order to make our moral discourse and practice intelligible we must refer to making sense of, or understanding as rational. Morality will be grounded on God if we need to refer to God to make sense of our moral concepts and practices. Here I wish to look at one aspect of our moral practice that may or practice of making knowledge claims in regards to morality; that is, claimshould not do. What I wish to argue for is that it is hard, if not impossible, to make sense of this aspect of our moral practice without supposing theism. preliminary remarks, I will look at a recent skeptical argument found in KierKnowing Right from Wrong. We can call this the argument from epistemic luck, since it tries to show that if our moral beliefs are true, then it is only a 1 I will argue that the theist is in a much better position to respond to the argument from epistemic luck than his atheist counterpart.
{"title":"God and Moral Skepticism","authors":"J. Milburn","doi":"10.5840/QD20155112","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/QD20155112","url":null,"abstract":"order to make our moral discourse and practice intelligible we must refer to making sense of, or understanding as rational. Morality will be grounded on God if we need to refer to God to make sense of our moral concepts and practices. Here I wish to look at one aspect of our moral practice that may or practice of making knowledge claims in regards to morality; that is, claimshould not do. What I wish to argue for is that it is hard, if not impossible, to make sense of this aspect of our moral practice without supposing theism. preliminary remarks, I will look at a recent skeptical argument found in KierKnowing Right from Wrong. We can call this the argument from epistemic luck, since it tries to show that if our moral beliefs are true, then it is only a 1 I will argue that the theist is in a much better position to respond to the argument from epistemic luck than his atheist counterpart.","PeriodicalId":40384,"journal":{"name":"Quaestiones Disputatae","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2015-04-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87338624","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Let me begin by thanking Dr. Tollefsen for his paper, and Dr. Crosby for inviting me to comment on it. I find this paper extremely engaging and useful for organizing my own thoughts on several topics. What to me was most provocative in it was his discussion of commands. I also found the last section of his paper the most elegant in its synthetic solution to a number of vexed questions having to do with the way in which God communicates the natural law to us. I think Tollefsen is right in his concluding assessment that “our view of God’s communication of the law—natural, divine, and, let us say, personal—has perhaps been somewhat deformed by our relying on too close an analogy to the imperatival form of speech act associated with human positive law and to the form of speech act associated with imperfect human fathers of intransigent children.”1 The “authoritative invitations,” as Tollefsen describes them, seem to me to strike the right sort of balance that natural lawyers are looking for between the ways in which we are motivated to act rightly by being the desiring and deliberating beings we are and the ways in which God exercises authority over the universe, and indeed our very natures, via the Eternal Law. The doctrine of hell suggests that perhaps not all of God’s communications can be thought of just as authoritative invitations since the threat of damnation seems to imply something stronger than an ignored invitation. Nevertheless, I am convinced that a great many divine communications can helpfully be thought of in terms of authoritative invitations. It is with some hesitation that I offer a few comments on the first section of Tollefsen’s paper since it concerns several points of dispute between him and Mark Murphy. Notwithstanding these misgivings, let me offer a few observations on the topic of God as explanation of morality in the hope of clarifying what might be in dispute between Murphy and Tollefsen on this issue. What is an explanation? What sort of work ought it to do? What should we expect from an explanation? It is no fault of Tollefsen that he does not take up an elaborate answer to these questions in a paper dealing with how God explains morality, for the answers to these sorts of questions often
{"title":"Response to Christopher Tollefsen’s “Morality and God”","authors":"Jonathan J. Sanford","doi":"10.5840/qd2015517","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/qd2015517","url":null,"abstract":"Let me begin by thanking Dr. Tollefsen for his paper, and Dr. Crosby for inviting me to comment on it. I find this paper extremely engaging and useful for organizing my own thoughts on several topics. What to me was most provocative in it was his discussion of commands. I also found the last section of his paper the most elegant in its synthetic solution to a number of vexed questions having to do with the way in which God communicates the natural law to us. I think Tollefsen is right in his concluding assessment that “our view of God’s communication of the law—natural, divine, and, let us say, personal—has perhaps been somewhat deformed by our relying on too close an analogy to the imperatival form of speech act associated with human positive law and to the form of speech act associated with imperfect human fathers of intransigent children.”1 The “authoritative invitations,” as Tollefsen describes them, seem to me to strike the right sort of balance that natural lawyers are looking for between the ways in which we are motivated to act rightly by being the desiring and deliberating beings we are and the ways in which God exercises authority over the universe, and indeed our very natures, via the Eternal Law. The doctrine of hell suggests that perhaps not all of God’s communications can be thought of just as authoritative invitations