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Author: Frederick D. Wilhelmsen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351477706
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 172
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Book Description
For metaphysicians who have imbibed the sober and inebriating teachings of Thomas Aquinas, existence is an act, the act which makes all things actually to be. As the act of existence makes things to be, essence makes them to be what they are. Essence and the act of existence, in other words, are really distinct yet together they compose each of the things that are.Such an understanding involves a number of paradoxes, and Frederick D. Wilhelmsen's articulation of them reveals his philosophical genius. These paradoxes include the fact that the act of existence does not exist, that it can be thought but not conceived by the mind, and that truths about God can be known while He himself remains absolutely unknown. Wilhelmsen argues the notion that the Christian faith and philosophical reason harmonize while remaining completely distinct from each other.Writing in a captivating style, Wilhelmsen begins with a discussion of the development, strengths, and limitations of the ancient Greek philosophical accounts of being. Following that, he develops such key topics as the problem of existence, St. Thomas Aquinas' understanding of being, critical analyses of Hegel's and Heidegger's doctrines of being, existence as "towards God," and a metaphysical approach to the human person. The final two chapters develop the sense in which metaphysical thinking is and is not shaped by historical and social factors.
Author: Frederick D. Wilhelmsen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351477706
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 172
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Book Description
For metaphysicians who have imbibed the sober and inebriating teachings of Thomas Aquinas, existence is an act, the act which makes all things actually to be. As the act of existence makes things to be, essence makes them to be what they are. Essence and the act of existence, in other words, are really distinct yet together they compose each of the things that are.Such an understanding involves a number of paradoxes, and Frederick D. Wilhelmsen's articulation of them reveals his philosophical genius. These paradoxes include the fact that the act of existence does not exist, that it can be thought but not conceived by the mind, and that truths about God can be known while He himself remains absolutely unknown. Wilhelmsen argues the notion that the Christian faith and philosophical reason harmonize while remaining completely distinct from each other.Writing in a captivating style, Wilhelmsen begins with a discussion of the development, strengths, and limitations of the ancient Greek philosophical accounts of being. Following that, he develops such key topics as the problem of existence, St. Thomas Aquinas' understanding of being, critical analyses of Hegel's and Heidegger's doctrines of being, existence as "towards God," and a metaphysical approach to the human person. The final two chapters develop the sense in which metaphysical thinking is and is not shaped by historical and social factors.
Author: Garvin Rampersad
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429798369
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 255
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Book Description
First published in 1998, this volume aims to counter the paradoxes of causality and induction as presented by empirical scepticism, though the work is not a dry critique of others' efforts in this area. In order to address these issues, the author presents his instinctive belief in the interconnectedness of the world's elements from a conceptual point of view. The work is not epistemological, but metaphysical and logical, and the assumptions are made in these areas. The principal concept is "membership", which appears in logic, language and metaphysics. Truth, existence and reference are shown to be forms of membership and, as such, invalid concepts. The famous paradoxes stretch from that of the liar to Russell's result from this misconception, which is responsible for the paradoxes of causality and induction.
Author: Frederick D. Wilhelmsen
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 1412862116
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 147
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Book Description
The Metaphysics of Love develops the existential metaphysics of St. Thomas Aquinas, applying it to explore the ontological structure of the human person. Published first in 1962, this book demonstrates the fertility of Thomistic metaphysics and the enduring influence of Thomism on Western philosophy. It uncovers the ecstatic structure of human existence, in dialogue with philosophers ranging from Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas, to Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Tillich, Zubiri, and Ortega y Gassett, as well as theologians and historians Romano Guardini, Hilaire Belloc, and Eric Voegelin. Philosophical and theological examinations of love have in various ways raised the following question: how can love of self (eros) be harmonized with love of others (agape)? These types of love represent two drives, Wilhelmsen argues, that in the end must be seen as aspects of existence itself. Moral and psychological problems of love turn out to be manifestations of metaphysical issues. While different cultures have emphasized one of these drives or the other, a healthy culture will not completely forget either. Cultures differ in the way they emphasize one or the other, or flee from one or the other. These dimensions of human existence provide the framework for a person’s love of self, neighbor, and God. This volume is part of Transaction’s Library of Conservative Thought series.
Author: Avi Sagi
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004493964
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 220
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Book Description
This book is an original philosophic exploration of the meaning of Kierkegaard’s life, his thought, and his works. It makes a bold case for Kierkegaard’s recognition of the concrete existence of the individual, including Kierkegaard himself, as crucial to the spiritual life. Written with delicate insight, and beautifully translated from Hebrew, this work offers valuable new turns to understanding the puzzling life-work of a modern giant of spiritual reflection.
Author: Francesca Aran Murphy
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN: 0199219281
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 365
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Book Description
This is a challenging critique of narrative theologies. Murphy argues that the widespread notion that the role of the theologian it so 'tell God's story' has not helped theology to advance the reality of its doctrines. She offers her own alternative approach, making use of cinema and film theory.
