God
Reason and Reality
1st Edition
Published on 22. February 2014
Book
377 pages
978-3-88405-109-2 (ISBN)
Description
Philosophia Basic Philosophical Concepts
Anselm Ramelow (Editor) GOD Reason and Reality
ISBN 978-3-88405-109-2 © 2014 Philosophia Verlag GmbH. München
____________________________________________________________
Abstracts to the new contributions in this collection
Robert Spaemann
What Do We Mean When We Say "God"?
Before we can answer the question, whether God exists, we need to understand what we mean by this question, i.e. what we mean by "God." Different religions use the term "God," yet whether this term has the same referent, depends on its sense. Not all changes of the sense seem to imply a change of reference. The most basic sense seems to aim at a unique and inextricable unity of omnipotence and goodness, both of which are taken as absolute and yet dependent on each other.
Thomas Joseph White, O.P.
Monotheistic Rationality and Divine Names: Why Aquinas' Analogy Theory Transcends both Theoretical Agnosticism and Conceptual Anthropomorphism
This essay examines the philosophical thinking of St. Thomas Aquinas' regard-ing analogical names for God. Aquinas' philosophical theory of analogy takes its shape from conversations with Aristotle, Proclus, Dionysius and Maimon-ides. The balance Aquinas strikes on analogical names for God seeks to avoid the twin extremes of a theory of divine names that is excessively apophatic, leaning toward agnosticism, and one that is excessively anthropomorphic, un-derstanding God through the prism of a univocalist conceptuality. The poise of this position is applicable in a contemporary context. After Kant and Heidegger it is common place to label all theistic projects as forms of onto-theology, in-evitably dominated by what some have termed "conceptual idolatry." Mean-while, influential trends in analytic philosophy often seek a clarity regarding the concept of God at the expense of a sufficient acknowledgement of the apo-phatic quality of all natural knowledge of God. Aquinas' arguments provide a way to think about affirmative knowledge of God that is not anthropomorphic and apophatic knowle Theoretical Agnosticism dge of God that is not agnostic. The project of analogical naming of God in the Thomist tradition remains one of enduring value and is formative for avoiding problematic ways of theistic and atheistic thinking.
Lawrence Dewan
Thomas Aquinas, and Knowledge of a God as the Goal of Philosophy
The present paper is meant to recall the Aristotelian doctrine of the natural human desire to know as finding its complete fulfillment in knowledge of the highest cause, otherwise called "a God". The most truly "philosophical" knowledge will grasp things in the light of the divine, the supreme cause. Phi-losophy as its most philosophical is best understood as "theology" or "divine science", as Aristotle indicated.
I show how this is seen by Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century A.D., but that many, both then as still today, have taken the doctrine of a creator God as nec-essarily involving a doctrine of finite duration of the universe (looking towards the past). Thus, for such people God as creator seems unknowable to someone who allows no temporal beginning of a created universe.
Thomas was able to understand a doctrine of creation of the eternal (in the past) Aristotelian world, and saw that doctrine as professed by Aristotle. He could thus also understand the truth about the highest philosophy being "theol-ogy" (in one quite appropriate meaning of the word).
The god I find Thomas presenting in an Aristotelian philosophical portrait is quite readily viewed as creator and providence, knowing all things other than himself through and through. This does not mean that there is no affirmation by Thomas of a realm of theology "beyond philosophy." We show at the very outset that one must distinguish between natural and supernatural "theologies."
Stamatios Gerogiorgakis
Evidence and Principles in Bayesian Theism
I present Bayesian theism, i.e. Richard Swinburne's arguments for the exis-tence of God and for parts of the Christian faith. I also present the most usual criticisms which Bayesian theism has received, according to which 1) the Bayesian theory of probability is not adequate for the confirmation of scientific hypotheses, but even if it were, 2) some probability grades of the hypotheses, which Bayesian theism seeks to confirm, can be calculated to be inconsistent, implausible or to form poor results, and, finally, 3) the principles which Bayes-ian theism employs are unjustified or inadequate. I also present some argu-ments, with which Swinburne tried to defend Bayesian theism against these accusations. But mainly I aim at showing that the usual criticisms are pointless, especially when one bears in mind that Bayesian theism is essentially based on applying the Carnapian conception of probability on the Bayesian General Division Theorem (GDT). However, this defence of Bayesian theism generates some other problems, which I also briefly sketch.
