The Duane Berquist Lectures

1. Prologue to the Secunda Secundae: the seven virtues, the eleven emotions and the order of faith, hope and charity (Dei Verbum), with an overview of Question 1 on the object of faith

Thu, 21 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist introduces the Secunda Secundae by working through its prologue, explaining why Thomas treats virtues, vices, and precepts together and how the three theological and four cardinal virtues correspond to the gifts of the Holy Spirit and opposing vices. He draws on Vatican II’s Dei Verbum, quoting St. John’s first epistle and Augustine’s De Catechizandis Rudibus, to clarify the ordering of faith, hope, and charity. He then turns to Question 1, article 1, on the object of faith as “first truth,” setting Thomas’s treatment against the backdrop of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and the soul’s four faculties—reason, will, and the irascible and concupiscible appetites.

1. The Equivocity of "Logos": From John's Gospel to Thomas's Division of Logic

Thu, 06 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist starts from the equivocity of “logos” — word, thought, reason, the naming of a thing — as it appears at the opening of John’s Gospel, where the Word is the Father’s own perfect self-thought and a Person. He then follows Thomas Aquinas into the prologues to the logical commentaries, especially on the Posterior Analytics and Peri Hermeneias, using Aristotle’s De Anima to work out the difference between a name and speech. Comparing Thomas’s threefold division of logic — simple apprehension, judgment, and reasoning, matched to the Categories, De Interpretatione, and the Analytics and Topics — against Albert the Great’s simpler twofold division of defining and reasoning, he closes by setting logic’s method of predication against natural philosophy’s method of motion.

1. Metaphysics Proemium I: All Men Desire to Know — Sense, Memory, Experience and Art

Thu, 19 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens Aristotle’s Metaphysics at its first line, “all men by nature desire to know,” and asks what that desire actually tracks as it develops. Reading the text closely alongside Aquinas’s commentary, he lays out the ladder from sensation to memory to experience to art and universal knowledge, and finally to wisdom, which knows through causes. Along the way he reaches for homely examples—music, wine, medicine, raising children—to show concretely why the wise man who grasps causes outranks the merely experienced man who only knows that something works. The session sets up this proemium as the doorway into what Aristotle will call First Philosophy.

1. Eternal Life as Our End: Jude, Dei Verbum, and Thomas's Division of Scripture

Thu, 12 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens in prayer and asks how Scripture and tradition name our final end—eternal life, the beatific vision, seeing God as He is—tracing the order of faith, hope, and charity through Jude’s epistle, John 17, and the proemium of Dei Verbum, with care for the different senses of “before and after” that govern that order. He then reviews the history of biblical scholarship through Leo XIII’s Providentissimus Deus, honoring patristic and medieval exegetes, before turning to St. Thomas’s prologue to his commentary on John, where the Old and New Testaments are divided by law and grace, and the New Testament further divided into Gospels, Pauline epistles, and the remaining apostolic writings. He closes by comparing this Thomistic scheme to paragraphs 18–20 of Dei Verbum, showing how closely the Council’s account of the New Testament follows Aquinas’s threefold division.

1. Thomas's Premium to the Ethics: Wisdom, Order and the Parts of Moral Philosophy; Aristotle's Opening — the Good Is What All Want

Thu, 27 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through two proems side by side: Aristotle’s brief statement of the aim, audience, and method of the Nicomachean Ethics, and Aquinas’s much larger Proemium, which locates ethics within reason’s four relations to order—natural, logical, moral, and mechanical. He follows Aquinas’s argument that moral philosophy concerns human acts ordered to an end, and his division of practical philosophy into ethics, domestic economy, and politics, keyed to the individual, household, and city as distinct wholes. The class ends inside Aristotle’s own text, weighing his opening claim that “the good is what all desire” against Socrates’s manner of questioning in Plato’s dialogues.

1. From the Head to the Feet: The Word Made Flesh and the Plan of the Tertia Pars

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Starting from John’s account of the two angels at the empty tomb, Berquist reads their position at the head and feet as a figure of Christ’s divinity and humanity, and uses it to explain antonomasia and synecdoche — rhetorical devices that name a whole by a part — while showing how Arius and Apollinaris went wrong by taking such figures literally. He then works through the handout “The Matter and Order of Wisdom” and Summa Contra Gentiles III, ch. 17 to compare how Augustine, Aquinas’s Compendium, and the Summa Contra Gentiles order God, creation, and the end differently, before opening Summa Theologiae III, q. 1 to introduce the Tertia Pars and its coming questions on the fittingness of the Incarnation.

1. Vatican I, Dei Filius: Pius IX's Prologue and Chapter 1 on God in Himself

Tue, 06 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins Vatican I’s dogmatic constitution Dei Filius, treating it as an unfinished companion to Vatican II’s later documents on revelation and the Church. He works through Pius IX’s prologue on Trent’s legacy and the errors of rationalism, pantheism, and materialism that confused nature with grace, then turns to the constitution’s first chapter, its profession of God as one, living, creator, and Lord. He compares its structure to the Trinitarian pattern of the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds and the nature/person division of the Athanasian Creed, aligning it instead with the God-in-Himself, Creator, Ruler ordering of Aquinas’s Summa Contra Gentiles, pausing along the way to touch Summa Theologiae I, question 90 on scientific hypothesis and doubt.

1. The Fourteen Books of Wisdom: Naming, Dividing, and 'All Men by Nature Desire to Know'

Thu, 16 Dec 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Why is this work called first philosophy, wisdom, or metaphysics, and why does Berquist reject the traditional title as misleading? He starts by laying out Aquinas’s division of the text into proemium and tractatus, comparing it to similar structural moves in the Nicomachean Ethics and the Gospel of Matthew. Most of the class then stays with Aristotle’s opening sentence, “All men by nature desire to know,” asking what it means and whether it’s true. Berquist tests it against ordinary experience—the pleasure of seeing, the pull of a good story, the appeal of sports—to show why Aristotle chose this claim to launch an inquiry into wisdom as a good pursued for its own sake.

Beginning Fragments

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Beginning Fragments #

All handout series

Introductory Note to the Beginning Fragments #

foreword · Presocratics 01 Beginning Fragments - Notes · 3 pages · PDF · 01-Beginning_Fragments-Notes.pdf

Covers: Introduction to the earliest philosophical fragments: the Seven Wise Men, the Delphic exhortations ‘Know Thyself’ and ‘Nothing too much’, Heraclitus DK 116, and a preview of the order of topics (The Royal Fragment, what is common, beginnings of philosophy in desire and in reason, the roads and the first statement).

1. Aristotle's Proemium I: The Natural Desire to Know and Wisdom as Knowledge of Causes

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through the opening line of Aristotle’s proemium to the Metaphysics, asking what it means to say all men by nature desire to know. He traces the natural progression from sensation through memory and experience up to art or science, unpacking along the way the etymology of “philosophy” and “proemium.” Weighing Aristotle’s humility against Heraclitus, Socrates, and Plato, he uses examples—doctors versus pharmacists, chief artists versus mere craftsmen, teachers who grasp causes—to show that wisdom is not knowledge of singular facts but knowledge of universals and first causes, setting up the fuller argument to come.

1. Aristotle's Physics: Proemium and the Confused Before the Distinct (Three Kinds of Examples)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the proemium of Aristotle’s Physics—the “book of natural hearing”—asking why the study of nature must begin from beginnings, causes, and elements taken generally rather than particular things themselves. Working through the first lectio of Aquinas’s commentary alongside his own handout, he defends Aristotle’s claim that confused knowledge of a whole precedes distinct knowledge of its parts. He tests this with examples from taste, music, painting, and geometry, showing in each case how recognition of something as a whole comes before the ability to distinguish what composes it, and uses this pattern to explain Aristotle’s movement from general principles toward the specific matter of natural philosophy.

1. Where the De Anima Fits: Aristotle's Books on Nature and Life, and the Value of Common Experience

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks where On the Soul belongs among Aristotle’s writings on nature, generation and corruption, and the biological works, and answers by following Aquinas’s prologue to his commentary on De Sensu et Sensato, which lays out an order moving from soul considered in itself to soul as embodied in particular living things. He pairs this with Physics I, lectio 1, reading closely from a handout titled “Note for Book One of Natural Hearing, Reading I” to show that Aristotle starts from common experience—outward toward motion in the Physics, inward toward life in the De Anima—and pushes toward increasingly immaterial principles. He argues this progression trains the mind for metaphysics in a way later, more experimental sciences do not.

1. What Is Good? The First Definition and the Socratic Question of Cause vs. Effect

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist starts from the observation that people naturally answer “what is X?” by pointing to examples before reaching a universal definition, and traces this through Plato’s Meno and Euthyphro alongside the opening of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. He builds a first definition of the good as “what all desire,” then presses the Euthyphro’s cause-and-effect question—is a thing good because it is wanted, or wanted because it is good—testing it against Augustine on beauty and against cases in moral and positive law. He weighs objections on both sides of the distinction and leaves the question open at the close.

1. Loving as Giving and as Undergoing: Shakespeare, Teresa and Thérèse on the Wound of Love

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with a puzzle: is loving an act of giving, like a craftsman shaping material, or a passion—being acted upon and changed by the beloved, as the senses are worked on by their objects? He follows the imagery of boundless generosity through Shakespeare—Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, Antony and Cleopatra, A Midsummer Night’s Dream—against the imagery of love as wound, fire, and overwhelming force in Teresa of Ávila and Thérèse of Lisieux, with Aquinas’s treatment of the Holy Spirit as “Gift” standing behind both. He leaves the tension between giving and undergoing open, without yet showing how one account of love can hold both.

1. Why 'Metaphysics' Is the Wrong Name: Wisdom, Reason and Shakespeare's Definition of Reason

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Opening Book Nine of Aristotle’s fourteen books known as the Metaphysics, Berquist argues the title itself misleads: tracing “meta ta physika” to Andronicus of Rhodes, he contends “wisdom” or “first philosophy” better names what Aristotle intended. Since wisdom presupposes reason, he turns to Hamlet’s Act 4 soliloquy, treating “the ability for large discourse, looking before and after” as a working definition, and works through its several senses of “large” and “looking.” He closes by tying this to Aquinas’s proemium to the Nicomachean Ethics on order and reason, and to Albert the Great on wisdom’s dependence on the other sciences.

1. Matthew 28 (1): The Women at the Tomb, the Angel's Message, and the Bribed Guards

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist follows Aquinas’s reading of Matthew 28 under the pattern of “first hearing, then seeing,” moving from the women’s approach to the tomb through the earthquake, the angel’s announcement, and Christ’s own meeting with them. He draws out Thomas’s layered sense of the text: women restoring what women lost at the Fall, night giving way to day as a figure of sin turning to grace, and Galilee read as a kind of transmigration. He cross-references the other Gospels and 1 Corinthians 15 to line up the resurrection appearances, then closes with Thomas’s and the Fathers’ answer to the guards’ bribed, false report.

Summa Theologiae I

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Summa Theologiae I #

328 passages treated in 230 classes; 397 passages mentioned in passing

All works

Question 1 #

Summa Theologiae I, q. 1, a. 1 #

Text: aquinas.cc, Latin – English · isidore.co, Latin – English · New Advent, English

Treated in:

Prima Pars — 7. Summa Theologiae I, Q.1: Prologue, Overview, and Art. 1–2 (Why Sacred Doctrine Is Necessary; Objections to It Being a Science) (from 29:22)

Mentioned in 6 classes

Summa Theologiae I, q. 1, a. 2 #

Text: aquinas.cc, Latin – English · isidore.co, Latin – English · New Advent, English

2. II-II, Q.1, Articles 1–2: is the object of faith the First Truth, and is it simple or complex (a statement)?

Thu, 21 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the first two articles of Aquinas’s question on faith. The question: since faith’s object is the “first truth,” how can Christians be said to believe in Christ’s humanity, the sacraments, or events in Scripture, none of which is God himself? He works through Aquinas’s objections and replies to show these are all believed only as referred back to God. He then turns to whether what is believed is something simple (incomplexum) or a stated proposition (enunciabile), pausing along the way over angelic knowledge and what “Word of God” means to clarify the distinction between simple apprehension and complex judgment.

2. Logic's Three Acts of Reason, Univocal and Equivocal Names, and the Genus

Thu, 13 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist lays out Aquinas’s threefold division of reason’s acts — grasping what something is, judging truth or falsity by composition and division, and reasoning — and matches each to its logical treatment: definition, statement, argument, drawn from Aristotle’s Categories, Peri Hermeneias, and the works on syllogism and demonstration. He contrasts this with Albert the Great’s rival twofold division of logic. Turning to Porphyry’s Isagoge, he distinguishes names used univocally from those used equivocally, either by chance or by reason (analogously), then begins working through the five predicables with genus, illustrating the abstractions with examples ranging from Shakespeare to geometry.

2. Metaphysics Proemium II: 'Doing' and Making, Wisdom as Knowledge of First Causes, and the Six Marks of the Wise Man

Thu, 19 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist follows the proemium of Aristotle’s Metaphysics with Aquinas’s commentary, tracking the ascent from sensation through memory, experience, and art to wisdom as knowledge of first causes. Along the way he pauses over the distinction between motion and operation and between doing and making, and takes up the meanings of “beginning” and “cause” from Book V. He then sets out Aristotle’s six-part portrait of the wise man—knowing all things universally, grasping what is difficult, possessing greatest certainty, teaching through causes, seeking knowledge for its own sake, and ruling rather than obeying—linking it to Aquinas’s account of wisdom as reason’s highest ordering perfection. Anecdotes from teaching, seminary life, Mozart, MacArthur, and the Bohr-Heisenberg-Einstein debates keep the argument concrete.

2. Dividing the Four Gospels and the Fourteen Epistles of St. Paul

Thu, 12 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through Aquinas’s prologue divisions of the four Gospels and the fourteen Epistles of St. Paul, showing how Thomas repeatedly nests these groups into three-plus-one or three-plus-three-plus-one structures. In the Gospels this pattern tracks Christ’s human and divine natures; in the Epistles it tracks grace as found in the Head, the principal members, and the mystical body. Berquist draws parallel three-and-one divisions from Aristotle’s Poetics, Shakespeare, the Summa Contra Gentiles, and natural cycles like the seasons, illustrating a general logical principle for dividing sets of four. He closes by weighing where to take future classes—the Secunda Pars on faith, hope, and charity, more of the Tertia Pars, or a return to philosophy.

2. Is It Good Because We Want It? The Order of Ends and Arts, the Chief Good, and Political Science

Thu, 27 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Working from Aquinas’s commentary on the opening lectiones of the Nicomachean Ethics, Berquist takes up Aristotle’s definition of the good as “that which all desire” and presses the Euthyphro-style question: is a thing good because desired, or desired because good? He works it out dialectically and by induction from cases like food, water, sleep, and knowledge. He then follows Aristotle’s argument that subordinate arts serve further ends—bridle-making under horsemanship, medicine aiming at health—pointing toward a self-sufficient end wanted for its own sake, which identifies political science as the master art governing the chief good of human life. Aquinas’s text, the Categories, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet come in along the way.

2. Why God Became Man: Summa III, Question 1, Articles 1–2

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the first two articles of Aquinas’s treatise on the Incarnation. He asks whether it was fitting for God to take on flesh and whether doing so was necessary to repair human nature, working through Thomas’s objections and replies and his use of Augustine, Dionysius, and Damascene. He traces the reasons Thomas gives—advancing faith, hope, charity, right conduct, and participation in divinity, while countering pride, presumption, and the devil’s claim on man—for why the Word’s assumption of flesh was the fitting, though not strictly necessary, way of redemption. He digresses on Augustine’s influence on Thomas’s style and on devotion to Saint Joseph.

2. Dei Filius Chapter 1: God Distinct from the World, Creation, Providence and the Canons Against Pantheism

Tue, 06 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Dei Filius’s opening chapter on divine simplicity, God’s real distinction from creation, and creation as a free act, setting its structure against the orderings Aquinas uses in the Summa Theologiae and Summa Contra Gentiles. He treats pantheism—found in figures from Tocqueville and Spinoza to Hegel and Einstein—as the modern error the council’s canons target, and reads Anaxagoras as an ancient halfway case, closer to materialism than to genuine creation from nothing. Along the way he considers what divine omnipotence and liberality mean and why theology and philosophy order angels, matter, and man differently. He closes by pointing ahead to the document’s next move, into revelation and faith.

