ACHIEVING A SCIENCE OF SACRED DOCTRINE*

Aquinas claims that sacred doctrine is a science, or scientia. All scientiae involve demonstrations containing principles which yield conclusions that are necessary and certain. The principles leading to sacred scientia are the articles of faith. Those articles are contained in Scripture and constitute the premises of demonstrations the conclusions of which form sacred doctrine's content. Because of those articles' divine origin, we can expect them to yield conclusions the truth of which is guaranteed. According to William Abraham, however, Aquinas must demonstrate Scripture's divine origin as a condition for achieving a sacred scientia. In the absence of such a demonstration, we cannot be certain that the articles contained in Scripture are God‐breathed, nor can we be certain that the conclusions deduced from them belong to sacred doctrine. Abraham argues that Aquinas's putative demonstration of Scripture's divine origin fails and—consequently—so does his attempt to establish a sacred scientia. In this paper, I will show that Aquinas never intended to provide such a demonstration, nor does he need to in order to secure sacred doctrine's status as a scientia. Furthermore, I will show that achieving sacred scientia is not, pace Abraham, an epistemological undertaking but a spiritual discipline that eventuates in knowledge of and love for God.     

Facing being: the significance of Thomist ontological epistemology to realism in post-Kantian philosophy

The Kantian ‘Copernican Revolution’ contained in his Prologomena and The Critique of Pure Reason deemed metaphysical statements to be ‘transcendental illusions’, so directing metaphysics to its dearth. As a consequence, no longer could objects be known ‘in-themselves’ by the sensorily-reliant human. This perceived impossibility of metaphysical knowledge in the turn to the subject from Kant through Nietzsche's rejection of true knowledge has heavily inclined Continental Philosophy to an anti-metaphysical quandary. Analytic Philosophy is no different following the influence of Carnap, Wittgenstein and Rorty upon its own ‘linguistic turn’. An inevitable consequence of things not being knowable in themselves is the philosophical distance from ‘the world’, which Stephen Hawking has argued, makes the philosophical enterprise ‘dead’. In dialogue with this widespread decline in metaphysics, I will attempt to reclaim realist metaphysics through the employment of a Thomist paradigm. If philosophy is to be relevant to the knowledge economy, it is compelled to be in relation with what is. Thus, in my theoretical framework, being will be considered as central to all knowledge systems seeking to correspond to ‘hard’ science. The Thomist realist natural philosophy of ‘scientia’ – wherein truth is conformed with being – will be at the core of the argument. This paper challenges the ignoring of being because extant reality is composed of all that is, continuously faced and never evadable. Consequently, Thomism is recaptured as significant to post-Kantian philosophy as Aquinas articulated a means through which the thinking subject engages with being through sensation and cognition.     

Knowledge and society

The question of the nature of our knowledge of society has recently been raised in an interesting form by Peter Winch in his monograph, The Idea of a Social Science, and debated in recent issues of Inquiry by A. R. Louch and Winch himself. In this paper I attempt to contribute to this discussion by attacking the problem of the nature of the empirical bases of social scientific knowledge, the main point in dispute between Winch and Louch. I try to construct an argument to show that in specifying the ‘data’ of social science, we have to introduce an element of ‘interpretive understanding’ which radically alters the meaning of the term ‘empirical base’ in social scientific contexts, thus supplementing Winch's argument in his reply to Louch. At the same time, my argument shows, I believe, that this view of the nature of social science does not lead to any arbitrary restrictions on the methods of research pursued by social scientists, as is sometimes imagined. What the argument leads to is the conclusion that our knowledge of society involves distinctive epistemological features that differentiate this kind of knowledge from the kind of knowledge we have in the natural sciences.     

Kant and experimental philosophy

While Kant introduces his critical philosophy in continuity with the experimental tradition begun by Francis Bacon, it is widely accepted that his Copernican revolution places experimental physics outside the bounds of science. Yet scholars have recently contested this view. They argue that in Critique of the Power of Judgment Kant’s engagement with the growing influence of vitalism in the 1780s leads to an account of nature’s formative power that returns experimental physics within scientific parameters. Several critics are sceptical of this revised reading. They argue that Kant’s third Critique serves precisely to deflate the epistemological status of experimental physics, thereby protecting science from the threat of vitalism. In this paper I examine Kant’s account of science in the context of the experimental tradition of philosophy, particularly in relation to the generation dilemma of the eighteenth century. I argue that Kant does not deflate the epistemological status of experimental physics but rather introduces systematicity to the experimental tradition. By identifying the reflective use of reason to organize laws of experience into a systematic whole, Kant aims to ground experimental inquiry on the secure course of a science, opening a conception of science as a research programme.     