John F. X. Knasas
The "Suppositio" of Motion's Eternity and the Interpretation of Aquinas' Motion Proof
The article focuses on Aquinas' two God proofs from motion at Summa Contra Gentiles I, 13. Is the operative context for the proofs Aristotle's physics or of Aquinas' metaphysics? First, I argue that the second proof's "supposition" of motion's eternity indicates a metaphysical context. If the context were physics, the eternity of motion would be a necessary conclusion and not a supposition. Study shows that Aquinas has a metaphysics already in place to counter the claim that motion is the only way something can come into being. Second, I argue that the absence of motion's eternity in the first proof is a sure indication that the proof is metaphysical. As mentioned, on the level of Aristotle's phys-ics, the eternity of motion is a strict conclusion and so should be considered by any physical proof. In the course of pursuing these two points, the article con-siders the views of the famous natural philosophy Thomists, Vincent Smith and Benedict Ashley.
Paul Thom
Shades of Simplicity
Patricia Curd's notion of predicational monism, as relativised to a given class of predications, is applied to a number of medieval accounts of divine simpli
ity from Boethius to Scotus. Accounts that take simplicity to consist in the absence of composition are distinguished from those that take it to consist in the coincidence of being and what-it-is.
Michael Dodds
The God of Life, the Science of Life, and the Problem of Language
Scripture often attributes to God the quality of "life." But what does it mean to
say that God is living? The very notion of life remains mysterious to us, despite the advances and discoveries of contemporary biology. We can name certain characteristics of life, but we are far from any simple definition of it. How then are we to speak of divine life? Certainly life cannot belong to God in the same way it belongs to a snail or a sparrow. How then do we bend language to speak of divine life? Does the term remain a mere metaphor when applied to God or does it name an essential divine property? And if it names the very being of God, how does it fit with other divine attributes, especially divine immutabil-ity?
William Wainwright
Divine Impassibility
The traditional doctrine of divine impassibility includes two claims: 1) That God isn't causally affected by, or ontologically dependent on, any contingent state of affairs, and 2) God doesn't literally grieve, share our sufferings, and the like. The first claim entails the second but the second doesn't entail the first. Both claims are rejected by a significant number of contemporary theists. I shall argue that they are right to reject the first but that the rejection of the sec-ond may be too hasty.
Linda Zagzebski
Divine Foreknowledge and the Metaphysics of Time
In this paper I argue that when we examine the traditional dilemma of infallible divine foreknowledge and human free will, we uncover a deeper dilemma that has nothing to do with God, infallibility, or free will. Many historically impor-tant ways out of theological fatalism are irrelevant to this problem, which is a dilemma that arises directly within the metaphysics of time. I will then argue that the most reasonable response to the dilemma is to reject the idea that the necessity of the past is a purely temporal modality; in fact, it is not a form of necessity in the formal sense of necessity. Rather, I propose that it reduces to the metaphysical thesis that the past is causally closed. With this interpretation of the necessity of the past, the argument for theological fatalism must be re-vised in a way that has a peculiar and problematic feature.
Anselm Ramelow
The God of Miracles
A God who works miracles is very different from one who does not. It will be my concern to spell out what kind of God a "God of miracles" is, namely a personal God who is a free and omnipotent creator, yet who works in accord with his wisdom, which governs the universe. It will be part of the task to inves-tigate what is presupposed in the notion of miracles, and how we can know that they actually occurred.
Anselm Ramelow (Editor) GOD Reason and Reality
ISBN 978-3-88405-109-2 © 2014 Philosophia Verlag GmbH. München
____________________________________________________________
Abstracts to the new contributions in this collection
Robert Spaemann
What Do We Mean When We Say "God"?
Before we can answer the question, whether God exists, we need to understand what we mean by this question, i.e. what we mean by "God." Different religions use the term "God," yet whether this term has the same referent, depends on its sense. Not all changes of the sense seem to imply a change of reference. The most basic sense seems to aim at a unique and inextricable unity of omnipotence and goodness, both of which are taken as absolute and yet dependent on each other.
Thomas Joseph White, O.P.
Monotheistic Rationality and Divine Names: Why Aquinas' Analogy Theory Transcends both Theoretical Agnosticism and Conceptual Anthropomorphism
This essay examines the philosophical thinking of St. Thomas Aquinas' regard-ing analogical names for God. Aquinas' philosophical theory of analogy takes its shape from conversations with Aristotle, Proclus, Dionysius and Maimon-ides. The balance Aquinas strikes on analogical names for God seeks to avoid the twin extremes of a theory of divine names that is excessively apophatic, leaning toward agnosticism, and one that is excessively anthropomorphic, un-derstanding God through the prism of a univocalist conceptuality. The poise of this position is applicable in a contemporary context. After Kant and Heidegger it is common place to label all theistic projects as forms of onto-theology, in-evitably dominated by what some have termed "conceptual idolatry." Mean-while, influential trends in analytic philosophy often seek a clarity regarding the concept of God at the expense of a sufficient acknowledgement of the apo-phatic quality of all natural knowledge of God. Aquinas' arguments provide a way to think about affirmative knowledge of God that is not anthropomorphic and apophatic knowle Theoretical Agnosticism dge of God that is not agnostic. The project of analogical naming of God in the Thomist tradition remains one of enduring value and is formative for avoiding problematic ways of theistic and atheistic thinking.