2. The First Road in Our Knowledge: From Sensation and Memory to Experience and Art

Thu, 16 Dec 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins reading the opening lines of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, following the natural road of human knowledge as it rises from sensation to memory, from memory to experience, and from experience to art or science. Using homely examples—a cat that learns to avoid a hot stove, tea steeping, a doctor treating this man versus treating man as such—he shows why Aristotle judges knowledge of universal causes wiser than experiential knowledge of particulars, even though experience sometimes acts more successfully in practice. He works through the “Distinction of the Roads” handout and “The Royal Fragment,” closing with a preview of Aristotle’s further signs that knowing the why surpasses merely knowing the that.

2. The Six Marks of the Wise Man: Wisdom as Knowledge of All and of First Causes

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens Aristotle’s Metaphysics by asking what people actually mean when they call someone wise, sifting popular marks of the wise man down to a core claim: wisdom is knowledge of the universal, and more strictly, knowledge of first causes. Following Aquinas’s commentary, he distinguishes being universal “in predication” from being universal “in causing.” He then takes up the proemium’s further claims—that wisdom is sought for its own sake out of wonder rather than need, that it is the most liberal and most divine of the sciences, and that no man possesses it fully. Examples from Shakespeare, Euclid, Democritus, and Plato’s Theaetetus illustrate certitude, causality, and wonder along the way.

2. Why the Confused Is Known First: Imperfect Before Perfect, and Descartes Versus Aristotle

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s claim, from the opening of the Physics with Aquinas’s commentary, that we know things confusedly before we know them distinctly—the whole grasped before its parts, as in tasting wine or seeing an effect before its cause. He reads Descartes’ Discourse on Method against this: Descartes ties certitude to clarity and distinctness on the model of mathematics, while Aristotle’s syllogism, Berquist argues, secures knowledge more rigorously. He closes by following the same tension—precision traded against certainty—into Duhem’s Aim and Structure of Physical Theory and de Broglie’s remarks on idealization in physics.

2. The Proemium of the De Anima: Why Knowledge of the Soul Is Most Desirable, and What 'Soul' Means

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins with the proemium to Aristotle’s De Anima, first showing how Greek and medieval philosophers used such openings—in Plato’s Timaeus, Porphyry’s Isagoge, and elsewhere in Aristotle—to state a work’s scope, order, and difficulty. He then follows Aristotle’s own claims: that all knowledge is good, that one science outranks another by the dignity of its object or by its certitude, and that the study of the soul wins on both counts. Drawing on Thomistic commentary, he explains why the soul’s existence is self-evident even though its essence is not, and why this makes the science of soul foundational to ethics, logic, wisdom, and theology alike.

2. Answering by Induction: We Want Things Because They Are Good, and Why the Bad Seems Wanted

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the old question of whether something is good because it is wanted, or wanted because it is good. Following the Posterior Analytics’ distinction between induction and syllogism, he argues the case inductively, running through natural goods—food, water, sleep, health, reproduction, pleasure, knowledge, money, friendship, wisdom—and the desires that answer to each. Drawing on Aquinas’s treatise on love in the Summa, along with examples from Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, he meets objections about misdirected desire by distinguishing the good as such from the merely apparent good, explained through ignorance or deception by resemblance. He closes by placing the inquiry within Plato’s sequence of Meno, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo, previewing “the better” as background for Socrates’ quarrel with the Athenians in the Apology.

2. Why Love Is Undergoing Yet Called Giving: Aristotle on Truth and Good, and Love in the Concupiscible Appetite

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the Prima Secundae’s question of whether love belongs to the concupiscible or the irascible appetite, working alongside a parallel passage from Aquinas’s Sentences commentary. Love, he shows, is fundamentally passive—a wounding, a transformation, a conforming of heart to its object—yet Aquinas still speaks of it as “giving.” He resolves the tension through Aristotle’s Metaphysics VI distinction between truth, which resides chiefly in the mind, and goodness, which resides chiefly in things. Along the way he maps the full order of concupiscible passions (love, desire, joy, hatred, aversion, sadness) against the irascible (hope, despair, fear, boldness, anger), drawing on Shakespeare, Mozart, Augustine, and Dionysius.

2. Looking Before and After: The Senses of Order, Distinction and Error, and Two Ways of Dividing a Book

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks what Aristotle means by “before and after,” tracing its senses from the Categories, Physics, and Nicomachean Ethics through examples in geometry, chemistry, and Shakespeare’s puns on “before” in All’s Well That Ends Well and his definition of reason in Troilus and Cressida. He then distinguishes two ways of dividing a book: the editorial division used for reference and the logical division into two or three parts that actually yields understanding, illustrating it from Matthew’s Gospel, the Psalms, and the prologue to Romeo and Juliet. Turning to Aristotle’s Metaphysics, he begins locating its proemium and the overall structure of its fourteen books, working from the handout “Note for Aristotle’s Proemium to Wisdom,” to set up the afternoon’s question of where Book Nine falls within that division.

2. Matthew 28 (2): The Galilee Appearance, 'All Power Is Given to Me', and Why God the Father Cannot Envy the Son

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Reading Matthew’s account of the risen Christ meeting the eleven on the mountain in Galilee, Berquist asks what the disciples’ worship mixed with doubt means, and unpacks the threefold structure of Christ’s words, “all power in heaven and earth has been given to me.” He cross-references Mark and John to reconcile the order of the resurrection appearances. The class then turns philosophical: using Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 37, and Aquinas’s Summa Contra Gentiles, Berquist argues that divine simplicity rules out envy between Father and Son, and closes by tying this to natural friendship and the commandment to honor father and mother.

Natural Fragments

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Natural Fragments #

All handout series

The Natural Fragments of the First Philosophers #

reading · Presocratics 01 · 10 pages · PDF · 01-The_Natural_Fragments.pdf

Covers: Collection of Presocratic fragments (DK), from Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, through to Democritus.

No recorded class was matched to this handout.

On the Natural Fragments (Natural Fragments of the First Philosophers) #

note · Presocratics 02 · 51 pages · PDF · 02-On_the_Natural_Fragments.pdf

Summa Theologiae I-II

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Summa Theologiae I-II #

604 passages treated in 262 classes; 687 passages mentioned in passing

All works

Question 1 #

Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 1 #

Text: aquinas.cc, Latin – English · isidore.co, Latin – English · New Advent, English

Treated in:

Prima Secundae — 5. Prologue to the Second Part and Question 1, Article 1: Does Man Act for an End? (from 20:30)

Mentioned in 3 classes

Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 1, a. 1 #

Text: aquinas.cc, Latin – English · isidore.co, Latin – English · New Advent, English

3. Appropriation to the Persons of the Trinity and the Visions of St. Gertrude

Thu, 06 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks what it means to appropriate a divine attribute to one Person of the Trinity when all three share every perfection equally. Drawing on Aquinas’s Commentary on the Sentences, he distinguishes appropriation from antonomasia, the naming of a person by a title proper to another. He then turns to the Life and Revelations of Saint Gertrude the Great, reading her visions of the Trinity and of the Blessed Virgin as the “White Lily of the Trinity,” along with words spoken to her by Christ, to show power, wisdom, and goodness recurring throughout. He closes by linking her prayers of confession and thanksgiving to Aquinas’s scriptural metaphors and to his own devotion to Gertrude.

3. Aquinas on Faith, Part 1: Mary's Unique Grace, Whether Anything False Can Be Believed (II-II Q.1 A.3), and Whether Faith Is About Things Seen (A.4)

Thu, 28 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up two articles from Aquinas’s treatise on faith: whether anything false can fall under belief, and whether faith concerns things seen. He walks through the objections, sed contra, and responses, distinguishing an article of faith itself from a merely human conjecture about its timing, and showing how faith stands apart from both vision and opinion by way of God’s eternal knowledge. Along the way he digresses on Mary’s “hypostatic order” of grace, citing the Dominican Louis Chardon and his own teachers Charles De Koninck and Maurice Dion, with anecdotes on certitude and first principles.

3. Porphyry's Five Predicables: Difference, Species, Property and Accident

Thu, 13 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Porphyry’s account of the five predicables, asking how difference both completes a definition begun by genus and divides that genus into species—illustrated with squares and quadrilaterals. He then separates property, which follows necessarily from a thing’s nature (as two right angles follow from being a triangle), from accident, which does not (as color). Along the way he traces how words like “property,” “undergoing,” and “road” slide into equivocation by losing part of their original sense, drawing on Aristotle’s Categories and De Anima. He closes by asking why Porphyry defines species differently from genus and difference, noting how terms like virtue, habit, and comedy shift between genus and species depending on relation, and pointing ahead to the categories.

3. Metaphysics I Proemium: Knowledge, Experience, Art, and the Six Marks of the Wise Man; Wisdom as Looking, Liberal and Divine Knowledge

Thu, 09 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through the proemium of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, asking what separates mere experience and art from wisdom itself. He lays out Aristotle’s six-fold portrait of the wise man—knower of universals and of difficult things, more certain, able to teach through causes, seeking knowledge for its own sake, and fit to direct others—drawing on Aquinas’s commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics and the proemium to the De Anima for comparison. He ends with Aristotle’s claim that philosophy begins in wonder, likening the philosopher to the “philomythos,” the lover of stories, and pointing to Homer and Shakespeare as examples of how narrative first stirs the mind toward philosophical questioning.

3. Aristotle's Ethics I: The Good, the Last End, Certitude in Ethics, and Man's Own Act

Thu, 10 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist reads the Proemium to Nicomachean Ethics I with Aquinas’s commentary, showing by proportional reasoning how lower arts and goods serve higher ones and why this chain requires a highest good desired for itself. He then takes up Aristotle’s claim that ethics, as a practical science, admits less certitude than mathematics, and his portrait of the fit “hearer” of moral philosophy—experienced and self-governing rather than young or ruled by passion. Using tools, bodily organs, and human occupations as inductive examples, Berquist closes by raising the Socratic question of a thing’s “own act”: does man as such have a proper function, the question that will drive the search for a definition of happiness.

3. Why God Became Man: Summa Contra Gentiles IV, 54 and the Thirteen Reasons

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks why it was fitting for God to become man, tracing Aquinas’s argument in Summa Contra Gentiles IV, 54 alongside the parallel treatment near Summa Theologiae III, q. 1. He matches roughly eight reasons in the Contra Gentiles against about ten in the Summa, showing where they overlap—arguments from faith, the example of virtue, reparation for sin—and where each text adds something distinct, such as separate arguments from hope and from charity. Along the way he takes up despair versus hope in the pursuit of truth, citing Aristotle and Plato’s Phaedo, and weighs the difference between calling Christ a “human being” and a “human person.” He counts roughly thirteen distinct reasons once both texts are combined.

3. The Necessity of Belief and the Two Roads to God: Vatican I on Revelation

Thu, 15 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Why must a learner believe before he can know? Berquist works through ordinary cases—trusting a teacher’s proof, persisting with a hard author like Aristotle, hearing Mozart—to show belief enables knowledge, though sciences differ in how much they depend on a teacher, least in mathematics and most in sacred doctrine. He then reads Vatican I’s Dei Filius, applying a threefold structure: chapter one on God as source and end, chapters two through four on how we come to know this through revelation, faith, and reason. Closing on the revelation chapter, he distinguishes the two roads to God, natural reason and supernatural revelation, and uses Aristotle’s senses of “necessary” to explain why revelation is needed both to secure natural knowledge of God and, absolutely, for our supernatural end.

3. Metaphysics I.1 (end): Why Knowing the Cause Is Wiser Than Experience

Wed, 05 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist reads through Aristotle’s opening arguments in Metaphysics I, asking why art and science rank above mere experience. He follows Aristotle’s examples—the chief artist over the subordinate craftsman, the doctor over the pharmacist, the teacher who can say “why” and not just “that”—to show that grasping causes, not just facts, is what makes someone wise. Along the way he draws out Aristotle’s distinction among arts serving necessity, pleasure, and pure knowledge, tracing the Greek roots of “philosophy” and “mathematics.” He closes with student questions on how experience relates to theoretical knowledge, pointing ahead to later passages that pin down wisdom as knowledge of causes rather than universals.

3. Wonder, Liberal Knowledge, the Divine Science, and How the Philosopher Must Love Wisdom

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s argument in Metaphysics Book I that wisdom is the most divine of the sciences, since it concerns God as first cause and is the knowledge God himself would possess most fully—honorable rather than merely necessary. From there he turns to what it means to be a philosopher in the strict sense: one who loves wisdom for its own sake, as life’s highest end and a common good, not the truncated “philosophers” of Bacon, Adam Smith, Hegel, or Nietzsche, who really pursue power, wealth, or freedom. He closes on wonder as the root of philosophical inquiry, setting up the next class’s treatment of philosophy’s nature and divisions through Aristotle, Aquinas’s proemium to the Ethics, and Shakespeare.

3. Levels of Universality, the Via Negativa in Theology, and Particular vs. General Equivocation

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the opening chapter of Aristotle’s Physics, where knowledge proceeds from what is more known to us toward what is more known by nature. Using triangles, sonnets, and syllogisms, he distinguishes a “horizontal” movement, from a general grasp to a definition at the same level of universality, from a “vertical” movement, from genus down to species, arguing the first must come before the second. He then carries this distinction into natural theology, asking why negating something general of God, such as “unchanging” or “without parts,” brings us closer to him than negating something particular, and touches on Descartes’s error, Heisenberg’s return to Greek thought, and Scripture’s reliance on common rather than private experience.

3. Why Knowing the Soul Is Hard: How Natural Science Reasons, and the Phaedo's Two Views of the Soul

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through the opening puzzles of Aristotle’s De Anima Book I: what genus the soul falls under, whether it admits one definition or many, and whether to study its substance, powers, acts, or objects first, reading Aquinas’s commentary alongside the text. He brings in two supporting passages—Aquinas’s Summa Contra Gentiles III, ch. 56, on how knowing a thing’s substance grounds demonstrative knowledge of its properties, and Aquinas on Boethius’s De Trinitate distinguishing how natural philosophy, mathematics, and metaphysics each reason (rationabiliter, disciplinabiliter, intellectualiter). He closes by returning to Plato’s Phaedo, contrasting the soul as separable substance against the soul as bodily harmony, setting up Aristotle’s later synthesis.

3. The Good, the Better, and the Three Kinds of Human Goods

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist reviews the Socratic argument, built by induction from cases like food, water, and rest, that we desire things because they are good rather than the reverse—and answers objections drawn from Aquinas on love and knowledge as causes of desire. He then turns to “better,” using the logic of if-then statements and the principle that a cause is more truly what it causes something else to be, to show that an end is always better than what is pursued for its sake. Applying this to Aristotle’s division of goods of the soul, of the body, and external goods, he uses it to clarify what is at stake in Plato’s Apology, where Socrates and the Athenians disagree about which goods, and so which end of life, is truly greatest.

3. Love as an Undergoing: Conformity of the Heart, and Sense Love in Shakespeare

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through Aquinas’s question of whether love counts as an “undergoing”—a being-acted-upon—and how love as a felt passion (amor) relates to love as a deliberate act of will (dilectio). Drawing on Aristotle, Dionysius, and Augustine, he presents love as a conformity of the heart to its object, the root from which desire and rest follow. He turns to A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Hamlet to show how sense-based romantic infatuation differs from love chosen by reason. The class ends mid-argument, on the cusp of the article distinguishing amor from dilectio, to be picked up next time.

3. Custom as Tyrant, Method and Matter, and the Logical Division of the Fourteen Books of Wisdom

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works out why the Metaphysics divides as it does: Book One surveys the predecessors, Book Two asks about man’s relation to truth, and Book Three asks how wisdom itself gets discovered. He reads through his handout “Note for Word Cause” and Aquinas’s commentary on Book Five to press a warning drawn from Physics II—that a method suited to one science, like the Pythagoreans’ demand for geometric first principles, becomes a tyrannical custom when forced on matter it doesn’t fit. He tests the point against examples ranging from Huygens on light to Hamlet, arguing that method, like pleasure, must answer to its proper matter.

Natural Theology Fragments

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Natural Theology Fragments #

All handout series

Natural Theology and Religion Fragments #

reading · Presocratics 3 (Natural Theology Fragments) · 4 pages · PDF · 01-The_Natural_Theology_Fragments.pdf

Covers: Presocratic fragments (Diels-Kranz) on natural theology and religion, beginning with Xenophanes and Heraclitus and ending with Anaxagoras DK 12.

No recorded class was matched to this handout.

