A History of Western Philosophy

In some singulars there is evil, but God cannot know evil. Aquinas replies that God knows singulars as their cause; that He know ...

sesses the contemplative and active virtues. He is happy, and is His own happiness. We come now (in Book II) to the consideratio ...

suffice; nor the knowledge of Him obtained by demonstration; nor even the knowledge obtained by faith. In this life, we cannot s ...

purely rational considerations, not to divine commands and prohibitions. Here, as throughout the first three books, Aquinas is g ...

suppose that He was the son of the Holy Ghost according to the flesh. The sacraments are valid even when dispensed by wicked min ...

doctrine, he states it first, often with great force, and almost always with an attempt at fairness. The sharpness and clarity w ...

There is little of the true philosophic spirit in Aquinas. He does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever t ...

losophy for the benefit of the Pope. He therefore produced in a very short time three books, Opus Majus, Opus Minus, and Opus Te ...

judgement of all wise men." Like almost all his contemporaries, he uses the designation "The Philosopher" when he speaks of Aris ...

Christian philosophers, but he had little influence in his own time, and was not, to my mind, so scientific as is sometimes thou ...

finds is Romans I, 20: "The invisible things of God, understood by means of those things that have been made, are clearly compre ...

properties, which, like many that the scholastics took over from Aristotle, turns out to be unreal as soon as we attempt to stat ...

important man, Marsiglio of Padua. All three were excommunicated in 1328, but escaped from Avignon, and took refuge with the Emp ...

Cassius, who are all three equally traitors, the first against Christ, the other two against Caesar. Dante's thought is interest ...

point of difference between Independents and Presbyterians in the English Civil War. Occam's political works * are written in th ...

the breakdown of scholasticism, as a precursor of Descartes or Kant or whoever might be the particular commentator's favourite a ...

For Occam, logic is an instrument for the philosophy of nature, which can be independent of metaphysics. Logic is the analysis o ...

knowledge, which is only concerned with the universale post rem. In explaining human knowledge, Occam never allows universals to ...

petites desire something which with our understanding we reject; therefore appetite and understanding belong to different subjec ...

CHAPTER XV The Eclipse of the Papacy THE thirteenth century had brought to completion a great synthesis, philosophical, theologi ...