Lawrence Dewan
Thomas Aquinas, and Knowledge of a God as the Goal of Philosophy
The present paper is meant to recall the Aristotelian doctrine of the natural human desire to know as finding its complete fulfillment in knowledge of the highest cause, otherwise called "a God". The most truly "philosophical" knowledge will grasp things in the light of the divine, the supreme cause. Phi-losophy as its most philosophical is best understood as "theology" or "divine science", as Aristotle indicated.
I show how this is seen by Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century A.D., but that many, both then as still today, have taken the doctrine of a creator God as nec-essarily involving a doctrine of finite duration of the universe (looking towards the past). Thus, for such people God as creator seems unknowable to someone who allows no temporal beginning of a created universe.
Thomas was able to understand a doctrine of creation of the eternal (in the past) Aristotelian world, and saw that doctrine as professed by Aristotle. He could thus also understand the truth about the highest philosophy being "theol-ogy" (in one quite appropriate meaning of the word).
The god I find Thomas presenting in an Aristotelian philosophical portrait is quite readily viewed as creator and providence, knowing all things other than himself through and through. This does not mean that there is no affirmation by Thomas of a realm of theology "beyond philosophy." We show at the very outset that one must distinguish between natural and supernatural "theologies."
Stamatios Gerogiorgakis
Evidence and Principles in Bayesian Theism
I present Bayesian theism, i.e. Richard Swinburne's arguments for the exis-tence of God and for parts of the Christian faith. I also present the most usual criticisms which Bayesian theism has received, according to which 1) the Bayesian theory of probability is not adequate for the confirmation of scientific hypotheses, but even if it were, 2) some probability grades of the hypotheses, which Bayesian theism seeks to confirm, can be calculated to be inconsistent, implausible or to form poor results, and, finally, 3) the principles which Bayes-ian theism employs are unjustified or inadequate. I also present some argu-ments, with which Swinburne tried to defend Bayesian theism against these accusations. But mainly I aim at showing that the usual criticisms are pointless, especially when one bears in mind that Bayesian theism is essentially based on applying the Carnapian conception of probability on the Bayesian General Division Theorem (GDT). However, this defence of Bayesian theism generates some other problems, which I also briefly sketch.
John F. X. Knasas
The "Suppositio" of Motion's Eternity and the Interpretation of Aquinas' Motion Proof
The article focuses on Aquinas' two God proofs from motion at Summa Contra Gentiles I, 13. Is the operative context for the proofs Aristotle's physics or of Aquinas' metaphysics? First, I argue that the second proof's "supposition" of motion's eternity indicates a metaphysical context. If the context were physics, the eternity of motion would be a necessary conclusion and not a supposition. Study shows that Aquinas has a metaphysics already in place to counter the claim that motion is the only way something can come into being. Second, I argue that the absence of motion's eternity in the first proof is a sure indication that the proof is metaphysical. As mentioned, on the level of Aristotle's phys-ics, the eternity of motion is a strict conclusion and so should be considered by any physical proof. In the course of pursuing these two points, the article con-siders the views of the famous natural philosophy Thomists, Vincent Smith and Benedict Ashley.
Paul Thom
Shades of Simplicity
Patricia Curd's notion of predicational monism, as relativised to a given class of predications, is applied to a number of medieval accounts of divine simpli
ity from Boethius to Scotus. Accounts that take simplicity to consist in the absence of composition are distinguished from those that take it to consist in the coincidence of being and what-it-is.
Michael Dodds
The God of Life, the Science of Life, and the Problem of Language
Scripture often attributes to God the quality of "life." But what does it mean to
say that God is living? The very notion of life remains mysterious to us, despite the advances and discoveries of contemporary biology. We can name certain characteristics of life, but we are far from any simple definition of it. How then are we to speak of divine life? Certainly life cannot belong to God in the same way it belongs to a snail or a sparrow. How then do we bend language to speak of divine life? Does the term remain a mere metaphor when applied to God or does it name an essential divine property? And if it names the very being of God, how does it fit with other divine attributes, especially divine immutabil-ity?