Natural Theology Fragments #

reading · Presocratics Natural Theology Fragments (02 - On the Natural Theology Fragments) · 7 pages · PDF · 02-On_the_Natural_Theology_Fragments.pdf

Summa Theologiae II-II

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Summa Theologiae II-II #

25 passages treated in 15 classes; 44 passages mentioned in passing

All works

Question 1 #

Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 1 #

Text: aquinas.cc, Latin – English · isidore.co, Latin – English · New Advent, English

Treated in:

Secunda Secundae — 1. Prologue to the Secunda Secundae: the seven virtues, the eleven emotions and the order of faith, hope and charity (Dei Verbum), with an overview of Question 1 on the object of faith (from 48:13)

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 4

Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 1, a. 1 #

Text: aquinas.cc, Latin – English · isidore.co, Latin – English · New Advent, English

4. Augustine on Order in God, Aristotle's Senses of Before and After, and the Rule of Two or Three

Thu, 06 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with a puzzle: Augustine denies any before-and-after in the Trinity, yet Aquinas defines order itself as before-and-after. He shows how Aquinas resolves this by treating Augustine’s usage as an analogous, equivocal transfer of the term—keeping the formal sense of “this from that” while stripping away the generic, temporal sense. From there he works through Aristotle’s distinct senses of “before”—in time, in being, in knowledge, in goodness, and in causality—and how Aquinas deploys them in arguing for God’s existence and divine causality. He closes by noting the mind’s habit of dividing things into twos and threes, drawing examples from the categories, Euclid, the Our Father, the four causes, and the Summa’s own tripartite structure.

4. Aquinas on Faith, Part 2: The Light of Faith, Whether Faith Can Be Scientific Knowledge (A.5), and the Articles of Faith (A.6)

Thu, 28 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of what exactly faith’s object is. He works through article 4’s distinctions between believing something “in particular” and finding it generally credible, and between believing simply and believing “somewhat,” tying these to how the light of faith differs from the light of glory. Article 5 asks whether matters of faith can also be known by science or opinion; article 6 asks why the articles of faith are distinguished as they are, using the word “article” itself and the example of Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection. He draws in moral-virtue analogies, the Transfiguration, and other asides to keep the distinctions tied to how faith is actually lived.

4. Ante-Predicaments I: Highest Genera, Being as a Name for Everything, and Equivocal, Univocal and Derived Names

Thu, 20 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins with Aristotle’s Categories, asking why things named “beings” are not named univocally the way animals sharing a genus are. He walks through the opening distinctions of equivocal, univocal, and denominative (paronymous) naming, then uses these to argue that being cannot be a single highest genus, since a genus requires univocal predication of its species. He places this within the larger plan of the Categories—ante-predicaments, predicaments, post-predicaments—and draws on Porphyry’s Isagoge, Aristotle’s Metaphysics, and Aquinas on divine simplicity for comparison. Homely examples—family relations, geometrical figures, grammar—illustrate genus, species, and the whole/part relation throughout.

4. Metaphysics I Proemium (cont.): Wonder, Chance, and the End of Inquiry; Wonder What and Why, Why God Has No Cause, and the Order of Sense, Memory and Experience

Thu, 09 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Why does philosophy begin in wonder, and why does that wonder vanish once a cause is grasped? Berquist works through Aristotle’s opening of Metaphysics Book I, contrasting wonder at mere chance—a surprise meeting—with wonder at something like the diagonal’s incommensurability, whose resolution satisfies curiosity while leaving admiration intact. He digresses through Shakespeare’s meter, Euclid, Thérèse of Lisieux’s Story of a Soul, and Aquinas on divine simplicity to test the point, then sketches Book I’s survey of Aristotle’s predecessors and what Books II–V will take up, closing with Socrates’ remark that wonder is offspring of Thaumas.

4. Happiness as Activity by Virtue: The General Meaning of Virtue, Moral Virtue and Choice, and Shakespeare on Reason

Thu, 10 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist reads closely from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Book One, and Aquinas’s commentary (lectio 10) to define happiness as activity of the soul in accordance with reason, and to fix the general meaning of virtue: whatever lets a thing do its proper work well, as a sharp edge suits a knife or clear sight suits an eye. He maps how the moral virtues—courage, temperance, liberality, justice—differ from the virtues of reason itself, working from the handout “Drawing a Line Around the End of Man.” He closes with an extended turn to Shakespeare, using scenes from Hamlet, Henry IV, and Two Gentlemen of Verona, guided by “Shakespeare’s Understanding of a Play,” to show reasoned choice held fast against emotion and impulse.

4. Would God Have Become Incarnate Without Sin? Original Sin and the Timing of the Incarnation (ST III q.1 aa.3–5)

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up three linked questions from Aquinas on the Incarnation’s cause and timing: whether God would have become man apart from sin, whether Christ came chiefly to remedy original sin or actual sin, and whether he should have appeared at the very start of history rather than after a long delay. Working through the objections, the sed contra citations from Augustine and Ambrose, and Aquinas’s replies, he and the students trace the reasoning about human pride, the pedagogical unfolding of salvation history, and man’s place as a microcosm joining creation to God. The session breaks off partway into the reply of Article 5, mid-argument on why the delay was fitting.

4. Scripture, Tradition and the Nature of Faith: Vatican I, Chapters 2-3

Thu, 15 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Dei Filius, Chapters 2 and 3, tracing the Council’s teaching that revelation comes through both Scripture and unwritten Tradition, and that the Church alone judges Scripture’s true sense, with attention to the canons condemning errors on natural knowledge of God and on which books are canonical. He then turns to the definition of faith as a supernatural virtue resting on God’s authority, working from the definition in Hebrews as read through Aquinas’s commentary, and closes on the “reasonable service” of faith—miracles and prophecy as external signs alongside the Spirit’s internal grace—and why perseverance in faith is necessary for salvation. He brings in Augustine, Hilary of Poitiers, Newman, Sartre, Marx, and von Balthasar along the way.

4. Metaphysics I.2: The Six Marks of the Wise Man; Wisdom as Knowledge of What Is Said of All

Wed, 05 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the second part of the proem to Aristotle’s Metaphysics, where Aristotle lists six things people commonly say of the wise man: he knows all things, knows hard things, is more certain, can teach, seeks knowledge for its own sake, and is fit to direct others. Following Aquinas’s commentary, Berquist shows how the first three traits argue that wisdom concerns what is “said of all”—the universale in praedicando—while the last three argue separately that wisdom concerns the highest causes, the universale in causando, a distinction he insists later thinkers such as Hegel collapse. He draws out the argument with examples from Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, De Koninck, MacArthur, and Shakespeare, and ties it back to related discussions of immaterial cause in the Physics and De Anima.

4. Natural Beginnings of Philosophy: Wonder, the Natural Road, and Axioms

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the fourth of his four guiding questions—how one should enter into philosophy—after reviewing its division into theoretical, practical, and logical parts. He argues that philosophy begins naturally in wonder and in the desire to live well, and that the mind travels a natural road from sense to reason, arriving at self-evident axioms it grasps without proof. Working through the handout “An Introduction to the First Road in Our Knowledge” and Friar Laurence’s remarks on stumbling, he explains why we know sensible, material, composed, and effect-related things before the immaterial, simple, and causal, and why understanding moves from confused, outward, singular grasp toward distinct, inward, universal grasp.

4. Natural Road, Common vs. Private Experience, and Experimental Science

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins with Aquinas’s commentary on 1 Corinthians, using the mystical body’s eyes, ears, hands, feet, and nose to distinguish contemplative from active life and their degrees of spiritual understanding. He then works through Aristotle’s Physics I on how natural knowledge moves from confused to distinct, reading from two handout notes and setting this beside Boethius’s De Trinitate on how natural philosophy, mathematics, and wisdom each proceed differently toward matter, from simple to composed, and toward the immaterial. He closes by distinguishing common from private experience to mark off philosophy of nature from experimental science, illustrating the empirical-theoretical split with Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg.

4. Aristotle's De Anima Proemium: Nature, Substance, and How to Define the Soul

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins with a prayer to St. Thomas Aquinas, then lingers over Gloucester’s cliff scene in King Lear to weigh an editor’s gloss on the word “clearest” applied to the gods. Turning to the proemium of Aristotle’s De Anima, he reads Aristotle’s near-synonymous terms “nature,” “substance,” and “what it is” as different names for the task of definition, drawing on Ammonius Hermeias and Metaphysics Book V to distinguish defining a thing by its cause or specific difference from defining it merely by an effect or property. He closes by raising the difficulty this creates for defining the soul itself, given the split between substance and accident, illustrated with the examples of time and health.

4. The End of Man: Own Act, Virtue, and the Act with Reason Done Well

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks what man’s proper end is, ranking external, bodily, and spiritual goods as Aristotle does in the Nicomachean Ethics while drawing on Plato’s Republic and Symposium for comparison. He builds the argument inductively, using tools, bodily organs, and occupations to establish Plato’s notion of a thing’s “own act”—what it alone does, or does best—and to show how ability and act point to an end wanted for its own sake rather than as a means to something further. From there he arrives at man’s end as “the act with reason done well,” identified broadly with virtue, setting up the further question of what that virtue is and how it is acquired.

4. Amor and Dilectio, the Love of Wishing Well and the Love of Wanting

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist reads closely through Aquinas’s account of love, asking what distinguishes sense-based, emotional love from the rational love of the will, and how amor, dilectio, caritas, and amicitia relate to eros, philia, and agape. The class centers on the article dividing love into “love of friendship”—wishing good to another for the other’s own sake—and “love of wanting”—desiring a good for oneself, drawn out through Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Dionysius’s Divine Names. Berquist tests the distinction against Augustine, C.S. Lewis, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Teresa of Ávila, and illustrates it with examples from Hamlet, family life, and romantic love.

4. Metaphysics Book Nine, Reading 1: Distinguishing Kinds and Senses, and the Meanings of Ability

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins Aristotle’s Metaphysics Book Nine, following Aquinas’s commentary from where the study of substance in Books Seven and Eight gives way to the study of potency and act. He explains why Aristotle starts from the familiar, motion-related sense of potency before rising to the fully universal sense required to speak of immaterial substances and God. Working from a handout on the word “cause,” he shows how wisdom distinguishes both kinds of things and senses of a word at once, illustrated through the four causes and the categories of being, then traces Aristotle’s primary division of potency into active, passive, and resistive senses, all referred back to an active sense. He also takes up, via Aquinas’s Summa Contra Gentiles and an anecdote about Charles De Koninck, why natural philosophy must be studied before metaphysics.

Plato: Dialogue and Logic

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Plato: Dialogue and Logic #

All handout series

A Division of the Meno #

division · Meno Division of the Meno · 6 pages · PDF · 01-Division_of_the_Meno.pdf

Covers: Outline of the whole Meno (Stephanus 70A-100B): Meno’s question whether virtue can be taught, and the three conversations (what is virtue; how one can investigate the unknown; whether virtue can be taught), ending with Socrates asking Meno to calm Anytus.

Summa Theologiae III

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Summa Theologiae III #

324 passages treated in 120 classes; 353 passages mentioned in passing

All works

Question 1 #

Summa Theologiae III, q. 1 #

Text: aquinas.cc, Latin – English · isidore.co, Latin – English · New Advent, English

Treated in:

Tertia Pars — 1. From the Head to the Feet: The Word Made Flesh and the Plan of the Tertia Pars (from 51:27)

Mentioned in 2 classes

Summa Theologiae III, q. 1, a. 1 #

Text: aquinas.cc, Latin – English · isidore.co, Latin – English · New Advent, English

5. Summa II-II, Question 1, Articles 7–8: How the articles of faith grew over time, and why there are fourteen (unity, Trinity, the humanity of Christ; the rule of two or three)

Thu, 05 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up two questions from Aquinas: does the content of faith increase through history, and why do the articles of faith come to fourteen? He works through Aquinas’s distinction between implicit and explicit belief, likening doctrine’s growth to a teacher condescending to a learner’s capacity rather than adding new truths. Along the way he distinguishes agent from material causality and discusses the “fullness of time” surrounding Christ’s coming, drawing on Hebrews, Galatians, Ephesians, and Gregory the Great, with side references to Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Categories and brief remarks on Marian and Josephine devotion.

5. Ante-Predicaments II: Said Of and In a Subject, Individual Substance, and the Ten Categories

Thu, 20 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s Categories, starting from chapter one’s split between simple terms and intertwined statements, then the fourfold division of beings by whether they are said of a subject and/or in a subject — sorting out universal substance, individual substance, universal accident, and individual accident. He turns to chapter three, where predication carries transitively down a genus-species line, but differences belonging to unrelated genera, like animal and science, do not transfer across them. Along the way he works out equivocal terms such as “knowing” versus “thinking” and the several senses of “accident,” setting up the later treatment of the ten categories.

5. Metaphysics Proemium I: Reason as Looking Before and After — Anaxagoras, Homer, Boswell, and 'All Men by Nature Desire to Know'

Thu, 15 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins with prayer, then asks what reason and wisdom actually are, turning to Shakespeare’s definition of reason in Hamlet as a “large discourse, looking before and after” and finding the same ordering of before and after at work in passages from Homer’s Iliad and Boswell’s Life of Johnson. He then moves into Aristotle’s proemium to the Metaphysics alongside Aquinas’s commentary, reading closely the opening line that all men by nature desire to know. He follows Aristotle’s argument from the primacy of sight among the senses, arguing that we love to see apart from any practical use, and illustrates the point with his own anecdotes about astronomy and the sheer pleasure of natural beauty.

5. Prologue to the Second Part and Question 1, Article 1: Does Man Act for an End?

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins by distinguishing a text’s editorial divisions from its logical, understandable ones, then shows how the Prima Secundae and Secunda Secundae are built around man’s last end and the virtues and vices that lead to or away from it—an order he contrasts with Aristotle’s arrangement of the virtues in the Nicomachean Ethics. Turning to Question 1, Article 1, he argues through whether every human act is for an end, dwelling on the etymology of “happiness” and “beatitude” and on Thomas’s answer that an end, though last in execution, is first in intention and so remains a cause. He illustrates the point with examples from Shakespeare and the Iliad.

5. Aquinas on the Incarnation: Its Timing, the Plan of the Third Part, and Why Christ Has Not One Nature but Two (ST III, q.1 a.6 – q.2 a.1)

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist closes out Summa Theologiae III, q. 1, a. 6, where Aquinas, leaning on Augustine and Chrysostom, asks why the Incarnation happened neither at the world’s beginning nor at its end. He then maps the whole plan of the Tertia Pars—Incarnation, the Gospel narrative, the sacraments—before turning to q. 2 on how the Word is united to human nature. Working out the meaning of “nature” through Aristotle’s Physics and Boethius, he shows why Christ cannot have one composite nature, as Eutyches and readings of Cyril and the Athanasian Creed suggested, but must have two, against the mixture heresies Chalcedon rejected.

5. Dei Filius III: The Church as a Sign of Credibility, the Canons on Faith, and the Two Kinds of Knowledge of God

Thu, 22 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist reads through Denzinger’s text of Dei Filius: why faith is necessary for salvation, why the Church herself is a sign of credibility, and the canons condemning fideism, rationalism, and the denial of miracles. He then turns to Summa Contra Gentiles IV, ch. 15, where Aquinas distinguishes two orders of knowing God—natural reason and revealed faith—showing how the same truth, including certain moral precepts, can be reached by both. To picture the distinction he reaches for Aquinas’s comparison of sight and touch grasping one object differently, alongside remarks from Augustine and Aquinas’s Eucharistic hymns on the freedom and merit of belief.

5. Metaphysics I, Proemium: Wisdom Is About the First Causes; Philosophy Begins in Wonder

Thu, 13 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through the proemium of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, with an eye to Aquinas’s commentary, asking why wisdom must grasp both what is “said of all” and the first causes of things—since knowing causes is what makes teaching and understanding complete. He then turns to Aristotle’s claim that wisdom is speculative rather than practical, rooted in wonder rather than use, drawing on Plato’s Theaetetus and Aristotle’s image of the philosopher as a “philomythos,” lover of stories. Along the way he distinguishes universal poetic knowledge from singular historical knowledge, and warns against collapsing “the universal” into “the cause of all,” the mistake he locates in Hegel’s pantheism.

5. Why Begin from Nature: Beginnings, Order, and Heraclitus on the Common

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the question of why inquiry must begin from natural starting points—the desire to know causes, the wish to live well, the movement from sense to reason, and grasp of axioms like non-contradiction—rather than from private opinion. He works through Heraclitus’s fragments contrasting waking and sleeping and insisting we follow what is common, reading from the handout on natural fragments and the one on the “before and after” in acts of reason. Examples from Euclid’s geometry and Plato’s Theaetetus and Meno illustrate how teacher and student, or equals in discussion, can only advance together from shared, commonly known premises. The lecture draws throughout on Aristotle’s Physics, Ethics, and Poetics to show why order in beginning is not optional but necessary.