The Fictitious Audience of 1 Peter

Recent scholarship has argued that Simon Peter is not the author of 1 Peter, whilst maintaining that the addressees in 1:1 are the real recipients of the letter. We contend that both the stated author and the stated audience are part of the author’s deception. We propose instead that the author may have simply argued that this text was an older letter from Peter. This proposal is consistent with the widely-held view that pseudepigraphical letters were not knowingly accepted in early Christian circles, as well as the ancient tradition that Peter was believed to be the real author of the text and offers a simple solution as to how the letter escaped the scrutiny that came with pseudepigraphical works. If this thesis is followed, scholarship concerned with uncovering the socio-economic status of the Christians in Asia Minor based on this text is therefore misguided.     

Peter Martyr Vermigli on grace and free choice

Abstract

Within contemporary scholarship there has been considerable debate over the character and scope of Peter Martyr Vermigli’s scholasticism, which has sought to locate his thought between the two poles of the ‘via Thomae’ and the ‘via Gregorii.’ This paper traces the Augustinian-Thomist polarity throughout Vermigli’s doctrine of grace and free choice. In particular it seeks to discover Gregorian distinctives in his thought, namely, doctrinal points shared by Vermigli and Rimini, representing a development of Augustine and a departure from Aquinas. Without denying the important Thomist and Aristotelian elements of his thought, this paper concludes that renewed attention now needs to be paid to his profound debt to late-medieval Augustinian scholasticism and its global impact on his theology.     

Vermigli Replicating Aquinas: An Overlooked Continuity in the Doctrine of Predestination

Although Peter Martyr Vermigli is well recognized for his integration of Thomism with Reformed theology, there is no consensus on whether to consider Thomas Aquinas a dominant influence on his doctrine of predestination. Recent scholarship argues that Gregory of Rimini’s influence is greater than Aquinas. This essay provides strong evidence to the contrary for the influence of Aquinas on Vermigli’s early exposition of predestination as a Reformer. Vermigli not only drew upon Aquinas’s doctrine in general, as he does elsewhere, but reproduced the details of Aquinas’s article in the Summa on whether foreknowledge of merits is the cause of predestination. This finding has significance for understanding the development of Vermigli’s thought, his relation to Thomist scholasticism, and his mature writings on predestination. In general, this evidence increases the importance of Thomas as a formative influence on Vermigli’s thought.     

‘More than a swineherd’

Abstract

This article suggests that alongside the strongly biblical defence of the royal supremacy, which was common in Elizabethan England, there can be found a distinctive line of argument; it stresses the roots of the magistrate’s ‘cura religionis’ in natural and human law, rather than simply divine law. This argument is often identified with Richard Hooker, who is taken to be innovative at this point. This study argues, however, that many of the same philosophical and theological points can be found in Peter Martyr Vermigli, who may have influenced Hooker. Elements of Vermigli’s Aristotelian political theory are traceable on a reading of his Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and the application of these concepts in his biblical commentaries is noticeable.     

Peter Martyr Vermigli,history, and the Anabaptist menace

Abstract

This article demonstrates Peter Martyr Vermigli’s use of historical perspective in his exegesis in his opposition to Anabaptists, taking as a test case the subject of prophecy. By contrasting the material on prophecy found in Vermigli’s Loci communeswith his handling of a number of key Pauline passages, the essay also seeks to make a point about our understanding of the man and his genius, namely, that one fails to obtain a full sense of the latter if one restricts oneself to the Loci communes. For while Vermigli’s loci on prophecy contain mostly standard medieval fare, his expositions of Paul exhibit originality and ingenuity.     