William Wainwright
Divine Impassibility
The traditional doctrine of divine impassibility includes two claims: 1) That God isn't causally affected by, or ontologically dependent on, any contingent state of affairs, and 2) God doesn't literally grieve, share our sufferings, and the like. The first claim entails the second but the second doesn't entail the first. Both claims are rejected by a significant number of contemporary theists. I shall argue that they are right to reject the first but that the rejection of the sec-ond may be too hasty.
Linda Zagzebski
Divine Foreknowledge and the Metaphysics of Time
In this paper I argue that when we examine the traditional dilemma of infallible divine foreknowledge and human free will, we uncover a deeper dilemma that has nothing to do with God, infallibility, or free will. Many historically impor-tant ways out of theological fatalism are irrelevant to this problem, which is a dilemma that arises directly within the metaphysics of time. I will then argue that the most reasonable response to the dilemma is to reject the idea that the necessity of the past is a purely temporal modality; in fact, it is not a form of necessity in the formal sense of necessity. Rather, I propose that it reduces to the metaphysical thesis that the past is causally closed. With this interpretation of the necessity of the past, the argument for theological fatalism must be re-vised in a way that has a peculiar and problematic feature.
Anselm Ramelow
The God of Miracles
A God who works miracles is very different from one who does not. It will be my concern to spell out what kind of God a "God of miracles" is, namely a personal God who is a free and omnipotent creator, yet who works in accord with his wisdom, which governs the universe. It will be part of the task to inves-tigate what is presupposed in the notion of miracles, and how we can know that they actually occurred.
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Philosophia Basic Philosophical Concepts
Anselm Ramelow (Editor) GOD Reason and Reality
ISBN 978-3-88405-109-2 © 2014 Philosophia Verlag GmbH. München
________________________________________________________________
Contributors Biographies
Robert Sokolowski
Robert Sokolowski is the Elizabeth Breckenridge Caldwell Professor of Philoso-phy at The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, where he began teaching in 1963 after earning his doctorate at the Catholic University of Lou-vain. He has taught as a visiting professor at the Graduate Faculty of the New School, the University of Texas at Austin, Villanova University, and Yale. Among his books are Moral Action: A Phenomenological Study (1985), Pictures, Quotations, and Distinctions: Fourteen Essays in Phenomenology (1992), Eu-charistic Presence (1994), Christian Faith and Human Understanding (2006), and Phenomenology of the Human Person (2008). His main interests are in phe-nomenology, which he interprets as the study of the human person as involved in truth. He has used this approach to consider such topics as words and pictures, artificial intelligence, measurement in science, and moral action, as well as theo-logical issues such as the Christian understanding of God, the Eucharist, and the relation between faith and reason.
Robert Spaemann
Robert Spaemann (* 1927, Berlin) did his doctorate under J. Ritter in 1952 (Mün-ster) and taught after his Habilitation (1962) at the Universities of Stuttgart, Hei-delberg and Munich until 1992. He received honorary doctorates from the Uni-versities of Fribourg, Washington, Santiago de Chile, Navarra, Salzburg and Lub-lin, as well as the Karl-Jaspers-Preis of the city and university of Heidelberg (2001). He has published numerous books and articles, particularly in the areas of bioethics, ecology and human rights. A major concern of his are questions of anthropology and personhood in the context of modern science and the relevance of a rearticulated Aristotelian notion of nature (human and other).
His books include: Der Ursprung der Soziologie aus dem Geist der Restauration. Studien über L. G. A. de Bonald (München: Kösel, 1959), Reflexion und Sponta-nität. Studien über Fénelon (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1963), Rousseau - Bürger ohne Vaterland. Von der Polis zur Natur (München: Piper, 1980), Die Frage Wozu? Geschichte und Wiederentdeckung des teleologischen Denkens (Munich: Piper 1981).
[Books in English: Basic Moral Concepts, trans. T.J. Armstrong (London: Routledge, 1990); Essays in Anthropology: Variations on a Theme, trans. Guido De Graaff and James Mumford. (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2010); Happiness and Benevolence, trans. J. Alberg (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2000); Persons: The Difference between "Someone" and "Something", trans. Oliver O'Donovan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).]