5. Paul VI, Via Negativa, and the Meanings of the Word 'Nature'

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with Paul VI’s encyclical Mysterium Fidei and its case for why dogmatic formulas hold across time, using this to draw out the difference between common and private experience and between the via negativa and via affirmativa in theology. He then turns to Aristotle’s Physics, the “books of Natural Hearing,” and works through the etymology of “nature” from physis, meaning birth, through the sense of a source within a mother, to the general sense Aristotle needs: any internal principle of change. Examples from Shakespeare, Aquinas, and Boethius illustrate each stage. The class closes by setting up Book II of the Physics, where nature gets defined in this third, operative sense.

5. Error as Wandering: The Sadducees, 'You Err Through This', and Ignorance as a Cause of Error

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins with a philological detour through Aristotle’s De Anima, following Euclid’s editor Heath on the Greek and Latin roots of “error” as wandering—the same root behind “planet”—and Aquinas’s remark that logic guides reason “orderly, easily, and without error.” He then sets Matthew, Mark, and Luke side by side on Christ’s exchange with the Sadducees over the resurrection, weighing variant readings such as “like the angels” against “equal to the angels” and the Greek behind “you err,” to show Christ diagnosing their mistake as rooted in ignorance of Scripture and of God’s power. He closes by tying this pattern of error-through-ignorance back to Aristotle’s account of causes and to the opening problem of De Anima Book I: why philosophers have held so many conflicting opinions about the soul.

5. The Good, the Better and the End of Man: Own Act, Virtue and Proportion

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

What is the good, and what does “better” mean? Berquist takes up that question from Nicomachean Ethics Book I, working through his handout “Note on End or Purpose of Man” to build three proofs—by induction, by categorical syllogism, and by a hypothetical syllogism using proportional reasoning—for man’s proper end: “the act with reason, done well, throughout life.” He ties this to virtue as what lets a thing do its own act well, touches his “Note on Practical Philosophy” and Aristotle’s Metaphysics II, and closes on the threefold division of goods of soul, body, and external things, the dispute Socrates dramatizes in the Apology.

5. The Good as Cause of Love: Shakespeare and Aquinas ST I-II q.27 a.1, and Knowledge as Cause of Love in Shakespeare

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Does the good cause love, and can something bad still be loved? Berquist walks through Aquinas’s article, its syllogistic argument, and its answers to objections about loving evil, self-deprecation, and beauty. He builds the case first, though, with an extended tour of Shakespeare—Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, King John, The Taming of the Shrew, Othello, The Tempest, the Henry VI/Richard III plays, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream—plus Jane Austen, showing goods of soul, body, and fortune drawing love, and their absence breeding a sense of being unlovable. A digression into Plato’s Meno on knowing simply versus knowing imperfectly explains how merely apparent goods can still be loved.

5. Ability and Beginning: Mover and Matter, and Thomas's Texts on Power (with Shakespeare and Mozart Asides)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist reopens the reading on potentia, asking how the active and passive senses of “ability” relate to the causes of mover and matter, and how both connect to the several meanings of “beginning” (principium) worked out in the Physics. Drawing on Aquinas’s Scriptum on the Sentences, De Potentia, and the Summa Theologiae, he argues that potentia belongs to the category of quality rather than relation, even though defining it requires the relational phrase “beginning of change”—much as knowledge is a quality that still implies a relation to what is known. The class closes with asides on metaphor and analogy, plus digressions on Shakespeare and Mozart, before turning toward the afternoon’s second reading.

Plato: On the Soul

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Plato: On the Soul #

All handout series

Division of the Phaedo #

division · Phaedo 01 · 9 pages · PDF · 01-Division_of_the_Phaedo.pdf

Covers: Outline of the whole Phaedo, from the framing scene (57A-59E) through the last day of Socrates (60A-118), including the discussions on whether the philosopher should be willing to die, the two parts on the soul’s immortality, the muthos about the soul after death (107C-115A), and Socrates’ death. Uses Stephanus, not Bekker, numbering (57A-118).

6. Summa II-II, Question 1, Articles 8–10: The objections on the articles answered, the Creed as a summary of Scripture, the Apostles', Nicene and Athanasian Creeds, and the Pope's authority over the Creed

Thu, 05 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through Aquinas’s replies to objections on the unity of God and the Trinity before taking up Question 1, Articles 9 and 10: whether the Creed is fittingly worded and whether it belongs to the pope to draw up a new edition of it. He compares the ordering of divine attributes in the Summa against the Summa Contra Gentiles, distinguishes the Apostles’ Creed from the Nicene “symbol of the fathers,” and considers Athanasius’s role behind the Athanasian Creed. The discussion is conversational, mixing close reading of the text with tangents into Church history and contemporary magisterial teaching.

6. The Ten Categories in Aristotle's Text and Thomas on Being Divided by Ways of Predication

Thu, 03 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist finishes the antepredicaments in Aristotle’s Categories, chapter 4, reading closely through his handout to lay out the ten highest genera — substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, having, action, passion — with attention to Aristotle’s Greek terms and his choice of examples, and to how affirmation and negation depend on the “intertwining” of terms. He then sets this beside Aquinas’s parallel treatments in the commentaries on the Physics and Metaphysics, asking why being splits non-univocally into these genera rather than one, with digressions on translation problems and on how analogical and equivocal naming bear on the relation of logic to natural philosophy and wisdom.

6. Metaphysics Proemium II: The Natural Road of Knowledge — Sensing, Memory, Experience, Art, and the Chief Artist Who Knows the Cause

Thu, 15 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through the opening chapter of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, following the ascent from sense perception through memory and experience to art and finally to universal, causal knowledge. He illustrates each stage with homely examples—cats, French fries, tea-making, his father’s factory, a kindergarten teacher—and draws in Aquinas’s commentary, Cicero on prudence, and lines from Shakespeare, including Romeo and Juliet. Along the way he argues that reason’s grasp of universals reveals the soul is not merely bodily, touching briefly on Francis de Sales’s account of angelic versus sensible knowledge to sharpen the contrast between fact and cause.

6. Question 1, Articles 2–3: Nature Acting for an End and How the End Specifies Human Acts

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Articles 2 and 3 of Question 1 on human acts, asking first whether acting for an end is proper to rational nature alone. Drawing on Aristotle’s Physics Book II, he shows that every agent, rational or not, acts for an end—rational creatures directing themselves through will and reason, irrational things directed by another, as with plants and Fabre’s observed wasps. He then turns to Article 3, on whether moral acts get their species from the end intended, working out the relation between action, passion, and will. An etymological aside on “ethics” as customary philosophy runs alongside the argument.

6. The Union in One Person: Cyril, the Athanasian Creed, the Human Nature as God's Joined Tool, and Why Christ Is Not a Human Person (ST III, q.2 a.1–2)

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s account of the hypostatic union in Summa Theologiae III, q. 2, a. 1–2, asking how one person can subsist in two really distinct natures without their blending into a third thing. He follows Aquinas’s replies through the Second Council of Constantinople, the Athanasian Creed, John Damascene, and Boethius’s definition of person, weighing the soul-body union as an analogy for the divine-human union and noting where it breaks down, with a parallel glance at the Summa Contra Gentiles. He closes with a geometric image—a single point as the shared origin of two distinct lines—to show how the man Christ, though truly human, is not a human person.

6. Dei Filius IV: How Reason Serves the Mysteries of Faith, Why Faith and Reason Cannot Contradict, and Why Theology Judges Philosophy

Thu, 22 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks how reason serves the mysteries of faith without ever mastering them, working from Vatican I’s Dei Filius alongside Augustine, Aquinas, and Vincent of Lérins. He distinguishes three ways reason helps: analogy with natural knowledge, as when mind, knowledge, and love illumine the Trinity; tracing connections among mysteries themselves, such as the Incarnation’s bearing on Mary as Mother of God or the missions of Son and Spirit ordered to man’s last end; and establishing faith’s preambles. He insists reason can never contradict or penetrate these truths, and that theology alone judges its own relation to philosophy. The class closes with Vatican I’s condemnations of rationalism and why doctrinal formulas keep their force across ages.

6. Metaphysics I, Proemium: Liberal Knowledge, Not a Human Possession, the Knowledge of God

Thu, 13 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Why does Aristotle call wisdom the most “liberal” and most “divine” of the sciences? Berquist works through the end of the proemium to the Metaphysics, read with Aquinas’s commentary, tracing the analogy between free and servile knowledge and Aristotle’s catalogue of practical bondage in ordinary human life. He examines the Simonides quotation, which assigns wisdom properly to God alone, and unfolds the double sense in which wisdom is “knowledge of God”—as its highest object and as possessed most fully by the divine intellect itself. Along the way he brings in Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Socrates, and Shakespeare, and points ahead to Aquinas on pride and humility, to show why the ancients approached this science with reverence rather than presumption.

6. Coming into Philosophy through Reason: Shakespeare's Exhortation and the Ability for Discourse

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins from the handout “Beginnings of Philosophy in the Senses and Reason,” asking what dispositions—wonder, the desire to live well, hope, humility, fear of error, freedom from anger—must precede the use of reason. He then works through Shakespeare’s exhortation (“What is a man…”), scanning its unrhymed iambic pentameter to draw out a working definition: reason as “the ability for large discourse, looking before and after,” set against sense and imagination by its power to reach the unknown through the known. Plato’s Phaedo and Boethius’s account of self-evident truths help place this account of reason within Aristotelian psychology and human nature.

6. Aristotle Defines Nature: Five Parts, Nature vs. Art, and Experimental Science

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the opening of Book II of Aristotle’s Physics, where nature is distinguished from art as two different sources of coming-to-be. He walks through Aristotle’s five-clause definition of nature—a source and cause of motion and rest, residing in the thing itself, and belonging to it primarily and per se rather than incidentally—testing each clause against examples: wood burning versus stone in fire, trees versus rocks, a log cabin reverting to nature, and the doctor who cures himself. He closes by asking why the Greeks made natural philosophy the road to wisdom, and how modern experimental science mixes natural knowledge with technical, artificial control.

6. Pius X on the Causes of Error: Pride, Curiosity, Likeness, False Imagination, and the Road of Inquiry

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks what actually causes error, starting from Pius X’s Pascendi Dominici Gregis and its distinction between remote causes lodged in the will—pride and curiosity—and the proximate intellectual cause, ignorance. He sets this alongside Aquinas’s own account of error in his commentary on the Epistles to Timothy and in the Summa Contra Gentiles, then works out how such causes operate accidentally, through coincidence, chance, and the removal of an impediment. Turning to Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations and the proem to the De Anima, he examines likeness, false imagination, and mental “wandering” as further sources of deception, illustrating the pattern with examples from King Lear, The Comedy of Errors, and Scripture.

6. Goods of the Soul, Body and Exterior: Socrates vs. the Athenians, and the Scope of Practical Philosophy

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Why must ethics, which is chiefly concerned with the good of the soul, also treat goods of the body and exterior goods? Berquist works through Aristotle’s threefold division, using Socrates’ stance against the Athenians to show dialectically that interior goods outrank exterior ones and goods of the soul outrank those of the body, on the principle that the end is always better than what merely serves it. He exposes a common fallacy—mistaking what is “prior in being,” like breathing, for what is “prior in goodness,” like philosophizing—then notes Aquinas’s use of this same division for Christ’s humanity, and closes by placing ethics within the order of the sciences, comparing its outward reach toward first principles to the movement in Aristotle’s Physics.

6. Knowledge as Cause of Love (q.27 a.2) and Likeness as the Third Cause of Love

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens by following “fancy,” or love, as it arises through sight and knowledge of another’s goodness or beauty across Shakespeare—The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and The Taming of the Shrew—pausing over reason, will, and devices like rhyme and alliteration. He then turns to Aquinas’s question of whether knowledge causes love, working through objections to Thomas’s answer that the good must first be apprehended for love to follow, though love can outrun the knowledge that gives rise to it, as when we love God more than we comprehend Him. He closes by introducing likeness as a third cause of love, setting up the next class.

6. Metaphysics IX, Lectio 2: Natural vs. Rational Ability, and Nature vs. Will

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up why irrational, natural abilities are determined to a single effect while rational abilities—reason and will—extend to contraries, since knowing one opposite entails knowing the other. He tests the distinction against examples drawn from Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and Plato’s Symposium and Meno, then turns to a harder puzzle: how reason and will can still be said to act “naturally” toward first principles and happiness without erasing the line between nature and rational power. Drawing on Aquinas’s De Potentia, Summa Theologiae, and De Veritate, he proposes resolving the tension through a broader, Boethian sense of “nature.”

Logic

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Logic #

All handout series

Foreword to the Categories #

foreword · Categories Foreword · 3 pages · PDF · 01-Foreward_to_the_Categories.pdf

Covers: Introduction to Aristotle’s Categories, considering its matter (names said of many things, genera and species), end, form (division into ante-predicaments, predicaments, post-predicaments) and author (Aristotle).

No recorded class was matched to this handout.

The Four Kinds of Opposite #

note · Categories Chapter 10 · 7 pages · PDF · 01-Opposites_Ch.10.pdf

7. Distinction and Order, the Senses of 'Before', and Augustine's Definition of Believing (II-II q.2 a.1)

Thu, 12 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with the logical distinctions between material and formal distinction, and between the senses of “order,” working through Aristotle’s five meanings of “before” in the Categories, ch. 12 — in time, in being, in knowledge, in goodness, and by causality. He shows how these senses bear on the Trinity and on Aquinas’s arguments for God as first being and first cause. The class then turns to Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 2, a. 1, examining Augustine’s definition of believing as “thinking with assent” and distinguishing it from doubt, suspicion, opinion, and simple understanding, to explain how firm adherence joined to ongoing inquiry grounds theology as fides quaerens intellectum.

7. Deriving the Ten Categories: Substance, Inherent Accidents, and Extrinsic Denomination by Cause and Measure

Thu, 03 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist follows Aquinas’s exposition of Categories, chapter 4, asking how ten distinct predicaments arise from a single threefold division of predication. Substance is predicated by essence; quantity, quality, and relation are predicated by an accident inhering in the subject; the remaining six—action, passion, place, time, position, and habitus—are predicated by extrinsic denomination from a cause (matter, form, agent, end) or from a measure. He clarifies the property/accident and intrinsic/extrinsic distinctions with examples like kicking, heating water, sitting, and wearing clothes, and notes that Aristotle’s Metaphysics will take up the same causal distinctions again.

7. Metaphysics Proemium III: Speculative Arts, Leisure, Words Equivocal by Reason, and the Six Marks of the Wise Man

Thu, 15 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist follows Aristotle’s proemium as it climbs from sense experience and memory through art and experience to the speculative sciences, asking why “maker” arts like poetry and painting, and leisure-born sciences like mathematics, count as wiser than practical crafts. He pauses over how words become equivocal “by reason” rather than by chance, using episteme and sophia, and animal and man, as examples drawn from the Ethics and Metaphysics Book V. He then begins working through Aristotle’s six-part description of the wise man—touching universal knowledge, difficulty, and certainty—as groundwork for the claim that wisdom is knowledge of first causes and beginnings.

7. Aquinas on the Last End (Summa I-II, Q1, Art. 4): One Feast, One House, One Mutual Happiness — Why Ends Cannot Go On Forever

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether one man can have several last ends, or none at all, distinguishing ends ordered per se from those ordered per accidens, with examples drawn from Euclid’s geometry and Aristotle’s Physics on the impossibility of an infinite regress of movers. He turns at length to Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona, tracing “happiness” back to “hap” and dwelling on the closing line “one feast, one house, one mutual happiness” as a picture of beatitude. Returning to the Article, he works through Aquinas’s replies on the diffusiveness of the good and the seemingly endless operations of reason and will, closing with the question of whether souls in heaven still grow in knowing and loving God.

7. Summa III, Q.2, Arts. 3–5: One Hypostasis in Christ, the Sense in Which His Person Is 'Composed', and the Union of His Soul and Body

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s careful sorting of person, hypostasis, and suppositum to ask where exactly the union of God and man occurs in Christ, and why saying it happens only “in the person” risks the Nestorian error condemned at Ephesus and Constantinople. He then asks whether Christ’s person can be called “composed” of two natures, and, turning to the union of soul and body, why this union is drawn into the already-existing person of the Word rather than constituting a new hypostasis. Along the way he reaches for grammatical and geometric analogies—including a line’s endpoint—to pin down the aliud/alius and hypostasis/persona distinctions doing the real work in the arguments, drawing also on a handout page and a passage in the School of Aristotle volume.

