Contra gentilesThomas Aquinas
Contra gentiles
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As a contrast to those works, Summa Contra Gentiles by Aquinas would be a good follow up. Then to pull both together try Christian-Islamic Preambles of Faith - An Exercise in Philosophy of Religion or Kalâm for Our Day Modeled after Thomas Aquinas, Summa…
on “Aleister Crowley and William Butler Yeats Get into an Occult Battle” ↗The best axiomatic reasoning failures I've seen are in Thomas Aquinas' Summa contra Gentiles, e.g. 13th century natural law Christian apologism. Don't get me wrong -- they are works of philosophical art and among my favorite texts in all of philosophy. But they also very much abuse the space…
on “Games People Play with Cash Flow (2020)” ↗…another kind. But that reason would be external to God, and thus God's nature would thus be contingent on something other than Himself. But then wouldn't that external reason be greater than God? Aquinas, Contra Gentiles, I.22.8-9: > [8] Moreover, if something can exist only when several elements come together, it is composite. But no thing in which the essence is other than the being can exist unless several elements…
on “Gallup: U.S. church membership dips below 50% for first time” ↗…(Hindu, Zen, Taoist etc.). For instance, the concept of Yin and Yang and how they define each other and rely on each other. St. Thomas Aquinas actually paralleled this concept quite briefly in The Summa contra Gentiles, though such an idea is quite taboo among many fundamentalist Christian traditions today: >There are in the world many good things which would have no place unless there were evils. Thus there would…
on “The NSA’s machine learning algorithm may be killing thousands of innocent people” ↗Although it's attributed to him, William of Ockham did not come up with Occam's Razor. My metaphysics teacher showed me a line in the Summa Contra Gentiles where St. Thomas Aquinas enunciated the same idea behind the Razor almost a hundred years before Ockham did. Sorry, I don't have the reference handy. Furthermore, the Wikipedia article on Ockham's Razor…
on “No, negative masses have not revolutionized cosmology” ↗> Thomas never claimed to be doing philosophy ? "The Summa Contra Gentiles is meant as a philosophical work" Anthony Kenny (Aquinas on Mind, 13) http://people.exeter.ac.uk/sp344/Aquinas%20on%20Mind.pdf
…https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_that_I_Am Which is where Aquinas and others get concept of 'God as verb'. God is not a thing or a being (not even the Supreme Being), but rather God is to be: Being itself. See Aquinas Summa contra Gentiles, XXII. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summa_contra_Gentiles Search for ipsum esse subsistens (Subsisting Essence Itself) if you wish to go down this rabbit hole.
on “A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning” ↗> Omniscience and omnipotence cannot co-exist; they are logically incompatible. Aquinas, in his Summa Contra Gentiles, for one would disagree. See Theorem 11 (and corollaries): * https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/11/first-way-part-iv-casca...
on “Anselm's Ontological Argument: A Guide for the Perplexed” ↗…sake. In addition, in this operation man is united to higher beings (substances) since this is the only human operation that is carried out both by God and by the separate substances (angels). (Summa Contra Gentiles, book 3, chapter 37) and It is impossible for any created good to constitute man’s happiness. For happiness is that perfect good which entirely satisfies one’s desire; otherwise it would not be the…
on “Can You Overdose on Happiness?” ↗