Thomas Joseph White
Thomas Joseph White (D.Phil) is a Dominican priest. He is Director of the Thomistic Institute at the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception (PFIC), Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C. He read theology at Oxford University and is the author of Wisdom in the Face of Modernity. A Study in Thomistic Natural Theology (Sapientia Press, 2009). He is the editor or co-editor of several works of theology, including The Analogy of Being. Invention of the Anti-Christ or the Wisdom of God? (Eerdmans, 2010). He has also authored essays on topics pertaining to Christology, sacraments and natural theology, pub-lished in journals such as Pro Ecclesia, Nova et Vetera and The Thomist.
Lawrence Dewan
Lawrence Dewan, O.P., Ph.D. (philosophy, Toronto) is professor of philosophy at the Dominican University College, Ottawa, Canada, and a member of the Pon-tifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas, Vatican City. A native (1932) of North Bay, Ontario, he studied philosophy at the University of Toronto, the University of Paris, and the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies (PIMS). His teaching career has included periods at the University of Ottawa, the University of Toronto and PIMS, and the Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. He is au-thor of Form and Being: Studies in Thomistic Metaphysics, Washington, D.C., 2006: CUA Press; St. Thomas and Form as Something Divine in Things, Mil-waukee, Wis., 2007: Marquette University Press; and of Wisdom, Law, and Vir-tue: Essays in Thomistic Ethics, New York, 2008: Fordham University Press. A group at Sergio Arboleda University, Bogota, Colombia is currently publishing Spanish translations of his work. [He is also at present Adjunct Professor of Phi-losophy, School of Graduate Studies and Research, University of Ottawa; and Professeur associé de la Faculté de théologie et de sciences religieuses, Université Laval.]
Stamatios Gerogiorgakis
Stamatios Gerogiorgakis (Ph.D. LMU Munich; venia legendi in Erfurt) teaches philosophy and history of religion at the University of Erfurt. Before this he taught philosophy at the University of Patras/Greece. Publications on argumenta-tion and logic in religion, history of philosophy and, finally, on non-standard logics.
John F. X. Knasas
John F. X. Knasas is Professor of Philosophy at the Center for Thomistic Studies of the University of St. Thomas, Houston, Texas. He has taught extensively in the Philippines and in Eastern Europe where he was a 2004 U.S. Fulbright pro-fessor to Vilnius, Lithuania. In 2006-2009 he was holder of the Bishop Nold Chair in Graduate Philosophy. Among his many publications are The Preface to Thomistic Metaphysics: A Contribution to the Neo-Thomist Debate on the Start of Metaphysics (1990); Being and Some Twentieth-Century Thomists (2003); and Thomism and Tolerance (2011). He has recently completed a monograph, Aqui-nas and the Cry of Rachel: Thomistic Reflections upon the Problem of Evil. His areas of interest include: Aquinas, metaphysics, cosmological reasoning, and neo-Thomistic revival, philosophy of culture, philosophical psychology, and ethic
Paul Thom
Paul Thom is an Honorary Professor of Philosophy in the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry at the the University of Sydney, and a Fellow of the Aus-tralian Academy of the Humanities. He has published widely on the history of logic, and on the performing arts. His books include The Syllogism (Philosophia 1981), For An Audience: a philosophy of the performing arts (Temple University Press 1993), The Logic of Essentialism: an interpretation of Aristotle's modal syllogistic (Kluwer 1996), Making Sense: a theory of interpretation (Rowman & Littlefield 2000), Medieval Modal Systems (Ashgate 2003), The Musician as In-terpreter (Pennsylvania State University Press 2007), Logic and Ontology in the Syllogistic of Robert Kilwardby (Brill 2007), and The Logic of the Trinity: Augustine to Ockham (Fordham University Press 2012). He is editing Robert Kilwardby's commentary on Aristotle's Prior Analytics. He is a musician with a special interest in opera. His long-term ambition is to write a book on opera.
Michael Dodds
Michael J. Dodds, O.P., is Professor of Philosophy and Systematic Theology at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California. After undergraduate studies at Seattle University, he entered the Order of Preachers in 1970 and was ordained in 1977. He then taught for three years at St. Mary's College, Moraga, California, before doing his doc-toral studies at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, from which he graduated summa cum laude in 1986. He has served as Academic Dean of the Dominican School, Convener of the Theology Area at the Graduate Theological Union, and Regent of Studies and Vicar Provincial of the Western Dominican Province. He is the author of The Unchanging God of Love: Thomas Aquinas and Contempo-rary Theology on Divine Immutability (2008), and Unlocking Divine Action: Contemporary Science and Thomas Aquinas (forthcoming), both from The Catholic University of America Press.
