divine Intellect for Boethius and Aquinas,” Res philosophica 93, no. 4 (October 2018): 583–615. 2. “’Complectitur Omnem’: Divine and Human Happiness in Aristotle and in Aquinas’ Summa theologiae,” Kronos VII (2018): 187–205. The following brings these two together and shows the importance of Aquinas’ use of the idea of participation to establish the human in relation to the divine. 3. Dwight Crowell, “Thomas Aquinas’ Attribution of Participation to Aristotle,” Dionysius 37 (2019): 134–64. This volume of Dionysius is posted on the Brightspace. *** 4. “Augustine’s Trinitarian Cosmos,” Dionysius 35 (2017): 61–98, exposes the interconnection of the human and divine. Usefully read with “Between and Beyond Augustine and Descartes: More than a Source of the Self,” Augustinian Studies 32:1 (2001): 65–88, especially, pp. 7-12 of the posted text and with “Re-evaluating E.R. Dodds’ Platonism,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 103 (2007): 499–541, especially 521-23 on the shift to the human in Late Antiquity. 5. “Ratio, Preces, Intuitus: Prayer’s Mediation in Boethius’ Consolation,” Praying and Contemplating: Religious and Philosophical Interactions in Late Antiquity, Studies and Texts in Antiquity and Christianity (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018), 71–96, examines how the characteristic form of human knowing and willing is restored after its absorption into the Divine. 6. “John Scottus Eriugena,” Cambridge History of Late Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy, 2010. Eriugena’s is the most profound humanism ever developed philosophically and theologically, see especially, pp. 10-13 of the posted text. Usefully read with “Augustine, Denys, Eriugena and the Western turn to the World,” Hermathena 165 (Winter, 1998): 9–70, especially 39-45 of the posted text, and “Jean Trouillard: Authentic Neoplatonism in a French Seminary.” 7. God in Himself, Aquinas’ Doctrine of God as Expounded in the Summa Theologiae, Oxford Theological Monographs / Oxford Scholarly Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987 / 2000), Introduction, is a brief assertion and contextualization of Aquinas’ humanism. 8. “God’s Indwelling: Aquinas’ Platonist Systematization of Aristotelian Participation,” for Participation in the Divine, edited Douglas Hedley and Evan King, Notre Dame University Press, in press. Aquinas unites the human to the divine through the notion of participation. Understanding how participation functions in Aquinas is crucial. Usefully read when you are reading Dwight Crowell, “Thomas Aquinas’ Attribution of Participation to Aristotle.” 9. “The Conversion of God in Aquinas’ Summa theologiae: Being’s Trinitarian and Incarnational Self Disclosure,” Dionysius 35 (2017): 132–170, demonstrates how the human moves the Summa theologiae and explicates the Divine. Everything necessary for the class will be posted on its Brightspace site, but participants will find it useful to have a copy of the collected dialogues of Plato, Aristotle’s De Anima, Metaphysics, and Nicomachean Ethics, the Enneads of Plotinus, the Confessions of Augustine, the Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius, portions of the Periphyseon of Eriugena, and the Summa theologiae of Aquinas.

2008