Whose social values? Evaluating Canada’s ‘death of evidence’ controversy

With twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophy of science’s unfolding acceptance of the nature of scientific inquiry being value-laden, the persistent worry has been that there are no means for legitimate negotiation of the social or non-epistemic values that enter into science. The rejection of the value-free ideal in science has thereby been coupled with the spectres of indiscriminate relativism and bias in scientific inquiry. I challenge this view in the context of recently expressed concerns regarding Canada's death of evidence controversy. The worry, raised by Stathis Psillos, is that as constructivist accounts of science demoted the previously secure status of evidence for drawing justified conclusions in science, we were left with no rational delineation between the right and wrong values for science. The implication for the death of evidence controversy is that we may have no rational grounds for claiming that the Canadian Government is wrong to interfere with scientific enterprise. But he does offer another avenue for reaching the conclusion that the wrong social values are directing the current stifling of some sectors of Canadian science. Psillos draws from standpoint epistemologies to devise a salient defence of ‘valuing evidence’ as a universalizable social value. That is, government bodies ought to enable scientific research via adequate funding as well as political non-interference. In this paper, I counter that (i) non-epistemic values can be rationally evaluated and that (ii) standpoint epistemology’s universalizable standpoint provides an inadequate framework for negotiating social values in science. Regarding (i), I draw from the evidence-based medicine debate in philosophy of medicine and from feminist empiricist investigations into the science–values relationship in order to make the argument for empirically driven value arbitration. If social values can be rationally chosen in the context of justification, then we can have grounds for charging the Canadian leadership with being ‘at war with science’. (ii) I further argue that my recommended empiricist methodology is preferable to Psillos’s search for universalizable perspectives for negotiating social values in science because the latter method permits little more than the trivial conclusion that evidence is valuable to science.     

Peter Martyr Vermigli's Preces sacrae (1564) and the Problem of Prayers as Historical Sources

This article combines a study of Peter Martyr Vermigli’s Sacred Prayers with a methodological concern for the particular challenges involved in coming to grips with prayers as historical sources. It demonstrates that in the reception history of Vermigli’s prayers there has been a recurring tendency to read them as something other than prayers, a commentary on the Psalms for instance. By contrast, this article attends to the specificity of their genre and form as prayers. This approach leads, first, to a fresh appreciation of the Preces sacrae as a rare and revealing source of their kind, since not many prayers offered before lectures in sixteenth-century Protestant universities have survived; secondly, to the discovery of important, as yet unknown connections between Vermigli’s Preces sacrae and Wolfgang Capito’s Precationes; and thirdly to an understanding of the spiritual depth of the Preces sacrae going beyond their propositional theological content.     

INTO TERRA INCOGNITA: CHARTING BEYOND PETER HARRISON'S THE TERRITORIES OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION

Peter Harrison's The Territories of Science and Religion throws down a serious challenge to advocates of dialogue as the primary means of engagement between science and religion. This article accepts the validity of this challenge and looks at four possible responses to it. The first—a return to the past—is rejected. The remaining three—exploring new epistemic frameworks for the encounter of science and religion, broadening out the engagement beyond the context of the physical sciences and Western culture, and looking at ways in which scientific and theological practitioners may collaborate on practical problems—are all offered as potential ways in which science and religion may engage with one another, in ways which move beyond Harrison's critique.     

Returning to experience – Dewey’s second mission to China

ABSTRACT

In this essay, as a philosophical exercise in exploring some of the underlying assumptions that serve as an interpretive context for classical Chinese philosophy, I will first follow Dewey’s philosophical turn from a ‘knowledge paradigm’ to an ‘experience paradigm’ in which he seeks to overcome the dualism between subject and object. Secondly, I will interpret Dewey’s Darwinian challenge to the notions of Aristotelian ‘species’ (eidos) and ‘teleology’ (telos) and their ‘universality.’ In so doing, Dewey sought to restore time, change, relationality, and particularity to our philosophical agenda, ideas that are all recommended by the cosmology of the first among the Chinese philosophical canons, the Book of Changes (Yijing易经). And finally, I will try to offer an interpretation of traditional Chinese philosophy as a science in a Deweyan sense.     

Structure Disclosed. Replete Moments and Aesthetic Experience in Reading Novels

ABSTRACT

Despite the huge interest in different philosophical questions surrounding literature, particularly analytic philosophers have had relatively little to say about literature’s specifically aesthetic character. Peter Kivy has developed this antiaesthetic tendency furthest, ultimately denying that the reading of prose literature has any deep aesthetic content. Building on Alan Goldman’s and John Dewey’s work on aesthetic experience, I argue that a key literary feature of novels I single out – what I term a replete moment – has the potential to trigger in readers significant aesthetic experiences. Along with revealing aesthetic aspects in reading that Kivy’s position does not cover, my account shows that contemplation of the overall structure of the novel is not the sole, more substantial form aesthetic experience can take in the case of reading, as Kivy’s formalistic literary aesthetics assumes. This conclusion is argued to be significant also for the general philosophical discussion on aesthetic experience. An analysis of a key passage in John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany is an important part of the view of literary aesthetic experience put forth.     