William Wainwright
William J. Wainwright is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is a past president of both the Society for the Philosophy of Religion and the Society of Christian Philosophers, and a past editor of Faith and Philosophy. He is the author of approximately one hundred articles and book chapters, and the author or editor of ten books, including most recently Philosophy of Religion, 2nd. ed. (Wadsworth), Reason and the Heart (Cornell University Press), Religion and Morality (Ashgate), and the Handbook of Philosophy of Religion (editor, Oxford University Press).
Linda Zagzebski
Linda Zagzebski is George Lynn Cross Research Professor of Philosophy and Kingfisher College Chair of the Philosophy of Religion and Ethics at the Univer-sity of Oklahoma. She is past President of the Society of Christian Philosophers and past President of the American Catholic Philosophical Association. Among her many endowed lectures, she has given the Romanell Lectures of Phi Beta Kappa, the McCarthy Lectures at the Gregorian University in Rome, the Wilde Lectures in Natural Religion at Oxford, and the Kaminski Lectures at the Catho-lic University of Lublin, Poland. Her books include The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge, (Oxford University Press, 1991), Virtues of the Mind (Cam-bridge University Press, 1996), Divine Motivation Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2004), Philosophy of Religion: An Historical Introduction (Blackwell, 2007), and On Epistemology (Wadsworth, 2008), as well as many edited books and articles in virtue epistemology, philosophy of religion, and virtue ethics.
Anselm Ramelow
Anselm Ramelow is a Catholic priest in the Order of Preachers. He is professor of philosophy at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley and currently the chair of the philosophy department. He obtained his doctorate under Robert Spaemann in Munich on Leibniz and the Spanish Jesuits (Gott, Freiheit, Weltenwahl, 1997) and did theological work on George Lindbeck and the question of a Thomist philosophy and theology of language (Beyond Modern-ism? - George Lindbeck and the Linguistic Turn in Theology, 2005). He contrib-uted articles to the Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie and essays on topics at the intersection of philosophy and theology. A translation and commentary on part of Aquinas' De veritate is forthcoming as well. He continues to work on questions of free will, philosophy of religion and philosophical aesthetics.
Anselm Ramelow (Editor) GOD Reason and Reality
ISBN 978-3-88405-109-2 © 2014 Philosophia Verlag GmbH. München
________________________________________________________________
Contributors Biographies
Robert Sokolowski
Robert Sokolowski is the Elizabeth Breckenridge Caldwell Professor of Philoso-phy at The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, where he began teaching in 1963 after earning his doctorate at the Catholic University of Lou-vain. He has taught as a visiting professor at the Graduate Faculty of the New School, the University of Texas at Austin, Villanova University, and Yale. Among his books are Moral Action: A Phenomenological Study (1985), Pictures, Quotations, and Distinctions: Fourteen Essays in Phenomenology (1992), Eu-charistic Presence (1994), Christian Faith and Human Understanding (2006), and Phenomenology of the Human Person (2008). His main interests are in phe-nomenology, which he interprets as the study of the human person as involved in truth. He has used this approach to consider such topics as words and pictures, artificial intelligence, measurement in science, and moral action, as well as theo-logical issues such as the Christian understanding of God, the Eucharist, and the relation between faith and reason.
Robert Spaemann
Robert Spaemann (* 1927, Berlin) did his doctorate under J. Ritter in 1952 (Mün-ster) and taught after his Habilitation (1962) at the Universities of Stuttgart, Hei-delberg and Munich until 1992. He received honorary doctorates from the Uni-versities of Fribourg, Washington, Santiago de Chile, Navarra, Salzburg and Lub-lin, as well as the Karl-Jaspers-Preis of the city and university of Heidelberg (2001). He has published numerous books and articles, particularly in the areas of bioethics, ecology and human rights. A major concern of his are questions of anthropology and personhood in the context of modern science and the relevance of a rearticulated Aristotelian notion of nature (human and other).
His books include: Der Ursprung der Soziologie aus dem Geist der Restauration. Studien über L. G. A. de Bonald (München: Kösel, 1959), Reflexion und Sponta-nität. Studien über Fénelon (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1963), Rousseau - Bürger ohne Vaterland. Von der Polis zur Natur (München: Piper, 1980), Die Frage Wozu? Geschichte und Wiederentdeckung des teleologischen Denkens (Munich: Piper 1981).
[Books in English: Basic Moral Concepts, trans. T.J. Armstrong (London: Routledge, 1990); Essays in Anthropology: Variations on a Theme, trans. Guido De Graaff and James Mumford. (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2010); Happiness and Benevolence, trans. J. Alberg (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2000); Persons: The Difference between "Someone" and "Something", trans. Oliver O'Donovan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).]