since the threat of damnation seems to imply something stronger than an ignored invitation. Nevertheless, I am convinced that a great many divine communications can helpfully be thought of in terms of authoritative invitations. It is with some hesitation that I offer a few comments on the first section of Tollefsen’s paper since it concerns several points of dispute between him and Mark Murphy. Notwithstanding these misgivings, let me offer a few observations on the topic of God as explanation of morality in the hope of clarifying what might be in dispute between Murphy and Tollefsen on this issue. What is an explanation? What sort of work ought it to do? What should we expect from an explanation? It is no fault of Tollefsen that he does not take up an elaborate answer to these questions in a paper dealing with how God explains morality, for the answers to these sorts of questions often","PeriodicalId":40384,"journal":{"name":"Quaestiones Disputatae","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2015-04-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89100673","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Response to Mark Murphy’s “Suárez’s ‘Best Argument’ and the Dependence of Morality on God”","authors":"J. Crosby","doi":"10.5840/QD2015515","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/QD2015515","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40384,"journal":{"name":"Quaestiones Disputatae","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2015-04-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77391388","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Response to John Rist’s “Must Morality be Grounded on God?”","authors":"Paul Symington","doi":"10.5840/qd2015513","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/qd2015513","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40384,"journal":{"name":"Quaestiones Disputatae","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2015-04-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86661774","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"St. Thomas Aquinas on Creation, Procession, and the Preposition per","authors":"J. Boyle","doi":"10.5840/QD20156130","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/QD20156130","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40384,"journal":{"name":"Quaestiones Disputatae","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2015-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79233755","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This appreciation of the work of Norrie Clarke testifies to his stirring presence in Catholic philosophical circles during my adult life of inquiry. In fact, Norrie Clarke fairly epitomizes the way philosophical inquiry can be enhanced by a faith as staunch as it is critical. For with such a faith comes an abiding openness to following paths different from our own, confident that the ensuing interaction can help us develop the skills needed for proper discernment. Learning from others was ever part of his own way of learning from Thomas Aquinas, clearly contributing to an abiding desire to illustrate the relevance of his mentor’s way of doing philosophy. Moreover, in doing so, Clarke never took pains to distinguish Aquinas’s faith-life from his mode of inquiry; in fact, Clarke’s own way of proceeding melded the two in ways which follow the contours of Aquinas’s own inquiry, to let that medieval searcher enliven our searching today. One can only imagine how such an embodied spirit of inquiry lured his students into doing philosophy as he himself displayed. We can best summarize that spirit in philosophical terms by twinning analogy with participation, as Philip Rolnick suggests and develops in his study comparing our work.1 Yet as cognate as our inquiry has been over the years, we have worked more alongside one another than in concert—although a linking spirit can well be identified with Bernard Lonergan’s “quest for understanding.” I suspect that Clarke is the better teacher of the two of us, intent on developing a metaphysical narrative that will captivate students. His approach is far more traditional as well, though his conclusions seldom are. We can detect this difference by our respective takes on the critical term ‘being.’ Clarke uses it unabashedly, while I tend to shy away from it. Tracing the reasons why could be mutually illuminating, as well as offer some perspective on different ways of doing philosophy. Initially, Clarke appears to take what people came to call “the Thomistic synthesis” for granted, whereas early mentors helped me to see it as a bowdlerization of Aquinas, ironically inspired by the very Cartesian need for certitude which Leo XIII’s Aeterne Patris intended it to supplant. Some decades ago the impeccably literate com-
{"title":"Using Aquinas to Rescue Analogical Understanding","authors":"David Burrell","doi":"10.5840/qd20156125","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/qd20156125","url":null,"abstract":"This appreciation of the work of Norrie Clarke testifies to his stirring presence in Catholic philosophical circles during my adult life of inquiry. In fact, Norrie Clarke fairly epitomizes the way philosophical inquiry can be enhanced by a faith as staunch as it is critical. For with such a faith comes an abiding openness to following paths different from our own, confident that the ensuing interaction can help us develop the skills needed for proper discernment. Learning from others was ever part of his own way of learning from Thomas Aquinas, clearly contributing to an abiding desire to illustrate the relevance of his mentor’s way of doing philosophy. Moreover, in doing so, Clarke never took pains to distinguish Aquinas’s faith-life from his mode of inquiry; in fact, Clarke’s own way of proceeding melded the two in ways which follow the contours of Aquinas’s own inquiry, to let that medieval searcher enliven our searching today. One can only imagine how such an embodied spirit of inquiry lured his students into doing philosophy as he himself displayed. We can best summarize that spirit in philosophical terms by twinning analogy with participation, as Philip Rolnick suggests and develops in his study comparing our work.1 Yet as cognate as our inquiry has been over the years, we have worked more alongside one another than in concert—although a linking spirit can well be identified with Bernard Lonergan’s “quest for understanding.” I suspect that Clarke is the better teacher of the two of us, intent on developing a metaphysical narrative that will captivate students. His approach is far more traditional as well, though his conclusions seldom are. We can detect this difference by our respective takes on the critical term ‘being.’ Clarke uses it unabashedly, while I tend to shy away from it. Tracing the reasons why could be mutually illuminating, as well as offer some perspective on different ways of doing philosophy. Initially, Clarke appears to take what people came to call “the Thomistic synthesis” for granted, whereas early mentors helped me to see it as a bowdlerization of Aquinas, ironically inspired by the very Cartesian need for certitude which Leo XIII’s Aeterne Patris intended it to supplant. Some decades ago the impeccably literate com-","PeriodicalId":40384,"journal":{"name":"Quaestiones Disputatae","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2015-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84736525","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Person as Cosmic Mediator: The Philosophical Vision of W. Norris Clarke, SJ","authors":"Derek S. Jeffreys","doi":"10.5840/QD20156124","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/QD20156124","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40384,"journal":{"name":"Quaestiones Disputatae","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2015-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87581610","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Evil was "a problem deeply troubling" to Augustine. This should come as no surprise to anyone who knows something about Augustine. Unlike Plato, who held that the purpose of knowledge is the contemplation of Eternal Ideas, Augustine held that one of the primary reasons why we should actively pursue knowledge in this life is to make sense of our experience of this world. Our experience of this world includes the experience of evil. This experience is deeply troubling to us all. The trouble that we have with evil is not just emotional. Evil does not just horrify us, or shock us, although it certainly does and should do both of these things. Being impassive to evil seems itself to be evil. Neither the Ottoman soldier--who could coldly report detailed accounts of the Armenian death marches to the Ottoman Minister of the Interior--nor the Nazi officer--who could impassively watch the countless horrors that were being inflicted upon the victims of the Third Reich--were what we would readily call good people. Pontius Pilate is no one's hero. Nor does evil just cause us to feel pain when we ourselves are its victims, although again, it most certainly does and should do so. A person who does not suffer from that evil to which he is subjected is either inhuman or in denial, super-human or insane. The abused abductee who does not acknowledge that he is being abused by his abductors, and who does not feel the pain that should result from that abuse, suffers from what psychologists consider to be a form of localized insanity: the Stockholm syndrome or some variant thereof. Repressing pain is positively harmful. It too seems to be evil. Evil is also, and perhaps even primarily, intellectually troubling. As the very shock that we feel when we witness it (or are subjected to it) indicates, evil makes no intellectual sense to us. Does murdering a million and a half Armenians really make intellectual sense? The Armenian Genocide took place in 1915, during World War I. At that time, the Ottoman Empire, which had entered the war in order to maintain its territorial integrity, was fighting a three front battle against the Russians to the north, the English to the south, and the French to the west. Did it really make sense for the leaders of that empire not just to commit troops that could have been used on those fronts, rather than massacring its own citizens? Did it really make sense for the leaders of that empire also to kill able bodied male citizens who would have fought on those fronts? Obviously not. In retrospect, it is positively insane. So too in general is evil. It is for all of these reasons that evil has haunted philosophers for over two thousand years. Every great thinker from Plato to Aquinas, from Ockham to Kant grappled with evil. The problem has not gone away. Hanna Arendt claimed that after the Holocaust evil would be the most significant of all philosophical problems. "The problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual lif
{"title":"Free Will, Evil, and Saint Augustine","authors":"Siobhan Nash-Marshall","doi":"10.5840/QD20156127","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/QD20156127","url":null,"abstract":"Evil was \"a problem deeply troubling\" to Augustine. This should come as no surprise to anyone who knows something about Augustine. Unlike Plato, who held that the purpose of knowledge is the contemplation of Eternal Ideas, Augustine held that one of the primary reasons why we should actively pursue knowledge in this life is to make sense of our experience of this world. Our experience of this world includes the experience of evil. This experience is deeply troubling to us all. The trouble that we have with evil is not just emotional. Evil does not just horrify us, or shock us, although it certainly does and should do both of these things. Being impassive to evil seems itself to be evil. Neither the Ottoman soldier--who could coldly report detailed accounts of the Armenian death marches to the Ottoman Minister of the Interior--nor