Class and Book notes on Aquinas

(Originally written December 5, 2006 in Book 7)

Classics of Philosophy 2nd Edition
Louis P. Pojman

Summa Theologica - Thomas Aquinas

Question LXXXV: The Mode and Order of Understanding

8 Points of inquiry

1. Whether our intellect understands by abstracting species from phantasms?
2. Whether the intelligible species abstracted are what our intellect understands, or that whereby it understands?
3. Whether our intellect naturally first understands the more universal?
4. Whether our intellect can know many things at the same time?
5. Whether our intellect understands by composition and division?
6. Whether the intellect can err?
7. Whether one intellect can understand the same thing better than another?
8. Whether our intellect understands the indivisible before the divisible?

History of Philosophy I Notes

[Thomas Aquinas]

Problem of Divine Predication

1. Univocal use of language - same sense
-Riggs is a dog
-Shelby is a dog

2. Equivocal use of language - different sense
-The sun is a star
-Mel Gibson is a star

God is good. Matt is good. Is the term "good" used univocally or equivocally?

3. Analogical use of language
-The same sense in some degree but also in a different sense or degree

Immortality of the Soul

Soul is the form of the body (Aristotelian view)

Argument from desire:
All natural desires are capable of being fulfilled
We all naturally desire immortality
Therefore, immortality is capable of being fulfilled.

The soul is not dependent upon the body.

Aquinas' Psychology

The Soul has three main aspects:
1. Nutritive - nutrition, growth, reproduction
2. Sensitive - enables awareness via the senses
3. Rational - Reason and will (cognition and volition)

Aquinas' ethics

1. Happiness

- To know and contemplate God
- Complete union with God. Immediate, non discursive knowledge of God

Happiness is only possible in Heaven, but we should seek it in this life

2. Virtue
- an excellence, an act in accordance with reason, acquired by experience

Kinds of virtue
1. Moral
2. Intellectual
3. Ascetic - virtues of self-denial
4. Theological - Faith, Hope and Love

Aristotle only ascribed to Moral and Intellectual virtues

3. Law
- the ordinance of Reason for the common good, promulgated by one who has care of a community

Types of law
1. Eternal Law (governs the whole) - the sum of God's decrees
2. Natural law - that aspect of eternal law which we can know via reason
3. Divine Law - special commands given to us in Scripture
4. Human Law - man-made laws not in natural or divine law

Human laws are not necessarily moral laws. They are created merely to order society.

The first principle of Natural law is to seek the good.