Thomas Joseph White
Thomas Joseph White (D.Phil) is a Dominican priest. He is Director of the Thomistic Institute at the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception (PFIC), Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C. He read theology at Oxford University and is the author of Wisdom in the Face of Modernity. A Study in Thomistic Natural Theology (Sapientia Press, 2009). He is the editor or co-editor of several works of theology, including The Analogy of Being. Invention of the Anti-Christ or the Wisdom of God? (Eerdmans, 2010). He has also authored essays on topics pertaining to Christology, sacraments and natural theology, pub-lished in journals such as Pro Ecclesia, Nova et Vetera and The Thomist.
Lawrence Dewan
Lawrence Dewan, O.P., Ph.D. (philosophy, Toronto) is professor of philosophy at the Dominican University College, Ottawa, Canada, and a member of the Pon-tifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas, Vatican City. A native (1932) of North Bay, Ontario, he studied philosophy at the University of Toronto, the University of Paris, and the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies (PIMS). His teaching career has included periods at the University of Ottawa, the University of Toronto and PIMS, and the Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. He is au-thor of Form and Being: Studies in Thomistic Metaphysics, Washington, D.C., 2006: CUA Press; St. Thomas and Form as Something Divine in Things, Mil-waukee, Wis., 2007: Marquette University Press; and of Wisdom, Law, and Vir-tue: Essays in Thomistic Ethics, New York, 2008: Fordham University Press. A group at Sergio Arboleda University, Bogota, Colombia is currently publishing Spanish translations of his work. [He is also at present Adjunct Professor of Phi-losophy, School of Graduate Studies and Research, University of Ottawa; and Professeur associé de la Faculté de théologie et de sciences religieuses, Université Laval.]
Stamatios Gerogiorgakis
Stamatios Gerogiorgakis (Ph.D. LMU Munich; venia legendi in Erfurt) teaches philosophy and history of religion at the University of Erfurt. Before this he taught philosophy at the University of Patras/Greece. Publications on argumenta-tion and logic in religion, history of philosophy and, finally, on non-standard logics.
John F. X. Knasas
John F. X. Knasas is Professor of Philosophy at the Center for Thomistic Studies of the University of St. Thomas, Houston, Texas. He has taught extensively in the Philippines and in Eastern Europe where he was a 2004 U.S. Fulbright pro-fessor to Vilnius, Lithuania. In 2006-2009 he was holder of the Bishop Nold Chair in Graduate Philosophy. Among his many publications are The Preface to Thomistic Metaphysics: A Contribution to the Neo-Thomist Debate on the Start of Metaphysics (1990); Being and Some Twentieth-Century Thomists (2003); and Thomism and Tolerance (2011). He has recently completed a monograph, Aqui-nas and the Cry of Rachel: Thomistic Reflections upon the Problem of Evil. His areas of interest include: Aquinas, metaphysics, cosmological reasoning, and neo-Thomistic revival, philosophy of culture, philosophical psychology, and ethic
Paul Thom
Paul Thom is an Honorary Professor of Philosophy in the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry at the the University of Sydney, and a Fellow of the Aus-tralian Academy of the Humanities. He has published widely on the history of logic, and on the performing arts. His books include The Syllogism (Philosophia 1981), For An Audience: a philosophy of the performing arts (Temple University Press 1993), The Logic of Essentialism: an interpretation of Aristotle's modal syllogistic (Kluwer 1996), Making Sense: a theory of interpretation (Rowman & Littlefield 2000), Medieval Modal Systems (Ashgate 2003), The Musician as In-terpreter (Pennsylvania State University Press 2007), Logic and Ontology in the Syllogistic of Robert Kilwardby (Brill 2007), and The Logic of the Trinity: Augustine to Ockham (Fordham University Press 2012). He is editing Robert Kilwardby's commentary on Aristotle's Prior Analytics. He is a musician with a special interest in opera. His long-term ambition is to write a book on opera.
Michael Dodds
Michael J. Dodds, O.P., is Professor of Philosophy and Systematic Theology at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California. After undergraduate studies at Seattle University, he entered the Order of Preachers in 1970 and was ordained in 1977. He then taught for three years at St. Mary's College, Moraga, California, before doing his doc-toral studies at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, from which he graduated summa cum laude in 1986. He has served as Academic Dean of the Dominican School, Convener of the Theology Area at the Graduate Theological Union, and Regent of Studies and Vicar Provincial of the Western Dominican Province. He is the author of The Unchanging God of Love: Thomas Aquinas and Contempo-rary Theology on Divine Immutability (2008), and Unlocking Divine Action: Contemporary Science and Thomas Aquinas (forthcoming), both from The Catholic University of America Press.