7. Summa Theologiae I, Q.1: Prologue, Overview, and Art. 1–2 (Why Sacred Doctrine Is Necessary; Objections to It Being a Science)

Thu, 05 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins with the prologue and structure of Question One before working through Article One’s case that revelation is necessary—both absolutely, for knowledge of man’s supernatural end, and for a fuller, more certain, more widely shared grasp of truths about God that unaided reason could reach only slowly and with error. He then takes up Article Two’s objections to calling sacred doctrine a science, addressing how it can proceed from higher, God-given knowledge the way subalternate sciences borrow their principles from higher ones. Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Ethics, Boethius, Dionysius, and Vatican I are brought in to frame the argument.

7. Metaphysics I, Proemium: Wonder Fulfilled, Iris Daughter of Thaumas, and Learning from Predecessors

Thu, 13 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the opening lines of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, where philosophy is said to begin in wonder. He separates two kinds: the wonder of ignorance, which vanishes once a cause is grasped, and the wonder of admiration, which excellence only deepens, as with the divine. The incommensurability of the diagonal and Euclidean geometry illustrate the first; Plato’s Theaetetus, where Iris is called the child of Thaumas, illustrates the pull toward the second. He closes by locating the proemium within Book One’s review of earlier thinkers on causation, framing the question of whether wisdom can be received from predecessors or must be won anew.

Aristotle: Natural Philosophy

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Aristotle: Natural Philosophy #

All handout series

Foreword to the Elements of Euclid #

foreword · EuclidElements · 5 pages · PDF · MATH_Foreward_to_Euclids_Elements.pdf

Covers: Introduction to Euclid’s Elements, unfolding its matter (geometry and arithmetic), end, form (how things are defined and demonstrated), and author (Euclid).

No recorded class was matched to this handout.

First Book of Natural Hearing, Reading One #

reading · Physics Reading 1 · 1 pages · PDF · NH_01-Reading_1.pdf

7. Reason as Ability for Large Discourse, Looking Before and After: Defining Reason

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist treats Shakespeare’s phrase “large discourse, looking before and after” as if it were a proper logical definition of reason, examining it piece by piece: genus and difference, “discourse” as knowing one thing through another, “large” as scope or extent, and “looking” as reason’s aim toward understanding. He offers the wise man’s discourse as the fullest case of this ability, and draws on Euclid, Aristotle, Boethius, and a passage from Romeo and Juliet to trace the causal sense buried in words like “understand” and “ground”—showing how ordinary language still carries the logic of before and under.

7. Nature vs. Art, Rhetoric, Experimental Science, and Mathematics vs. Natural Science (Physics II, Readings 2–3)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens by asking why the philosopher must follow the “natural road” of knowledge, and where rhetoric belongs as an offshoot of dialectic and ethics. He then turns to close commentary on Physics II, sorting out Aristotle’s distinctions among “nature,” “having a nature,” and “being by nature,” illustrated through a tree’s growth as opposed to the tree itself. He warns against two opposite errors—trying to prove what is self-evident, or denying what is actually known—and faults Kant, Berkeley, and Marx for blurring natural and artificial knowledge. He closes by previewing the next reading’s question of how natural philosophy relates to mathematics, using astronomy as the test case, and the role of the pre-Socratic “natural fragments” as reasoned guesses before Aristotle’s systematic science.

7. Are the Passions of the Soul Bodily? Emotions, the Will, and Immortality (De Anima I, Proemium)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up paragraphs 7–9 of the proemium to the De Anima, where Aristotle asks whether every passion of the soul—every emotion—involves the body, or whether something proper to the soul, above all thinking, might occur apart from it, a question bearing directly on the soul’s separability and immortality. He then turns to the emotions themselves, distinguishing the concupiscible from the irascible passions, and asks how far names like love, anger, or desire can be transferred to acts of the will and, more cautiously, to God. He draws on parallel treatments in Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, De Veritate, and Summa Contra Gentiles to test where such transfer is legitimate and where it breaks down.

7. Good, Better, and the End of Man: Review and the Two Kinds of Human Virtue

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist reviews how Aristotle moves from the definitions of “good” and “better” to man’s ultimate end: reasoned activity performed well. Virtue, on this account, is whatever enables a thing to perform its proper act excellently, and Berquist maps the resulting shape of the Nicomachean Ethics—moral virtue, intellectual virtue, states below and above the properly human, friendship, and finally happiness itself—showing how Aquinas takes up the same framework in the Summa Theologiae. He draws on the handouts on reason, logic, and man’s end to hold the argument together, pausing along the way for reflections on a recent pilgrimage tied to Padre Pio and on spiritual friendship in Scripture and monastic life.

7. Likeness as a Cause of Love: Aquinas on Why Like Attracts Like, and Why Rivals Clash

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Why does likeness sometimes make people love each other and sometimes make them rivals? Berquist follows Aquinas’s Summa treatment of likeness as a cause of love, sorting out the objections by distinguishing actual likeness, proportional likeness, and likeness as shared potential-to-act. He tests these distinctions against literary cases—Washington Irving on Goldsmith, Boswell’s Johnson, Austen’s characters, and the clashing lovers of Wuthering Heights—to show how the same similarity can bond or divide people. He closes on the theological risk this raises: loving what merely resembles oneself, a neighbor or oneself, more than loving God, who is better.

7. Reason and Will as Natures: Thomas's Two Solutions and the Man/Animal Analogy

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up a puzzle from De Veritate q. 22, a. 5: if reason and will are themselves kinds of nature, how can “nature” be used as something distinct from them? He traces Aquinas’s answer through the pattern of naming things equivocally by reason, where a shared term stays with whatever has nothing extra while the thing with an added feature gets a new name—illustrated by man and animal, habit and disposition, and finger and thumb. Drawing also on Summa Contra Gentiles III, 46 and parallel texts, he shows why reason and will must each rest on something known or willed naturally, prior to discursive activity. He closes by contrasting this with Mill and Sartre, who miss reason’s and will’s natural dimension.

8. Believing God, Believing by God, Believing in God, and Why Faith Is Needed for Salvation (II-II q.2 aa.2–3)

Thu, 12 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Article 2’s question of what it means to believe God, to believe by God, and to believe in God, tracing how Aquinas distinguishes the object, the authority, and the end of the act of faith. He moves closely through the Latin text, objections, and replies, pausing over translation problems between Latin and English and drawing on Aristotle’s account of learning and of equivocal terms to sharpen the distinctions. Turning to Article 3, he examines why rational creatures, ordered to an end exceeding natural reason, require supernatural instruction from God to attain it. Brief anecdotes—John Paul II in Poland, Cardinal O’Connor—illustrate the stakes, and the class breaks off partway through Article 3’s replies.

8. Being Divided into the Ten Categories: Thomas's Exposition of Metaphysics V (and Why Being Is Not a Genus)

Thu, 10 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Thomas’s commentary on Metaphysics V to ask why “being” cannot serve as a genus for its categories, tracing instead how it divides analogically into substance, quantity, quality, relation, and the other predicaments according to how a predicate relates to its subject. He distinguishes per se from accidental being, being in the mind from being outside it, and act from potency, illustrating each with everyday examples. A student’s question sends him briefly into Aquinas’s teaching on how soul fits body differently across species and between man and woman before he returns to the main line. Throughout, he stresses treating “being” as a word equivocal by reason, ordering its senses carefully, against modern philosophy’s looser handling of terms like “opposite.”

8. Metaphysics I, Reading 1: The Natural Road from Sense to Reason, and Why God's Love Causes Goodness (Part 1 of 3)

Thu, 22 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins Metaphysics Book I by unpacking “methodos” as a road, tracing how knowledge naturally travels from sense perception through memory, experience, and art up to universal knowledge and finally wisdom’s grasp of first causes. He pauses at length on a theological point drawn from Aquinas, Scripture, and Shakespeare: human love is caused by goodness already seen in another, while God’s love causes the goodness creatures have. This distinction explains why wisdom, as knowledge of the first cause, must come last in the order of human learning, even though it is first in the order of being. He weaves in Boethius, the contrast of natural philosophy with metaphysics, and the roots of the Greek and Latin terms along the way.

8. Aquinas on the Last End (Summa I-II, Q1, Art. 5): Can a Man Have Many Last Ends? No One Can Serve Two Masters

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Article 5 of the Summa’s question on the last end: can a single man will many ultimate ends at once? He lays out objections from Augustine’s City of God and Scripture before tracing Thomas’s threefold argument—that the last end must be one because it alone perfectly satisfies desire, because it functions as the first principle moving the will, and because it gives unity to the whole genus of voluntary acts. He clarifies the reasoning with Aristotle on perfection and unity, Boethius’s Consolation, and homely examples like candy, tea, and stereos, closing by linking one man’s need for a single end to the human race’s shared final end.

8. Summa III, Q.2, Arts. 5–6: Christ's Soul and Body Joined to a Pre-existing Person, and Why the Union Is Not Accidental

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up two articles of Summa III, q. 2: whether Christ’s body and soul were united less perfectly than in ordinary men, and whether human nature was joined to the Word by accident. He traces the Nestorian and Eutychian errors that pushed the Church to define the union “according to hypostasis” rather than accident or nature, drawing on Damascene and the councils alongside Aquinas’s own text. Along the way he digresses into Aristotle’s categories and the sense of touch before returning to the main line. He closes by using the analogy of body and soul reunited at the resurrection to show how human nature subsists in the Word’s person without adding a new accident or hypostasis.

8. Summa Theologiae I, Q.1, Art. 2–5: Sacred Doctrine as a Subalternate Science, One Science, More Speculative, and the Highest Science

Thu, 05 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up four questions Aquinas poses about sacred doctrine: is it a science, is it a single science, is it speculative or practical, and is it the most excellent science of all. Working from Aristotle’s account of subalternate sciences in the Posterior Analytics, he explains how theology borrows its principles from God’s own knowledge and from the knowledge of the blessed, the way music takes principles it does not itself demonstrate. He traces Aquinas’s argument that the science’s unity comes not from its many subjects but from the single formal aspect under which they are treated—things knowable through divine revelation—and closes by weighing the certitude and dignity that make this science higher than the rest, pausing on Augustine’s De Trinitate along the way.

8. The Four Causes and the First Philosophers: Thales and Anaximander

Thu, 20 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Continuing his commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics Book I, Berquist re-establishes the four causes—material, formal, efficient, and final—along with three corollaries governing how they relate, before turning to Aristotle’s review of the Presocratics. He works through the fragments on Thales, who held water to be the origin of all things, and Anaximander, whose notion of the apeiron, or “unlimited,” develops that first thought. Along the way he draws connections to Scripture and theology, including water as a figure for God and the matter of Baptism, and situates the discussion in the historical and geographic setting of Miletus.

8. The Senses of Before and After, Order, and the Exhortation's Five Reasons to Use Reason

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Starting from Shakespeare’s definition of reason as “large discourse, looking before and after,” Berquist asks what “before” actually means, and finds it is said in several ways: before in time, before in being, before in the order of reasoning, and before in goodness or rank, with a further “crowning” causal sense drawn from Aristotle’s Categories and Metaphysics and Aquinas’s commentary. He tests these distinctions against examples from geometry, chemistry, theology, and Shakespeare himself, including Two Gentlemen of Verona and Hamlet. The class closes by tying reason’s power to order time, being, knowledge, and cause to the exhortation to use reason well—reason as what makes man like God and true to himself, rather than governed by passion alone.

8. The Central Question of Philosophy: Plato, Aristotle, and Whether the Way We Know Is the Way Things Are

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist poses what he calls the central question of philosophy: must knowing match the mode of being it knows, or can truth survive when mind and thing differ in order or separation? Working from a passage in Aristotle’s natural philosophy, particularly the critique of Plato’s separated mathematicals and forms, he shows thinkers from Plato through Ockham, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, and Marx answering yes or no and arriving at sharply divergent systems. Aristotle’s own answer—that we can know things truly even when we know them apart from, or in a different order than, how they exist—is defended as the coherent alternative. Berquist traces this position forward into Boethius’s account, in the Consolation of Philosophy, of God’s eternal knowledge of temporal things.

8. Concupiscible and Irascible Emotions, Human Pleasures, and Natural Philosophy's Definition of Anger

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks why natural philosophy, unlike dialectic, must define passions like anger and fear by including bodily matter in the definition, not merely the formal account. Working from Aristotle’s De Anima, he examines how thumos and epithumia—the irascible and concupiscible appetites—relate to reason, comparing this to Plato’s tripartite division of the soul in the Republic and Symposium. He takes up the hierarchy of animal, human, and angelic pleasures, and turns to Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae on the theological virtues, distinguishing their objects: truth, goodness, and mercy. Touching on Augustine’s Confessions and reflections on beauty and liturgical music along the way, he returns to the methodological point that inquiry into the soul’s passions eventually gives way to metaphysics once immateriality is at stake.

8. The Virtues of Reason and the Moral Virtues in Aristotle and Thomas

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Thomas’s simple division of intellectual virtue into speculative and practical reason—art and prudence on the practical side, understanding, science, and wisdom on the speculative—and sets it against Aristotle’s own division, based on what is better known to us. He then turns to the moral virtues, noting that Aristotle’s Ethics treats courage, temperance, the minor social virtues, and justice last, while Thomas’s Secunda Secundae reverses the order, beginning with prudence and justice. He traces the difference to philosophy’s ascent from sense experience toward God against theology’s descent from God to creatures, using etymology and everyday examples to show why courage is easier to grasp than wisdom or justice.

8. Hope, Desire and Being Loved: Other Causes of Love, and Whether Love's Capacity Has a Limit

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Thomas’s article asking whether another passion or act of the will can be a cause of love, and works through the objections to his reply: every appetitive motion presupposes some prior love, though pleasure, desire, and hope can occasion further loves rooted in that first one. Reading through the “Causes of Love” handout, he brings in Augustine on love, Aristotle’s account of friendship and being loved in the Ethics, and illustrations from Shakespeare and Plato’s Phaedo. The class closes on self-love and the commandment to love one’s neighbor “as yourself,” pointing ahead to Thomas’s treatise on love’s effects.

8. Names Equivocal by Reason: Six Kinds and the Senses of 'Nature'

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through the difference between names equivocal by chance and names equivocal “by reason,” building a six-fold taxonomy under two branches: retained names, where one thing adds something notable to a shared meaning (as “making” does to “doing”) or possesses that meaning perfectly against another’s imperfect share (as intellectus does against ratio), and transferred names, carried to new things either by dropping part of the original sense or through various proportional ratios. Drawing on Aristotle’s Metaphysics with Aquinas’s commentary, he runs the scheme against “being,” “healthy,” “political,” and “act,” warning against flattening all of it into “analogy.” He closes by tracking “nature” itself from “birth” through “intrinsic source of motion” to “form” and “what a thing is,” setting up upcoming readings on act and potency.

Ethics

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Ethics #

All handout series

Thomas Aquinas, Proemium to Practical Philosophy (beginning of his laying out of the 1st Bk of Nicomachean Ethics) #

reading · AquinasCommentary Proemium to Practical Philosophy · 3 pages · PDF · 01-Aquinass_Proemium_to_Practical_Philosophy.pdf

Covers: Translation of Aquinas’s proemium to his Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics: wisdom orders; the twofold order (of parts to each other, and to an end); four ways order relates to reason (natural, logical, moral, and productive/artistic); and the division of moral philosophy into monastic (ethics), domestic (economics) and political.

9. Washington's Virtues, Believing God About God, and Why Truths Reason Can Prove Must Also Be Believed (II-II q.2 a.4)

Thu, 09 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Before reaching Aquinas, Berquist lingers on George Washington, using tributes from Adams, Jefferson, and Washington Irving to show the cardinal virtues embodied in a life. He then takes up Article 4 of question two: is it fitting for man to believe things demonstrable by natural reason? Working through Thomas’s three reasons—speed, universality, and certitude—he ties the answer to divine simplicity and to the structure of the act of faith itself, distinguishing credere Deum, Deo, and in Deum, and touching on how miracles and an infused habit dispose the believer toward assent.

9. Crossing Two Divisions, How Words Become Equivocal by Reason, and the Start of the Chapter on Substance

Thu, 10 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens by showing how crisscrossing two two-part divisions yields real distinctions, using Aristotle’s account of plot—beginning, middle, end—in the Poetics and the Trinitarian processions as illustrations, before applying the technique to substance and accident, universal and singular. He then spends the bulk of the class on how a term becomes “equivocal by reason,” distinguishing several ways this happens: keeping or dropping a common name, losing part of a word’s original meaning, and transferring a term by ratio or likeness of ratios, drawing examples from the Physics, Topics, On the Soul, and Metaphysics. He closes by turning to Categories, ch. 5, working from his handout on substance and Aquinas’s commentary on the division of substance into first and second substance.

