Fabrizio Amerini is not an author most Americans are likely to have heard of, but if you’re a fan of Umberto Eco, you might want to check out his new book. ‘New’ is not entirely accurate, perhaps, as it was first published in Italian in 2009. But Georgetown University professor Mark Henninger’s translation hit the… Continue reading Book Notes: Fabrizio Amerini on Aquinas and the Beginning and End of Human Life
Those rules of argument became increasingly complex. Many, after several centuries, now seem almost banal: it is perhaps a testimony to the effectiveness and importance of the foundations laid down in the twelfth century that stages in argumentative processes which then had to be carefully thought through and elucidated are now taken for granted, with… Continue reading The Middle Ages … and Your Latest Laptop
A similar uneasiness with this kind of distinction has appeared more recently within Roman Catholic theology, due no doubt in part to a sense that the notion of a self-subsistent soul is non-scriptural and/or that the notion of God’s immediately creating each human soul does not fit easily into the continuum of living beings that… Continue reading The Problem of the Soul
Here again, scientific work on the story of life has shown that it is a narrative permeated with stochastic processes governed primarily by serendipity. To put it another way, evolution is a sequence of chance events, a series of accidental intersections of two causal chains. For instance, a recent scientific paper published in the prestigious… Continue reading Aquinas, Evolution and Double Agency
Stephen Barr, writing in Faith: In short, Aristotelian/Thomistic philosophy has paid a heavy price for the two and a half centuries in which it largely ignored what was going on in the natural sciences. A sustained re-engagement with science would enrich its conceptual and linguistic resources. This re-engagement cannot simply be an attempt to translate… Continue reading Can Aristotle be Rescued?