Author: Étienne Gilson
Publisher: PIMS
ISBN: 9780888444158
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252
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Book Description
The study of being was one of the main preoccupations of Etienne Gilson's scholarly and intellectual life. Being and Some Philosophers is at once a testament to the persistence of those concerns and an important landmark in the history of the question of being. The book charts the ways in which being is translated across history, from unity in Plato and substance in Aristotle to essence in Avicenna and the act of existence in Aquinas. It examines the vicissitudes of essence and existence in Suarez and Christian Wolff, in Hegel and Kierkegaard, in order to uncover the metaphysical and existential foundations of modern thought. And yet Being and Some Philosophers remains not so much an historical investigation (although it could only have been written by a scholar steeped in the history of philosophy) but, in the words of its author, "a philosophical book, and a dogmatically philosophical one at that." Its passionate vigour has proven, over many years, at once fresh and provocative. Indeed, the appendix to this revised edition contains critiques of the book by two Thomists as well as Gilson's replies to their objections.
Author: Frederick D. Wilhelmsen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135131422X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 170
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Book Description
Frederick D. Wilhelmsen's Being and Knowing, rooted in the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, rests on two basic assertions: first, metaphysics is the science of being in its first and ultimate act, existence (the act by which all things manifest themselves); second, that existence is known not through observing objects, but in affirming through judgments that these objects are subjects of existence. The chapters of this book explore these Thomistic doctrines. Some explain St. Thomas Aquinas's philosophy of being. Others probe his epistemology. The complexity and density of Aquinas's theory of judgment (that truth is realized in the judgment of man), emphasized throughout most of the book, point not only to a deeper understanding of the nature of metaphysics, but they open doors to the clarification of philosophical issues germane to contemporary thought. This work addresses a number of metaphysical philosophical paradoxes. Wilhelmsen's exploration of them demonstrates why he was the preeminent American scholar of the Thomistic tradition. This volume is part of Transaction's series, the Library of Conservative Thought.
Author: Mark K. Spencer
Publisher: CUA Press
ISBN: 0813235200
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 473
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Book Description
"This book presents a philosophical portrait of human persons that depicts each way in which we are irreducible, with the goal of guiding the reader to perceive, wonder at, and love all the unique features of human persons. It builds this portrait by showing how claims from many strands of the Catholic tradition can be synthesized. These strands include Thomism, Scotism, phenomenology, personalism, nouvelle théologie, analytic philosophy, and Greek and Russian thought. The book focuses on how these traditions' claims are grounded in experience and on how they help us to perceive irreducible features of persons. This book also explores irreducible features of our subjectivity, senses, intellect, freedom, and affections, and of our souls, bodies, and activities"--
Author: Frederick D. Wilhelmsen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351528513
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 268
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Book Description
Each chapter in Christianity and Political Philosophy addresses a philosophical problem generated by history. Frederick D. Wilhelmsen discusses the limits of natural law; Cicero and the politics of the public orthodoxy; the problem of political power and the forces of darkness; Sir John Fortescue and the English tradition; Donoso Cortes and the meaning of political power; the natural law tradition and the American political experience; Eric Voegelin and the Christian tradition; and Jaffa, the School of Strauss, and the Christian tradition. Wilhelmsen is convinced that mainstream philosophy's suppression of the Christian experience, or its reduction of Christianity to myths, deprives both Christianity and philosophy. He argues that Christianity opened up an entirely new range of philosophical questions and speculation that today are part and parcel of the intellectual tradition of the West. Wilhelmsen remains relevant because political philosophy in America today is following the historic cycle of political philosophy's importance: as things get worse for the nation because it is internally riven by ideological and spiritual conflicts, there is a greater need for the political philosopher to raise and explore profound questions and reassert forgotten truths about man and society, the soul and God, and good and evil, as well as the ground of political order. This is the latest book in Transaction's esteemed Library of Conservative Thought series.
Author: Caitlin Smith Gilson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501330667
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 327
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Book Description
The discourse between nature and grace finds its linguistic and existential podium in the political condition of human beings. As Caitlin Smith Gilson shows, it is in this arena that the perennial territorial struggle of faith and reason, God and man, man and state, take place; and it is here that the understanding of the personal-as-political, as well as the political-as-personal, finds its meaning. And it is here, too, that the divine finds or is refused a home. Any discussion of ?post-secular society? has its origins in this political dialogue between nature and grace, the resolution of which might determine not only a future post-secular society but one in which awe is re-united to affection, solidarity and fraternity. Smith Gilson questions whether the idea of pure nature antecedently disregards the fact that grace enters existence and that this accomplishes a conversion in the metaphysical/existential region of man's action and being. This conversion alters how man acts as an affective, moral, intellectual, social, political and spiritual being. State of nature theories, transformed yet retained in the broader metaphysical and existential implications of the Hegelian Weltgeist, are shown to be indebted to the ideological restrictedness of pure nature (natura pura) as providing the foremost adversary to any meaningful type of divine presence within the polis, as well as inhibiting the phenomenological facticity of man as an open nature.