William Wainwright
William J. Wainwright is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is a past president of both the Society for the Philosophy of Religion and the Society of Christian Philosophers, and a past editor of Faith and Philosophy. He is the author of approximately one hundred articles and book chapters, and the author or editor of ten books, including most recently Philosophy of Religion, 2nd. ed. (Wadsworth), Reason and the Heart (Cornell University Press), Religion and Morality (Ashgate), and the Handbook of Philosophy of Religion (editor, Oxford University Press).
Linda Zagzebski
Linda Zagzebski is George Lynn Cross Research Professor of Philosophy and Kingfisher College Chair of the Philosophy of Religion and Ethics at the Univer-sity of Oklahoma. She is past President of the Society of Christian Philosophers and past President of the American Catholic Philosophical Association. Among her many endowed lectures, she has given the Romanell Lectures of Phi Beta Kappa, the McCarthy Lectures at the Gregorian University in Rome, the Wilde Lectures in Natural Religion at Oxford, and the Kaminski Lectures at the Catho-lic University of Lublin, Poland. Her books include The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge, (Oxford University Press, 1991), Virtues of the Mind (Cam-bridge University Press, 1996), Divine Motivation Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2004), Philosophy of Religion: An Historical Introduction (Blackwell, 2007), and On Epistemology (Wadsworth, 2008), as well as many edited books and articles in virtue epistemology, philosophy of religion, and virtue ethics.
Anselm Ramelow
Anselm Ramelow is a Catholic priest in the Order of Preachers. He is professor of philosophy at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley and currently the chair of the philosophy department. He obtained his doctorate under Robert Spaemann in Munich on Leibniz and the Spanish Jesuits (Gott, Freiheit, Weltenwahl, 1997) and did theological work on George Lindbeck and the question of a Thomist philosophy and theology of language (Beyond Modern-ism? - George Lindbeck and the Linguistic Turn in Theology, 2005). He contrib-uted articles to the Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie and essays on topics at the intersection of philosophy and theology. A translation and commentary on part of Aquinas' De veritate is forthcoming as well. He continues to work on questions of free will, philosophy of religion and philosophical aesthetics.
Content
Philosophia Basic Philosophical Concepts
Anselm Ramelow (Editor) GOD Reason and Reality
ISBN 978-3-88405-109-2 © 2014 Philosophia Verlag GmbH. München
________________________________________________________________
Content Page
Foreword: The Name of God
R Sokolowski 09
What Do We Mean When We Say "God"?
R Spaemann 17
Monotheistic Rationality and Divine Names:
Why Aquinas' Analogy Theory Transcends both
Theoretical Agnosticism and Conceptual Anthropomorphism
T J White 37
Thomas Aquinas and Knowledge of a God
as the Goal of Philosophy
L Dewan 81
Bayesian Theism and the Interpretation of Bayesian Probabilities
S Gerogiorgakis 127
The "Suppositio" of Motion's Eternity
and the Interpretation of Aquinas' Motion Proofs for God
J FX Knasas 147
Shades of Simplicity
P Thom 179
The God of Life, the Science of Life,
and the Problem of Language
M Dodds 197
Divine Impassibility
W Wainwright 233
Divine Foreknowledge
and the Metaphysics of Time
L Zagzebski 275
The God of Miracles
A Ramelow 303
Abstracts 365
Contributors Biographies 371
Anselm Ramelow (Editor) GOD Reason and Reality
ISBN 978-3-88405-109-2 © 2014 Philosophia Verlag GmbH. München
________________________________________________________________
Content Page
Foreword: The Name of God
R Sokolowski 09
What Do We Mean When We Say "God"?
R Spaemann 17
Monotheistic Rationality and Divine Names:
Why Aquinas' Analogy Theory Transcends both
Theoretical Agnosticism and Conceptual Anthropomorphism
T J White 37
Thomas Aquinas and Knowledge of a God
as the Goal of Philosophy
L Dewan 81
Bayesian Theism and the Interpretation of Bayesian Probabilities
S Gerogiorgakis 127
The "Suppositio" of Motion's Eternity
and the Interpretation of Aquinas' Motion Proofs for God
J FX Knasas 147
Shades of Simplicity
P Thom 179
The God of Life, the Science of Life,
and the Problem of Language
M Dodds 197
Divine Impassibility
W Wainwright 233
Divine Foreknowledge
and the Metaphysics of Time
L Zagzebski 275
The God of Miracles
A Ramelow 303
Abstracts 365
Contributors Biographies 371