9. Metaphysics I, Reading 2: The Six-Part Description of the Wise Man — Universality, Certitude, Causes, Knowledge for Its Own Sake, and the Origin of 'Philosopher' (Part 2 of 3)

Thu, 22 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Continuing his reading of Book Alpha, Berquist takes up each of the six marks by which Aristotle describes the wise man, pausing longest over the apparent tension between certitude and difficulty: how can wisdom be both hardest to attain and most certain? He draws on St. Thomas’s commentary to sort out equivocal terms like “whole” and “part” as they bear on the axioms, and traces the kinship between logic and wisdom. He closes by tracing the word “philosopher” itself back to Pythagoras, reading into it a lesson in humility, with anecdotes from his Laval teachers De Koninck and Dion along the way.

9. Summa I-II, Q.1, Articles 6–7: Whether we will everything for the sake of the last end, and whether all people share one last end (jest, speculation, taste and the sweetness of the Lord)

Thu, 03 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks whether every human act, including something as apparently pointless as a joke or a piece of speculative thought, is really willed for the sake of the last end. Working through Article 6, he shows how Aquinas treats jest and contemplation as ordered to happiness indirectly rather than directly, drawing on Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Ethics. He turns briefly to the opening of Article 7 and its question whether all men have the same last end, using the Psalm’s “taste and see” to explain why everyone seeks happiness even while disagreeing about what it is. Along the way he reads from Summa Contra Gentiles IV, ch. 15 and a handout on the first definition of reason.

9. Summa III, Q.2, Arts. 7–8: The Union Is Created, Real Relations vs. Relations of Reason, and Union vs. Assumption

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with a few pages from St. Teresa of Ávila’s autobiography, chapter 24, on her rapture during the “Veni Creator” and her gradual visions of Christ’s hands, face, and glorified body. He then turns to Summa III, q. 2, a. 7: is the union of Christ’s two natures itself something created? Article 8 presses the further question of why “union” and “assumption” name different things, since assumption is the act terminating in the union. Working through Aristotle and Avicenna on real versus rational relations, and Thomas’s De Potentia, he ties the argument back to divine immutability, the Trinity, and Mary’s Assumption.

9. Summa I, q.1, a.6–7: Sacred Doctrine as Wisdom and God as Its Subject

Thu, 12 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Articles 6 and 7 of Question 1, where Aquinas asks whether sacred doctrine counts as wisdom and whether God is properly its subject. He traces the objections and Aquinas’s replies, drawing on Aristotle, Augustine, and Dionysius, to show how sacred doctrine exceeds philosophical wisdom by knowing God both from creatures and from revelation itself. He argues everything treated in theology—creatures, morals, history—relates back to God as its beginning and end. The class closes by pointing ahead to how this subject connects to Scripture’s witness to the Word made flesh, with a glance at Vatican II.

9. Anaximenes, Pythagoras and Heraclitus: Air, Number, and the Puzzle of Change

Thu, 20 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist follows the Presocratics as each philosopher tries to improve on his predecessor’s guess about the world’s first principle, moving from the poets’ Mother Earth through Thales’ water and Anaximander’s Unlimited to Anaximenes’ choice of air, weighing why each step gains in unlimitedness and fineness. He then takes up Pythagoras’s discovery that the octave is a 2:1 ratio to introduce formal cause as something distinct from material stuff. Turning to Heraclitus, he reads the river fragment and the pairings of contraries—day and night, living and dead—as posing the problem of change and apparent contradiction that Parmenides, Plato, and Aristotle will later have to answer.

9. Why Philosophy Requires Reason: Review, Error and Mistake, and Better vs. More Necessary

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes Shakespeare’s short exhortation contrasting man’s chief good with that of the beast and shows its argument works by denial of the consequent, then uses it to distinguish several senses of “before” and “after”—especially priority in being, where something can exist without another but not conversely, versus priority in goodness. Breathing and philosophizing, faith and charity, illustrate that what is more necessary need not be better. Along the way he turns to Scriptural and Thomistic passages on error, wandering, and the road of wisdom, and briefly likens the crisscross division at work to the Trinitarian relations of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

9. Thales and Anaximander: Reasonable Guesses About the First Matter

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins with the surviving fragments of the first Greek philosophers, working from the handout “On the Natural Fragments” and treating them not as certain knowledge but as reasonable guesses, unlike Aristotle’s reasoned-out science. He traces philosophy’s start in Miletus and Thales’s claim that water is the beginning of all things, asking why the mind naturally seeks one simple material cause before it looks for a maker or mover. He contrasts this with Genesis, which opens with a divine maker rather than a material origin, and uses the images of mother as matter and father as cause to frame the difference, setting up the movement toward Aristotle’s fuller causal account.

9. De Anima, Book Two: Defining the Soul by Division as Substantial Form and First Act

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the opening of Book Two of Aristotle’s De Anima, asking how one can define something as elusive as the soul. He contrasts induction from particular examples with the method of division, arguing that only division can pin down so slippery a subject. Working through Aristotle’s opening divisions, he places the soul within the category of substance, then narrows it to form rather than matter or composite, and finally to first act rather than second act—using the analogies of geometric science versus its exercise, and health versus the living body. Aquinas’s commentary and cross-references to the Physics, Categories, and Posterior Analytics supply the background needed to grasp soul as the substantial form of a natural body.

9. Defining Moral Virtue: A Habit of Choosing the Mean, and the Virtues Between Their Extremes

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the definition of moral virtue from Books Two and Three of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics: a habit of choosing, lying in a mean relative to the individual, and determined by right reason. He then walks through the particular virtues—courage, moderation, liberality, munificence, magnanimity, mildness, and the social virtues of friendliness and truthfulness—showing how each stands between an excess and a deficiency, with the mean often falling closer to one extreme than the other. He closes by extending the doctrine of the mean to truthfulness in speech about God, comparing it to how orthodox Trinitarian teaching avoids the opposite errors of Arius and Sabellius.

9. Aquinas on Love: Review of the Treatise's Divisions and Union as the First Effect of Love

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist returns to Aquinas’s question on the effects of love, asking what it means to call union its first and principal effect. He works out three senses of union: as a cause of love, as formally the same thing as love, and as the real union that love seeks and achieves between lovers. He sets this within Thomas’s habitual practice of dividing a topic into twos and threes. To make the distinctions concrete, he draws on Shakespeare—As You Like It, All’s Well That Ends Well, Sonnet 36, and “The Phoenix and the Turtle”—showing how love joins lovers across distance and even turns two into one.

9. Metaphysics IX: Refuting the Megarians on Ability and Act

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the third reading of Book IX of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, following St. Thomas’s commentary line by line. The question is whether ability, or potency, is real only at the moment it is actually being used—the Megarian position Aristotle sets out to refute. He walks through Aristotle’s four arguments against it, drawn from house-building, from sensible qualities, from the operation of the senses, and from the case of standing and sitting, each showing that a thing can truly have a capacity it is not currently exercising. The session ends by pointing toward Book IX’s next task: ordering act and potency properly to each other.

Poetics

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Poetics #

All handout series

A Foreword to the Poetics #

foreword · Poetics 01 · 13 pages · PDF · 01-A_Foreward_to_the_Poetics.pdf

Covers: Introduction to the Poetics: what a poet is (maker of likenesses of human life in words vs. maker of verses), the matter/subject of the science, its dependence on experience of literary works, literary history, demonstration from the end of tragedy, and Aristotle’s treatment of species (tragedy and epic) before genus.

10. Explicit and Implicit Faith: The Learned and the Simple, and Belief in the Mystery of Christ (II-II q.2 aa.5-7)

Thu, 09 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up three articles of the Summa on the scope of required faith: must everyone believe every article explicitly, does this obligation differ between the learned and the simple, and was explicit belief in the mystery of Christ demanded of people in every historical period? He follows Aquinas’s objections, sed contra, and corpus in each article, drawing on Augustine, Gregory, Dionysius, and scriptural texts from Hebrews, Romans, Job, and John to distinguish core articles everyone must know from secondary matters the unlearned may hold only implicitly, trusting the Church’s fuller understanding.

10. First and Second Substance, and How Words Take On Related Meanings (Analogy vs. Equivocation by Reason)

Thu, 17 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist reads the chapter on substance in Aristotle’s Categories, distinguishing first substance (the singular thing) from second substance (the universal) and showing how this reorders the earlier division of singular and universal. He extends the inquiry into St. Thomas’s varied uses of “substance” across the Summa theologiae, Summa contra Gentiles, and the definition of faith in Hebrews, then turns to how analogy differs from equivocation by reason, using “healthy,” “disposition,” and “understanding” as test cases. A digression on the beautiful as an object of cognition rather than will, drawn from Augustine’s Confessions, rounds out the session, with everyday examples like elections and sunsets keeping the distinctions concrete.

10. Sapientis est Ordinare: The Wise Man as Director, Universal in Predicating and in Causing, and Why the Most Universal Is Hardest to Know (Part 3 of 3)

Thu, 22 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist closes his reading of Thomas’s commentary on the opening of the Metaphysics by tying the sixth mark of wisdom—that the wise man directs others—back to the earlier marks: knowledge of the universal, of first causes, and of what is desirable for its own sake. Using the contrast between induction and syllogism, and analogies of command like king and general, he distinguishes two senses of “universal”: universal in predicating versus universal in causing. He then turns to the passage explaining why the most universal things, being furthest from the senses, are hardest for men to know, with digressions on pride as a cause of error and on modern philosophy along the way.

10. Summa I-II, Q.1, Article 8 and Q.2, Articles 1–2: God as the end of all things, and why happiness is not in riches or honor

Thu, 03 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist follows Aquinas’s text closely, moving from the question of whether all creatures are ordered to man’s last end to the opening moves of the treatise on happiness. He shows how Thomas argues from confused to precise notions of man’s final good, then examines why riches cannot be that good—they exist only for the sake of something else—and why honor fails too, since it is given in recognition of some prior excellence rather than being self-sufficient. Along the way he draws on Aristotle’s Physics, Ethics, and Politics, Boethius, and Augustine, and illustrates the arguments with examples from Scripture, Shakespeare, Mozart, and Thackeray’s Vanity Fair.

10. Thomas as Teacher of Things and Words; Q.2, Art. 9: The Greatest of Unions, and Things That Differ Only in Thought

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins with Thomas’s exposition of Psalm 48, where he distinguishes teaching res (things)—as in the Summa’s treatment of God and the Incarnation—from teaching verba (words), as in scriptural commentary, placing Pseudo-Dionysius’s De Divinis Nominibus between the two and linking this to Vatican II’s and Leo XIII’s praise of Thomas as both dogmatic and scriptural teacher. He then reads closely through Summa Theologiae III, q. 2, a. 9, on whether the hypostatic union is the greatest of unions, following the objections, the sed contra from Augustine’s De Trinitate, and Thomas’s replies. Along the way he digresses on unity versus numerical oneness, the convertibility of being and good, and the difference between real distinction and distinction of reason as it applies to the divine persons and nature.

10. Summa I, q.1, a.7–9: Christ as King, Arguing from Authority, and Metaphor in Scripture

Thu, 12 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins with the Gospel portrait of Christ as king, prophet, and priest, and the Magi’s three gifts, to set up the unity of theoretical and practical wisdom in sacred doctrine. He then reads Article 7 on theology’s proper subject, Article 8 on how it argues from the articles of faith rather than toward them, weighing authority against reason, and Article 9 on why Scripture speaks through metaphors and bodily likenesses. He brings in Aristotle, Boethius, Dionysius, and Augustine, and reaches for Homer, Shakespeare, and the Song of Songs to show why figurative language reaches both the learned and the simple.

10. Heraclitus: Hidden Harmony, Strife as Father of All, and Fire

Thu, 27 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through a cluster of Heraclitus fragments on the unity of opposites, showing how a hidden harmony can underlie apparent contradiction in change, in friendship, and in cosmic order, and how strife or “war” serves as a moving cause behind becoming. He asks why Heraclitus settles on fire as first principle, tracing its influence on Empedocles and Anaxagoras, and drawing out later echoes in Hegel’s dialectic, Marxist dialectical materialism, and Heisenberg’s notion of energy. He closes on Heraclitus’s own unresolved tension between a rationally ordered cosmos and a universe described as “a heap piled up at random,” setting up the turn to Anaxagoras and mind.

Aristotle: First Philosophy (Wisdom)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Aristotle: First Philosophy (Wisdom) #

All handout series

The Matter and Order of Wisdom #

paper · Metaphysics WS01 · 54 pages · PDF · WS01_The_Matter_and_Order_of_Wisdom.pdf

Covers: Essay on what wisdom (First Philosophy/Metaphysics) is about and the order of its matters, and the order of the fourteen books; builds on the Proemium of Book 1 (980a21-983a23) read with Aquinas’s exposition.

Read from in:

Introductory Note for the Fourteen Books #

foreword · Metaphysics 01 · 3 pages · PDF · WS02_B1_01-Intro._Note_on_the_14_Books.pdf

10. Thomas's Proemia: Logic as the Art of Arts and Its Division by the Three Acts of Reason

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Why does Aquinas call logic an art, and an art of arts at that? Berquist works through the proemium to the Peri Hermeneias and the longer proemium to the Posterior Analytics, showing how Aquinas grounds the division of the logical works in reason’s three acts—simple apprehension, judgment, and reasoning—matching them to the Categories, the Peri Hermeneias, and the treatises on syllogism. He also draws out the further split among demonstrative, dialectical, and rhetorical or poetic argument by their degrees of certitude, illustrating the reflexivity of reason with examples from Plato’s Timaeus and Phaedo.

10. Simplicity, Pantheism and Digressions: Einstein, Hegel, Shakespeare, and Reflections on Reason

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Anaximander’s surviving fragments, asking why the “unlimited” (apeiron) rather than a determinate stuff like Thales’ water should be the source of everything, and defends the claim both qualitatively and by analogy to conservation laws in modern physics. He considers Anaximander’s striking idea that the origin of things is also their end—comparing it to the Christian “Alpha and Omega”—and his description of natural regularity in terms of “justice.” From there the class wanders into Boethius’s life, the pantheist leanings of Hegel and Einstein, and a Shakespearean illustration, before turning ahead to Anaximenes.

10. Know Thyself; Aristotle's Divisions Toward Defining the Soul (De Anima II.1)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins from the Delphic command “know thyself,” arguing it is finally addressed to the rational soul asking what it itself is. He then follows Aristotle’s method of definition by division at the start of De Anima II: soul falls under substance rather than quality, under form rather than matter, and under first act rather than second act, or operation. He pairs this with the parallel division of body—natural versus artificial, living versus nonliving—that Aristotle needs to define soul as the first act of a natural body having life potentially. Along the way he draws on the Physics for matter, form, potency, and act, and briefly sets Aristotle’s account against the Phaedo’s picture of soul as harmony.

10. Aristotle's Proemium to the Ethics: The Highest End, Method and Fit Hearers

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins the Ethics by distinguishing two ways of dividing an Aristotelian treatise: the familiar editorial split into books and chapters, and the logical structure of proemium and tractatus that Aquinas’s commentary tracks through its lectiones. Reading closely through Book I’s opening chapters, he follows Aristotle’s argument that every art, action, and choice aims at some good, moving from subordinate ends up to the highest good, happiness, as the proper object of political science, and pauses over Aristotle’s remark that ethics admits only the certitude its subject matter allows. He illustrates what a proemium does and demands of its reader with comparisons to Plato’s Timaeus, the opening of Romeo and Juliet, and Vatican II’s Dei Verbum.

10. Mutual Indwelling, Ecstasy and Zeal: Aquinas and Shakespeare on the Effects of Love

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Thomas’s account of love’s effects in the Summa Theologiae, moving through the objections and responses on mutual indwelling (mutual inhaesio) and ecstasy as love’s second and third effects. He draws out Thomas’s distinctions between the knowing and desiring powers, love of friendship versus love of desire, and Aristotle’s senses of “in” and “part,” testing each against Shakespeare—Antony and Cleopatra, Much Ado About Nothing, Macbeth, Hamlet, the Sonnets—alongside Aristotle, Dionysius, and Scripture. He closes by introducing zeal, the fourth effect, distinguishing it from the first three as the lover’s readiness to act against whatever threatens the beloved.

