En las últimas décadas, la teoría epistemológica de Juan Duns Escoto ha sido objeto de interés por combinar los aspectos metafísico y semántico, los cuales le permiten distinguir la intelección, un ...evento cognoscitivo real, de su ‘contenido’ específico. En este artículo abordaremos el conocimiento divino de las posibles creaturas, preguntándonos si el Doctor Sutil le atribuye a su ser inteligible, esse intelligibile, algún tipo de realidad ontológica. En discusión con la interpretación de quien fue su secretario, Guillermo de Alnwick, argumentaremos que Escoto se refiere, con aquella expresión, al contenido semántico de la intelección sin ningún compromiso ontológico.
Traditional theism says that the goodness of everything comes from God. Moreover, the goodness of something intrinsically valuable can only come from what has it. Many conclude from these two claims ...that no creatures have intrinsic value if traditional theism is true. I argue that the exemplarist theory of the divine ideas gives the theist a way out. According to exemplarism, God creates everything according to ideas that are about himself, and so everything resembles God. Since God is wholly good in every way, and since ethical supervenience is true, it follows that creatures have intrinsic value.
In the first part of this essay, I explain why Aquinas thinks that it is better to understand 'creation' as a relation rather than a change, and I establish what it means in Christian theology to say ...that the world depends on God. I then argue that one of the most philosophically and theologically persuasive ways of articulating this relation of dependence is via the Platonic metaphysics of divine ideas. Through a careful reading of Aquinas and Eckhart, I respond to some of the pantheistic fears which led to the virtual disappearance of the divine ideas paradigm in the Christian tradition after the medieval period, and argue that a keen sense of our own ontological fragility is a good thing - both metaphysically and spiritually.
Paul DeHart has recently proposed that Thomas Aquinas did not elaborate on the ethical and anthropological implications of his position on the divine ideas. The author challenges DeHart’s ...interpretive assumption by demonstrating that Thomas consciously and deliberately extended the divine ideas into his vision of virtue through a network of subtle allusions to the doctrine in the Summa Theologiae. Specifically, the article considers the place of the divine ideas in Thomas’s appeal to Macrobius’s categorical division of the cardinal virtues into political, purifying, purified-in-mind, and exemplar. It further examines the relation of this gradation of virtue to Thomas’s thought on the ontological correlation between each person’s creational formation and the eschatological perfection of virtue.
Benjamin DeSpain has taken issue with my claim that the divine ideas according to Aquinas’s conception cannot be the objects of our moral striving, nor can they be approximated by us. I argue that he ...has not attended to a necessary distinction between the divine essence as single exemplar and the ideas as multiple exemplars of the varied imitability of that essence. The result is that Macrobius’s “exemplar virtues” are the divine essence; they are not divine ideas, nor are they eternal law. Approximation to these virtues is possible, but not to the ideas. I conclude with some reflections on Aquinas’s use of tradition, and on the question of his “Platonism.”
Before God created did God have ideas in mind for particular things, kinds of things, properties of things, particular events, and laws of nature? At least since Augustine, theists have proposed ...differing answers. This paper is about a relatively recent theory, which holds that God constructs them when he creates the universe. James Ross, Brian Leftow, and Hugh McCann are its primary advocates. Since the shared features of their views do not pertain to the so-called “abstract objects” or to the “necessary truths” of mathematics and logic, let us call this “divine possibility constructivism” (DPC), differentiating it from the theistic activism of Christopher Menzel and Thomas Morris and from the voluntarism of René Descartes—both of which could otherwise be construed as “constructivist”. According to Ross, Leftow, and McCann, God had nothing in mind before he created—which is to say that, before God created, God was not aware of possibilities for a universe. Rather, God’s being aware of any such possibilities is grounded only in God’s having constructed them ex nihilo. This paper shows that DPC is incoherent.
Berkeley writes in his Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous that he “acknowledges a twofold state of things, the one ectypal or natural, the other archetypal and eternal. The former was ...created in time; the latter existed from everlasting in the mind of God” (254). On a straightforward reading of this passage, it looks as though Berkeley is an indirect perception theorist, who thinks that our sensory ideas are copies or resemblances of archetypal divine ideas. But this is problematic because Berkeley’s rejection of scepticism seems partly to rest on a rejection of indirect perception. In this paper, I consider, and reject, three different approaches to solving this problem: (i) that Berkeley’s remarks on archetypes are unrepresentative; (ii) that Berkeley is indeed committed to divine archetypal ideas (but that these are in some relevant way different from material archetypes); and (iii) that Berkeley thinks divine archetypal ideas are identical to human ideas. I finally settle on a fourth strategy, which involves reading Berkeley’s archetypes as divine powers to produce ideas. I claim that this reading is consistent with the texts, that it has an etymological basis and philosophical precedent, and that it resolves the problems associated with the other three approaches to archetypes.
El presente artículo busca poner de manifiesto la influencia filosófica que ejerció San Agustín de Hipona y su doctrina de la creación en el fundador de la Escuela Franciscana del siglo XIII, ...Alejandro de Hales. De este modo, veremos cómo los principales conceptos halesianos en torno a la creación, tales como la creación in tempore, las Ideas divinas, el ejemplarismo o las razones seminales, tienen un claro origen agustiniano, mientras que otros, como el hilemorfismo universal o la pluralidad de formas sustanciales, provienen de influencias aristotélicas, árabes y judías. Finalmente, proponemos pensar la doctrina halesiana de la creación como parte de una nueva tradición interpretativa de la metafísica agustiniana.
The Christian Platonic tradition affirmed that human flourishing involves conjunction with the realm of eternal divine ideas. The account developed by Thomas Aquinas in effect denied this, rendering ...ideas contingent, unknowable and impossible as direct objects of attainment. Although no longer ideals for human aspiration, a role within spiritual or ethical striving might still be envisioned for such de-idealized ideas. Through discussions of Meister Eckhart, Kierkegaard and Manfred Frank, the essay outlines such a role: one’s idea in God operates to ontologically ground personal existence, deploying the human agent as an irreducible individual entity engaged in a hermeneutical labor of self-creation.
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