Review Essay: The History of Israel Contested and Revised

Books reviewed in this article: Philip R. Davies, In Search of ‘Ancient Israel’ Philip R. Davies, Scribes and Scrolls: The Canonization of the Hebrew Scriptures Lester L. Grabbe (ed.), Can a ‘History of Israel’ Be Written? Niels Peter Lemche, The Israelites in History and Tradition V. Philips Long (ed.), Israel's Past in Present Research: Essays on Ancient Israelite Historiography Thomas L. Thompson, The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel     

Critical Notice: Peter Ludlow’s Living Words: Meaning Underdetermination and he Dynamic Lexicon,Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014

A provocative view has it that word meanings are underdetermined and dynamic, frustrating traditional approaches to theorizing about meaning. Peter Ludlow’s Living Words provides some of the philosophical reasons and motivations for accepting one such view, develops some of its details, and explores some of its ramifications. We critically examine some of the arguments in Living Words, paying particular attention to some of Ludlow’s views about the meanings of predicates, preservation of bivalence and the T-schema, and methods of modulating meaning.     

Theory construction and existential description in Schelling’s treatise on freedom

Despite considerable recent attention, important features of Schelling’s famous work, the 1809 treatise On the Essence of Human Freedom, remain under-explored. One of these is the methodological dualism which Schelling advocates at the very start of the text. Schelling aims to weld together into a coherent position a first-person phenomenology of freedom and an explanation achieved by locating freedom within a conceptual system articulating the basic structure of the world. Most interpretations of the Freiheitsschrift, however, concentrate on only one of these approaches, thus foreshortening their understanding of Schelling’s enterprise. The article explores this tendency towards one-sidedness by considering two sophisticated recent interpretations of the work, taking opposite tacks. One, by Markus Gabriel, focuses on the distinctive, self-reflexive metaphysics which Schelling proposes, while the other, by Sebastian Gardner, claims that Schelling’s ontology is extrapolated entirely from his account of our moral consciousness, a procedure pioneered by Kant. The article argues that neither of these interpretations can do full justice to Schelling’s project. Furthermore, although the Freiheitsschrift is not entirely successful, and hence points towards later developments in Schelling’s thinking, its treatment of freedom is superior to the ‘soft naturalism’ pioneered by Peter Strawson, and currently influential across various philosophical traditions.     

Parallel,additional or alternative histories of philosophy? Questions on the theory and methodology of the history of philosophy

ABSTRACT

Methodologies and theories for writing histories of philosophy are particularly relevant today due to the abounding challenges to the discipline that have emerged: e.g. the problem concerning the precise mode of the inclusion of non-Western philosophies in the history of philosophy, the response to postcolonial considerations at large, the transformative impact of new media and the question whether the history of philosophy is primarily a philosophical, rather than merely historical, enterprise. À propos the relative scarcity that is to be witnessed in explicit articulations of methodologies and theories for writing histories of philosophy, in this note I focus on certain spontaneous, rather than theoretically planned, responses that have emerged to the above challenges – in particular, Peter Adamson’s History of Philosophy without any gaps – and in conclusion, as an example of methodological development, I touch on some of the problems we encounter in the case of the inclusion of Byzantine philosophy in the history of philosophy.     

Peer Commentaries on James Russell’s Cognitive Development as an Executive Process – in part: A Homeopathic Dose of Piaget

Peter R. Hobson Beyond Agency: Commentary on ‘Cognitive Development as an Executive Process’, p.271 Olivier HoudéExecutive Performance/Competence, and Inhibition in Cognitive Development. Object, Number, Categorization and Reasoning, p.273 Marco W. Battacchi Commentary on ‘Cognitive Development as an Executive Process’, p.275 Peter Bryant Executive Control – A Cause or a Product or Both?, p.276 Jeremy I.M. Carpendale Symbols and Side Effects: Commentary on ‘Cognitive Development as an Executive Process’, p.278 Willis F. Overton Nativism, Empiricism and Developmental Dynamic Action Systems, p.280 Pierre Mounoud What is Homeopathic when you Overdose?, p.282 Joëlle Proust Experience, Action and Theory of Mind, p.285 Elisabeth Pacherie Action Monitoring: Lower, Higher and Intermediate Levels, p.287