the Nazi officer--who could impassively watch the countless horrors that were being inflicted upon the victims of the Third Reich--were what we would readily call good people. Pontius Pilate is no one's hero. Nor does evil just cause us to feel pain when we ourselves are its victims, although again, it most certainly does and should do so. A person who does not suffer from that evil to which he is subjected is either inhuman or in denial, super-human or insane. The abused abductee who does not acknowledge that he is being abused by his abductors, and who does not feel the pain that should result from that abuse, suffers from what psychologists consider to be a form of localized insanity: the Stockholm syndrome or some variant thereof. Repressing pain is positively harmful. It too seems to be evil. Evil is also, and perhaps even primarily, intellectually troubling. As the very shock that we feel when we witness it (or are subjected to it) indicates, evil makes no intellectual sense to us. Does murdering a million and a half Armenians really make intellectual sense? The Armenian Genocide took place in 1915, during World War I. At that time, the Ottoman Empire, which had entered the war in order to maintain its territorial integrity, was fighting a three front battle against the Russians to the north, the English to the south, and the French to the west. Did it really make sense for the leaders of that empire not just to commit troops that could have been used on those fronts, rather than massacring its own citizens? Did it really make sense for the leaders of that empire also to kill able bodied male citizens who would have fought on those fronts? Obviously not. In retrospect, it is positively insane. So too in general is evil. It is for all of these reasons that evil has haunted philosophers for over two thousand years. Every great thinker from Plato to Aquinas, from Ockham to Kant grappled with evil. The problem has not gone away. Hanna Arendt claimed that after the Holocaust evil would be the most significant of all philosophical problems. \"The problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual lif","PeriodicalId":40384,"journal":{"name":"Quaestiones Disputatae","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2015-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86042199","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The present paper engages the relation between two teachings: the doctrine that God has no real relation to creatures—essentially, the doctrine of the divine simplicity—and the doctrine of analogy.1 It is principally owing to my exchanges with Fr. W. Norris Clarke and David Schindler Sr.,2 and with Kenneth Schmitz (and, again, Fr. Clarke)3 that I have become increasingly aware that certain judgments superordinating relation to being occur in one principal early form in Thomistic writers of the nineteen sixties and seventies, only subsequently to be developed in the thought of the theologians and philosophers whom one might refer to as forming, in North America, the Communio School, or if one likes, “Communio Thomists.” Those early discussions regarding receptivity and relation in creatures and God pivoted around the understanding of the nature and limitation of the analogy from creatures to God.
{"title":"Thoughts on Analogy and Relation","authors":"S. Long","doi":"10.5840/QD20156129","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/QD20156129","url":null,"abstract":"The present paper engages the relation between two teachings: the doctrine that God has no real relation to creatures—essentially, the doctrine of the divine simplicity—and the doctrine of analogy.1 It is principally owing to my exchanges with Fr. W. Norris Clarke and David Schindler Sr.,2 and with Kenneth Schmitz (and, again, Fr. Clarke)3 that I have become increasingly aware that certain judgments superordinating relation to being occur in one principal early form in Thomistic writers of the nineteen sixties and seventies, only subsequently to be developed in the thought of the theologians and philosophers whom one might refer to as forming, in North America, the Communio School, or if one likes, “Communio Thomists.” Those early discussions regarding receptivity and relation in creatures and God pivoted around the understanding of the nature and limitation of the analogy from creatures to God.","PeriodicalId":40384,"journal":{"name":"Quaestiones Disputatae","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2015-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75189559","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
the IIa-IIae, and shall present it in two stages, corresponding to the two 1 For a sampling of recent positions on the issue, all of which center on the Aquinas’s Theory of Natural Law: An Analytic Reconstruction Natural Law and Practical Reason God and the Natural Law: A Rereading of Thomas Aquinas Perfecting Human Actions: St. Thomas Aquinas on Human Participation in Eternal Law 2 Aquinas, Summa theologiae (henceforth, ST 3
{"title":"The Moral Disadvantage of Unbelief: Natural Religion and Natural Sanctity in Aquinas","authors":"Francisco J. Romero Carrasquillo","doi":"10.5840/QD20155110","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/QD20155110","url":null,"abstract":"the IIa-IIae, and shall present it in two stages, corresponding to the two 1 For a sampling of recent positions on the issue, all of which center on the Aquinas’s Theory of Natural Law: An Analytic Reconstruction Natural Law and Practical Reason God and the Natural Law: A Rereading of Thomas Aquinas Perfecting Human Actions: St. Thomas Aquinas on Human Participation in Eternal Law 2 Aquinas, Summa theologiae (henceforth, ST 3","PeriodicalId":40384,"journal":{"name":"Quaestiones Disputatae","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2014-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85659523","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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