10. Metaphysics IX: Motion as the Most Known Act, and Heraclitus and Hegel

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through Aristotle’s definition of the possible—that whose corresponding act involves nothing impossible—and his puzzling claim that “act” (energeia) gets its name primarily from motion, since motion is what we know best, even though it ranks lowest among kinds of actuality. He traces this back into Metaphysics VI and Aquinas’s commentary, then widens out to Heraclitus and Cratylus on universal flux, Plato’s Forms as an answer to that flux, and the modern echo in Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger, who make becoming more fundamental than being. Along the way he uses courtroom testimony and everyday examples of motion and rest to keep the abstract distinction between potency and act concrete.

Summa Contra Gentiles

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Summa Contra Gentiles #

14 passages treated in 53 classes; 27 passages mentioned in passing

All works

Book I #

Summa Contra Gentiles I, ch. 9 #

Text: aquinas.cc, Latin – English · isidore.co, Latin – English

Treated in:

Prima Pars — 11. Summa Theologiae I, Q.1 aa.9–10 and the Prologue to Q.2: Metaphor in Scripture, the Four Senses, and the Plan of the Summa (from 48:34)

Summa Contra Gentiles I, ch. 35 #

Text: aquinas.cc, Latin – English · isidore.co, Latin – English

11. Explicit Faith in the Trinity, the Merit of Believing, and Reason's Role in Faith (ST II-II q.2 a.8-10, q.3 a.1)

Thu, 16 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist continues his article-by-article reading of the Summa on faith, taking up whether explicit belief in the Trinity is necessary for salvation, whether the act of believing is meritorious, and whether reasoning about what one believes increases or lessens that merit. Working through objections and Thomas’s replies in turn, he digresses into personal recollections of Charles De Koninck and Msgr. Dionne and touches on euthanasia and Protestant belief as test cases for the principles at stake. The class ends just as Thomas opens q.3, a.1, distinguishing confession as an act of faith from confession as an act of penance or thanksgiving.

11. The Properties of Substance, the Hypostasis of Christ, and Thomas's Texts on Substance

Thu, 17 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist continues through Aristotle’s Categories chapter 5, listing the properties of substance: not being in a subject, being said univocally, being a “this something,” admitting no contrary, admitting no degree, and being able to receive contraries while staying numerically one. He illustrates each with ordinary examples before turning to Aquinas, asking how these Aristotelian terms bear on the naming of God, divine simplicity, and the puzzle of how “substance,” “hypostasis,” and “person” apply—or fail to apply—to the Trinity and to Christ’s human nature. He closes by flagging that the next class turns to Aristotle’s treatment of quantity.

11. Metaphysics Proemium: The Natural Road and the Six Marks of the Wise Man

Thu, 29 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with Aristotle’s account, from the proemium to the Physics, of how human knowing moves from sensation through memory and experience to universal knowledge—an order running from confused to distinct. He then turns to the Metaphysics and its description of the wise man by six marks: knowing all things universally, knowing difficult things, knowing with greater certitude, knowing through causes, knowing for its own sake, and being one who commands others rather than obeys. Working through Aquinas’s commentary, he argues these marks together identify wisdom as knowledge of the first causes. Digressions along the way take up logic versus natural philosophy, the several senses of “before,” and the distinction between per se and per aliud.

11. Felicitas as Fruit, Boethius on False Happiness, and Why Happiness Is Not Honor or Glory (ST I-II q.2 aa.1-3)

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether human happiness could consist in honor or in glory, following the catalogue of false happiness Aquinas borrows from Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. He opens by tracing felicitas to its root sense of fruit, then reads passages on true and false happiness from Washington Irving’s Sketch Book and Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. Working through articles 2 and 3, he shows why neither honor nor fame can be man’s ultimate good, since both rest on the imperfect opinion of those who bestow them rather than on the excellence itself. He closes by setting human glory’s instability against the fixed certainty of glory before God.

11. Relations of Reason, the Divine Power, and the Grace of Union (ST III, Q.2, aa.10–11)

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist reads closely through two articles of the Summa’s third part on the hypostatic union, pressing the question of whether the grace by which Christ’s human nature was joined to the Word could in any way have followed upon merit, or whether it must simply precede it as pure gift. He draws on Aristotle’s distinction between what belongs to nature and what belongs to will to sharpen how the Father’s generation of the Son differs from God’s power to create, and uses this to clarify what a “relation of reason” actually is. Along the way he ties the argument to sanctifying grace, the theological virtues, and the meaning of the Mass, pausing to question students on the Latin text.

11. Summa Theologiae I, Q.1 aa.9–10 and the Prologue to Q.2: Metaphor in Scripture, the Four Senses, and the Plan of the Summa

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist wraps up Article 9 on why Scripture uses lowly bodily images rather than dignified ones, then turns fully to Article 10: whether one passage of Scripture can carry several senses at once. He works through the objections, Gregory the Great’s sed contra, and Aquinas’s answer distinguishing the literal or historical sense from the threefold spiritual sense—allegorical, moral, and anagogical—drawing on Dionysius, Augustine, and Hugh of St. Victor along the way. He illustrates the distinctions with ordinary examples of metaphor and irony before previewing the prologue to Question 2, comparing its plan for treating God in Himself, as source of creatures, and as end of the rational creature to the structure of the Summa Contra Gentiles.

11. Empedocles: The Four Elements, Ratios, and Change as Mere Mixing

Thu, 27 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist reads Empedocles’ surviving fragments—working from the “On the Natural Fragments” handout and DHB Vol I—to ask why earth, air, fire, and water, distinguished by hot/cold and wet/dry, must be posited as unchanging roots beneath apparent generation and corruption. He uses homely examples like sugar dissolving in coffee, heat passing between bodies, and ashes turning to smoke to show the ancient strategy of reducing qualitative change to local motion, mixture, and separation. Along the way he sets Empedocles against Anaxagoras, Democritus, Parmenides, and Aristotle on this same problem. The class ends by opening the question of the void, contrasting Empedocles’ denial of it with Democritus’ atomism.

11. Logic as Tool and Liberal Art: Ordering Thoughts Through Words

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks what logic actually is, distinguishing its proper subject—definition, statement, and syllogism, matching the three acts of reason—from its end, which is to perfect and order those acts. Working through the commentary on Boethius’s De Trinitate, alongside the proemium to the Ethics commentary and comparisons to Boethius on the liberal arts and Augustine on signs, he draws out a harder point: reason can order its own thinking only by means of sensible, spoken words, since thoughts themselves cannot be sensed or imagined the way images can. He illustrates this with examples ranging from perfect numbers and blank verse to Euclidean geometry, prayer, and Hamlet, treating logic’s tools as a kind of telescope for the mind.

11. Anaximenes, Pythagoras and Heraclitus: Air, Form, and the Problem of Change

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist follows the progressive refinement of early Greek accounts of nature’s first principle, asking why Anaximenes settles on air rather than the poets’ Mother Earth, Thales’ water, or Anaximander’s “unlimited,” measuring each candidate against criteria of unlimitedness and fineness of matter. He then introduces Pythagoras as the discoverer of form and ratio as a distinct kind of cause, using musical harmony and geometry as examples and tracing the line to Plato’s Timaeus. The lecture closes by beginning Heraclitus of Ephesus, centered on the river fragment and the doctrine of universal flux, with a nod to Heisenberg, Schrödinger, and Born as modern heirs to the problem. Discussion draws on Aristotle’s reports of the Presocratics alongside Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare.

11. The Equivocation of 'Body': Matter Receives Forms in Order, from Friendship to Geometry

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima and asks what precision the definition of the soul actually requires. He shows that “body” is said equivocally—once as a species of substance, once as the matter composing a living thing—and that “understanding” and “knowing” likewise need to be distinguished, on pain of the fallacies Aristotle catalogs in the Sophistical Refutations. Using examples from logic, mathematics, and letters forming words, he traces how matter receives its forms in a fixed order, then extends that pattern to friendship, love of God, and the stages of human growth, where lower perfections are taken up into higher ones.

11. Nicomachean Ethics I.7: Drawing a Line Around the End of Man—Reason as Man's Proper Function

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Reading Aristotle’s Ethics I.7 alongside Aquinas’s commentary (lectio 10) and the handout “Drawing a Line Around the End of Man,” Berquist asks what activity is proper to man alone. By eliminating what humans share with plants and animals, he arrives at reason as man’s distinctive function, and so happiness as activity of soul according to virtue, virtue taken in its fullest sense, over a complete life. He then digresses into Book II’s practical counsel for acquiring virtue—lean toward the extreme you’re less prone to, know your own tendencies, distrust pleasure—illustrating it through figures who deferred to more gifted successors: Plato and Aristotle, Albert the Great and Aquinas, Haydn and Mozart, Belloc and Chesterton.

11. Aquinas on Love: Review, and Jealousy and Zeal as an Effect of Love

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens by recapping the structure of Aquinas’s treatise on love in the Summa Theologiae: its nature, its causes, and its effects. He then takes up the fourth effect, jealousy or zeal, working through the objections and Thomas’s response article by article. The key distinction is between jealousy proper to the love of desire—guarding a good one wants for oneself—and zeal proper to the love of friendship—defending a good one wishes for someone else. He fills out the distinction with examples drawn from Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Smollett, and Cooper, alongside stories from his own experience.

11. Metaphysics IX: The Second Error, 'Everything Is Possible', and the Definition of the Possible

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Metaphysics IX and Aquinas’s lectio 3 on the possible and the impossible, distinguishing the “possible” as opposed to necessity from the wider sense that includes it. He traces two errors: the claim that everything is necessary, and its opposite, that everything is possible, illustrated by the absurd case of the diagonal becoming commensurable with the side. Working through Aristotle’s argument that if A entails B then A’s possibility entails B’s possibility, he shows how this differs from inferring B’s actuality outright. He also asks, with help from the handouts, why minds slip into these errors—chasing mathematical certitude or recoiling from necessity—linking the discussion back to Plato’s Meno.

12. Confession of Faith and the Definition of Faith: Substance of Things Hoped For (ST II-II q.3 a.2, q.4 a.1)

Thu, 16 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist finishes the objections and replies on whether confession of faith is necessary for salvation, showing how it depends on charity and the circumstances one is in, then turns to Question 4 and Paul’s Hebrews text defining faith as “the substance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” He treats this not as a formal definition but an implicit one, unpacking how it links faith to hope and grounds the intellect’s assent in divine authority rather than in seen evidence. Along the way he reaches for Aristotelian logic and geometry to pin down words like “substantia” and “argumentum,” mixing in anecdotes and historical asides to make the scholastic vocabulary concrete.

12. The Beauty of Order: Numbers in the Treatise on the Trinity, Limit in Art, and Why the Genera of Being Are Not the First Distinction

Thu, 01 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with the Trinity’s ordered numbers—three persons, two processions, four relations—and the beauty that lies in such order, symmetry, and limit, drawing illustrations from Shakespeare, Mozart, and Sherlock Holmes. He then turns to Aristotle, asking why the genera of being are not simply the first division of things, working from the Categories around chapter five into chapter six. Using a handout titled “Quantity,” he traces quantity’s split into discrete kinds like number and continuous kinds like line, surface, and time, checking the text closely against Aristotle’s own wording.

12. Metaphysics Proemium: Wonder as the Beginning of Philosophy — Wisdom as Free and Divine Knowledge

Thu, 29 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the third reading of Thomas’s commentary on the proemium, where Aristotle explains wisdom not as practical but speculative knowledge, sought for its own sake out of wonder rather than necessity. He pairs this with Plato’s Theaetetus, where Socrates tells Theaetetus that wonder is the beginning of philosophy and calls Iris daughter of Thaumas, and works through the liberal versus servile arts and the philomuthos and philomathes as forerunners of the philosopher. Wisdom emerges as the most divine science, since it concerns God and is the very knowledge God possesses. He closes with Aristotle’s own examples of wonder—the diagonal’s incommensurability, changes of moon and sun—and Thomas’s epilogue summarizing what wisdom is about and what kind of knowledge it is.

12. Why Happiness Is Not Power, Bodily Goods, or Pleasure (ST I-II q.2 aa.4-6)

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Can happiness consist in power, bodily health, or pleasure? Berquist takes up Aquinas’s arguments in q. 2, articles 4 through 6, showing that each of these goods can belong equally to the virtuous and the vicious, and so cannot be the perfect good that fulfills a man. Leaning on Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy and Aristotle’s Ethics, he traces how exterior and bodily goods prove unstable or insufficient, ordered toward something further rather than final in themselves. Anecdotes about Stalin, Hitler, and the atomic bomb, alongside lines from Chesterton, Dickinson, and Hopkins, press the argument toward an interior, intellectual good proper to man.

12. Grace Natural to Christ, the Assuming Person, and 'Simply' vs. 'In Some Way' (ST III, Q.2 a.12 – Q.3 aa.1–2)

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist closes out Question 2 with the question of whether the grace of union was natural to Christ, sorting out “nature” taken as birth versus as essence, and “simply” versus “in some way” as ways of qualifying a claim. He then turns to Question 3 on the hypostatic union viewed from the side of the person who assumes: article one asks whether it belongs to a divine person to assume a created nature, article two whether it belongs specifically to the divine nature to do so. Along the way he leans on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Augustine, Cyril of Alexandria, and Plato’s Meno to clarify how person and nature function as distinct principles of action.

12. Summa Theologiae I, Q.2 aa.1–2: Is God's Existence Self-Evident, and Can It Be Demonstrated?

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins with how Aquinas structures the Summa around God as beginning and end of all things, then turns to Question 2, Articles 1 and 2. He walks through Thomas’s replies to the objections, including the response to Anselm’s argument that God’s existence is self-evident, and the distinction between demonstration “propter quid” and “quia” used to show existence can still be proved without knowing God’s essence. He draws parallels to Trinitarian and Christological doctrine and to Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics and Boethius, with digressions on happiness and wisdom along the way.

12. Empedocles on Love and Hate, Mind vs. Chance, and Anaxagoras on Everything in Everything

Thu, 27 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Working from the “Natural Fragments” handout and Aristotle’s account in the First Philosophers volume, Berquist asks what actually moves and orders the four elements. Empedocles answers with Love and Strife, two contrary forces that combine and separate matter—a picture Berquist compares to modern chance-based evolutionary theory—paired with his “like knows like” account of cognition. He then turns to Anaxagoras, whose claim that everything contains a portion of everything Berquist likens to particle physics, and whose introduction of Mind as the cause of order stands against mere chance. Aristotle’s critiques, the Manichaean heresy, and Aquinas recur as points of comparison, alongside the recurring difficulty of grasping potency and act.

Aquinas, other works

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Aquinas, other works #

408 passages mentioned in passing

All works

Mentioned in passing #

Adoro te devote (Aquinas) #

Mentioned in 25 classes

Adoro Te Devote #

Mentioned in 27 classes

Thomas Aquinas, Adoro te devote #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Albert the Great commentary on the epistles #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 196

Albert the Great, Commentary on the Sentences II #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 210

Albert the Great, commentary on Aristotle’s logic (fallacy of accident) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 50

Albert the Great, commentary on Porphyry’s Isagoge #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 82

Albert the Great, commentary on Sophistical Refutations #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 87

Albert the Great, commentary on the Celestial Hierarchy #

Mentioned in 1 class

Love & Friendship 9

Ammonius, Commentary on Porphyry’s Isagoge #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 4

Thomas Aquinas, Articles of Faith and the Sacraments #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 74

Boethius commentary on Porphyry #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 102

Boethius, Commentary on Porphyry #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Cajetan #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 54

Cajetan commentary (Leonine edition) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 47

Cajetan on the Summa #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 35

Cajetan’s commentary #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 172

Cajetan’s commentary on the Isagoge #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 20

Cajetan’s commentary on the Summa #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 225

Cajetan, Commentary on the Summa #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Cajetan, commentary on the Summa #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 143

Cajetan, preface to commentary on the Summa (Leonine edition) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 134

Aquinas, Catechetical Instructions #

Mentioned in 8 classes

Thomas Aquinas, Catechetical Instructions (Compendium/Creed and Our Father) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 33

Aquinas, Catechetical Instructions (Naples sermons) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 58

Catena Aurea #

Mentioned in 20 classes

Catena Aurea (Golden Chain) #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Catena Aurea (John) #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Catena Aurea (Matthew) #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Catena Aurea on John #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Catena Aurea on Mark #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 71

Catena Aurea on Matthew #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Thomas Aquinas, Commendation and Division of Sacred Scripture #

Mentioned in 1 class

Sacred Scripture 1

Aquinas, Commendation and Partition of Sacred Scripture (inaugural lecture) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 145

Aquinas, Commendation/Division (Partition) of Sacred Scripture #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 108

Aquinas, Commentary on Boethius De Hebdomadibus, proemium #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 103

Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Boethius De Trinitate #

Mentioned in 8 classes

Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Boethius De Trinitate (liberal arts) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Introduction to Philosophy & Logic (1999) 11

Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Boethius’s De Trinitate #

Mentioned in 5 classes

Aquinas’s commentary on De Anima #

Mentioned in 44 classes

Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on De Caelo #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 25

Commentary on De Caelo III #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 82

Commentary on De Caelo et Mundo #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 69

Aquinas, Commentary on De Sensu et Sensato (proemium) #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 1

Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Ephesians #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Galatians #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 27

Aquinas, Commentary on Hebrews #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 41

Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Isaiah (prologue) #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Commentary on Job #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Job (Leonine edition) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 19

Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on John #

Mentioned in 12 classes

Commentary on John (prologue) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 8

Commentary on Matthew #

Mentioned in 7 classes

Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew (Passion narrative) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 48

Aquinas’s commentary on Metaphysics #

Mentioned in 60 classes

Aquinas’s commentary on Nicomachean Ethics #

Mentioned in 52 classes

Aquinas’s commentary on On Interpretation #

Mentioned in 22 classes

Aquinas’s commentary on Physics #

Mentioned in 28 classes

Aquinas’s commentary on Posterior Analytics #

Mentioned in 20 classes

Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Romans #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 135

Aquinas, Commentary on Romans, Prologue #

Mentioned in 1 class

Sacred Scripture 2

Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Timothy #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Commentary on the Book of Causes #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 20

Aquinas’s commentary on the Categories #

Mentioned in 26 classes

Aquinas, Commentary on the Epistles (Timothy) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 37

Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Epistles of Saint Paul #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 81

Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Epistles of St. Paul (Galatians) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 131

Aquinas, Commentary on the Epistles of St. Paul (Prologue) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Sacred Scripture 2

Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of John #

Mentioned in 5 classes

Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of John (Prologue) #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 34

Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew #

Mentioned in 1 class

Wisdom (2005) 1

Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Liber de Causis proemium #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 76

Thomas on the Our Father #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Aquinas, Commentary on the Psalms #

Mentioned in 17 classes

Aquinas, Commentary on the Psalms (Prologue) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 8

Commentary on the Psalms (Thomas) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 97

Aquinas Commentary on the Psalms (proemium) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 26

Commentary on the Sentences #

Mentioned in 42 classes

Commentary on the Sentences (Ten Commandments) #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Aquinas, Commentary on the Sentences (number in God) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 16

Commentary on the Sentences (order in the Trinity) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 149

Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Sentences (relation) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 17

Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Sentences (vestige of the Trinity) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 29

Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Sentences (whether God knows evil) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 221

Aquinas, Commentary on the Sentences I #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 227

Aquinas, Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard #

Mentioned in 6 classes

Commentary on the Sentences, prologue #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 10

Commentary on the Summa (Cajetan) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 167

Commentary on the first Psalm #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 9

Compendium Theologiae #

Mentioned in 5 classes

Compendium of Theology #

Mentioned in 47 classes

Compendium of Theology I #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 247

Contra Errores Graecorum #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 24

Thomas Aquinas, De Aeternitate Mundi #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 36

De Caritate a.1 (Article 1, reply to 22) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Wisdom (2006, Colorado) 26

De Ente et Essentia #

Mentioned in 2 classes

De Fallaciis #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Aquinas, De Fallaciis ad quosdam nobiles artistas #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 51

Aquinas, De Malo #

Mentioned in 9 classes

De Potentia #

Mentioned in 44 classes

Thomas Aquinas, De Potentia (Disputed Questions on Power) #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Thomas Aquinas, De Sensu et Sensato commentary #

Mentioned in 2 classes

De Spiritualibus Creaturis #

Mentioned in 5 classes

De Substantiis Separatis ch. 17 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 33

Thomas Aquinas, De Unitate Intellectus #

Mentioned in 1 class

Wisdom (2006, Colorado) 32

De Unitate Intellectus contra Averroistas #

Mentioned in 5 classes

De Venerabili Sacramento Altaris #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 243

De Veritate #

Mentioned in 30 classes

De Veritate (Book of Life) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 29

De Veritate (disputed questions) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 19

De Veritate (good as perfectivum alterius per modum finis) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Wisdom (2006, Colorado) 26

Aquinas, De Veritate (likely) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 63

De Veritate (question on liberum arbitrium) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 217

De Virtutibus #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 169

Thomas Aquinas, De aeternitate mundi #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 70

Thomas Aquinas, De articulis fidei #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 82

Thomas, De substantiis separatis #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 45

Treatise on the Separated Substances #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 45

Aquinas, De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 20

Disputed Question De Spe #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 149

Disputed Questions #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Thomas Aquinas, Disputed Questions (De Veritate) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 40

Disputed Questions De Potentia #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 23

Thomas Aquinas, Disputed Questions on Hope #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Aquinas, Disputed Questions on Power #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 31

Disputed Questions on the Power of God #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 271

Aquinas, Expositio in Symbolum Apostolorum #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 72

Aquinas, Expositio on the Creed (Symbolum Apostolorum) #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Aquinas, Expositio super Boethium De Trinitate #

Mentioned in 1 class

Wisdom (2005) 4

Thomas Aquinas, Exposition on the Angelic Salutation (Hail Mary) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 62

Genesis commentary of Aquinas #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 37

Golden Chain (Catena Aurea) #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Golden Chain (Catena Aurea) on Matthew #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 87

Golden Chain (Catena Aurea) on the Gospel of John #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Gospel of Matthew; Thomas’s commentary on Matthew, John, Psalms #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Hugh of St. Victor, Sentences #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 11

John of St. Thomas #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Lombard, Sentences #

Mentioned in 5 classes

Lombard, Sentences IV #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 84

Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Aquinas, Naples Sermons #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Aquinas, Naples sermons (Collationes on the Creed) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 5

O sacrum convivium #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Aquinas, On the Eternity of the World #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 88

Thomas Aquinas, On the Heavens (De Caelo commentary) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 9

Thomas Aquinas, On the Unity of the Intellect against the Averroists #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 21

Peter Lombard, Sentences #

Mentioned in 10 classes

Peter Lombard, Sentences II #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 270

Peter Lombard, Sentences III #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 216

Peter of Tarentaise, Commentary on the Sentences #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 102

Pius X apostolic letter on Thomas Aquinas #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 43

Thomas’s Prayer after Communion #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 170

Thomas’s prayer after communion #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Prayer of Thomas before communion #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 94

Thomas’s prayer before communion #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Proclus, Commentary on Euclid Book I #

Mentioned in 1 class

Wisdom (2005) 4

Proclus, commentary on Euclid #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 96

Proemium to Aristotle’s Logic (Thomas) #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Thomas Aquinas, Proemium to the Commentary on the Psalms #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 10

Prologue to Scripture (Thomas) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 91

Quaestio disputata De virtutibus in communi #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 49

Quaestiones Disputatae #

Mentioned in 8 classes

Quaestiones Disputatae De Potentia #

Mentioned in 5 classes

Quaestiones Disputatae De Veritate #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 66

Quaestiones Disputatae de Caritate #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 26

Aquinas, Quaestiones Disputatae de Malo #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Quaestiones Disputatae de Potentia #

Mentioned in 9 classes

Quaestiones Disputatae de Spe #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 26

Quaestiones Disputatae de Spiritualibus Creaturis #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 9

Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Quaestiones Quodlibetales #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 21

Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones disputatae #

Mentioned in 7 classes

Quaestiones disputatae De Potentia #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Quaestiones disputatae De Spiritualibus Creaturis #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 9

Quaestiones disputatae de malo #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Quaestiones disputatae de potentia #

Mentioned in 5 classes

Quaestiones disputatae de veritate #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones quodlibetales #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Scriptum Super Sententiis III #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 21

Scriptum on the Sentences III #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 22

Aquinas, Scriptum super Libros Sententiarum I #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 30

Aquinas, Scriptum super Sententiis #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 11

Aquinas, Scriptum super Sententiis I #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 30

Scriptum super Sententiis II #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Sentences #

Mentioned in 14 classes

Sentences (Lombard) #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Sentences (Peter Lombard) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 112

Sentences (Thomas on the Trinity) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 122

Sentences (Thomas) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 12

Sentences (Trinity objection) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 28

Sentences Book II #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 243

Sentences II (Peter Lombard) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 271

Sentences II (Peter Lombard, the Master) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 185

Sentences II (the Master) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 5

Sentences III #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 16

Sentences of Lombard #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 40

Sentences of Peter Lombard #

Mentioned in 6 classes

Summa #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 51

Contra Gentiles (Thomas’s) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Introduction to Philosophy & Logic (1999) 44

Treatise on the operations of God (ST I q.14, q.19) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 126 (2×)

Prima Secundae #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 2

Prima Pars #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 30

Secunda Secundae #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 67

Thomas Aquinas #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Thomas’s Commentary on John #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Thomas’s Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 26

Thomas’s Commentary on the Sentences #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 38

Thomas’s commentary on Boethius’ De Trinitate #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 113

Thomas’s commentary on Boethius’s De Trinitate #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 4

Thomas’s commentary on John #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Thomas’s commentary on Matthew #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 27

Thomas’s commentary on Philippians #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 97

Thomas’s commentary on relation #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Thomas’s commentary on the Epistles of St Paul #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 37

Thomas’s commentary on the Epistles of St. Paul #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Thomas’s commentary on the Gospel of John #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Thomas’s commentary on the Liber de Causis #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Thomas’s commentary on the Psalms #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Thomas’s commentary on the epistles of Paul #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 98

Thomas’s commentary on the epistles of St Paul #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 1

Thomas’s disputed questions on hope #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 16

Thomas, Commentary on Boethius De Trinitate #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 136

Thomas, Commentary on Isaiah #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 11

Thomas, Commentary on John #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 54

Thomas, Commentary on the Divine Names #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 272

Thomas, Commentary on the Gospel of John #

Mentioned in 1 class

Love & Friendship 6

Thomas, Commentary on the Psalms #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Thomas, Commentary on the Sentences #

Mentioned in 1 class

Love & Friendship 6

Thomas, Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard #

Mentioned in 1 class

Wisdom (2006, Colorado) 27

Thomas, De Malo #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 140

Thomas, Quaestiones Disputatae and Quodlibet #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 7

Thomas, commentary on Paul #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 11

Pseudo-Thomas treatise on the Eucharist #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 134

Treatise on the Trinity #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 38

Vivès edition of Aquinas #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 134

Thomas Aquinas, after-communion prayer #

Mentioned in 1 class

Wisdom (2006, Colorado) 33

Prayers of Thomas Aquinas before and after communion #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 42

Aquinas, catechetical instructions at Naples #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 61

Aquinas’s commendation of Sacred Scripture (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs) #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 126

Thomas Aquinas, commentaries on Scripture #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 48

Aquinas, commentaries on St Paul #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 39

Aquinas commentaries on the Epistles of Saint Paul #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Aquinas, commentaries on the Epistles of St Paul #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 105

Aquinas’s commentary #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 12

Thomas’s commentary, chapter on perfection (referred to earlier in the day) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Ethics 6

Aquinas, commentary on Aristotle (predicaments of action and passion) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 7

Thomas Aquinas, commentary on Aristotle (proemium) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Wisdom (2016) 5

Aquinas commentary on Aristotle’s Meteorology #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 36

Aquinas commentary on Boethius De Trinitate #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Aquinas’s commentary on De Caelo I #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 14

Aquinas, commentary on De Caelo et Mundo III #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 82

Thomas Aquinas commentary on Job #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 144

Aquinas commentary on Matthew #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Aquinas commentary on Paul’s epistles #

Mentioned in 1 class

Wisdom (2006, Colorado) 19

Aquinas commentary on Saint Paul #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 11

Thomas Aquinas, commentary on Sophistical Refutations #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 46

Aquinas’s commentary on St Paul #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Thomas Aquinas, commentary on St Paul (Timothy) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 37

Aquinas, commentary on St Paul (emotions do not obey reason as the hand does) #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 126

Aquinas, commentary on an epistle of Saint Paul #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Aquinas, commentary on the Epistle of St Paul #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 34

Thomas Aquinas, commentary on the Epistles of Saint Paul #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Aquinas commentary on the Gospel of John #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 9

Thomas Aquinas, commentary on the Predicaments #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 23

Aquinas commentary on the Psalms #

Mentioned in 13 classes

Aquinas, commentary on the Sentences #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Aquinas commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 148

Aquinas, commentary on the definition of syllogism #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Aquinas, commentary on the epistles of Saint Paul #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Thomas Aquinas, commentary or question on the unity of the intellect (Marietti edition) #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Aquinas, commentary proemium #

Mentioned in 1 class

Wisdom (2005) 34

Boethius, De Trinitate (Aquinas’s commentary) #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Sentences (Lombard/Aquinas commentary), four ways substance is said #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 11

Sentences (Thomas Aquinas commentary), question on whether paternity and Father are the same #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 110

Epistles of St. Paul (Aquinas commentary, irony) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Introduction to Philosophy & Logic (1999) 20

Aquinas, inaugural lectures on Sacred Scripture (commendatio and partitio) #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 21

Thomas Aquinas on Boethius De Trinitate (resolution in divine things) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Wisdom (2006, Colorado) 39

Thomas Aquinas on Christ as teacher (spoken vs written word) #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 26

Aquinas on De Generatione et Corruptione (mixed bodies) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 13

Commentary of Aquinas on John (proemium) #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Aquinas on Matthew #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Thomas Aquinas on angels #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 75

Thomas Aquinas on childish vices of intemperance #

Mentioned in 1 class

Introduction to Philosophy & Logic (1999) 43

Aquinas on evil as privation (Avicenna on pain) #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 28

Thomas Aquinas on forma vel idea #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 137

Thomas Aquinas on love (passive power of the heart) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Introduction to Philosophy & Logic (1999) 39

Thomas Aquinas, on one and multitude (transcendentals) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 14

Thomas Aquinas on rejoicing always #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Thomas Aquinas on relations of reason (real vs. rational relation) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 23

Thomas Aquinas on the Poetics #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Aquinas on the Trinity (distinction of the persons) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Introduction to Philosophy & Logic (1999) 27

Aquinas on the beatitude of God (four conditions of most perfect operation) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 39

Thomas Aquinas, on the liberal arts and logic (trivium, quadrivium) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Introduction to Philosophy & Logic (1999) 11

Thomas Aquinas on the order of reason #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 24

Thomas Aquinas on the passions #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 11

Thomas Aquinas on the poet (Poetae est inducere ad aliquid virtuosum per convenientem repraesentationem) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Introduction to Philosophy & Logic (1999) 30

Thomas Aquinas on the relation of God to creatures #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Aquinas on the sacrament of Orders (seven orders) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 48

Thomas on the three speculative sciences #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 111

Aquinas, prayer after communion #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Thomas Aquinas, prayer after communion (Gratias tibi ago) #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 115

Thomas Aquinas, prayer before Mass #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Adoro te devote (Thomas Aquinas prayer) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 6

Thomas Aquinas, prayers before and after communion #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 134

Thomas Aquinas, proemia to commentaries #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 2

Thomas Aquinas, proemium #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 34

Thomas Aquinas, proemium (three acts of reason) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 31

Psalms (Aquinas’s proemium on the Psalms) #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 59

Aquinas, proemium to commentary on Poetics #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 169

Aquinas proemium to logic #

Mentioned in 1 class

Introduction to Philosophy & Logic (1999) 22

Thomas Aquinas, proemium to logic commentary #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 33

Aquinas, prologue to Sacred Scripture (Principium) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 23

Aquinas, prologue to the Commentary on the Pauline Epistles #

Mentioned in 1 class

Sacred Scripture 2

Thomas Aquinas, question on free judgment (liberum arbitrium) #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Thomas Aquinas, scriptural commentaries #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 120

Thomas Aquinas, treatise on love #

Mentioned in 1 class

Love & Friendship 18

Aquinas, Commentary on 1 Corinthians #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on 1 Thessalonians #

Mentioned in 2 classes

De Anima 76 (2×)
De Anima 79

De Malo q.1 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 150

De Potentia q.1 #

Mentioned in 2 classes

De Veritate q.1 #

Mentioned in 6 classes

Disputed Questions on Truth q.1 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 230

Quaestiones Disputatae De Malo q.1 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 30

Quaestiones Disputatae de Potentia q.1 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 94

Thomas Aquinas, commentary on 1 Corinthians #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 20

Aquinas commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews ch. 1 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 35

Aquinas, De Potentia q.1 a.1 #

Mentioned in 4 classes

De Veritate q.1 a.1 #

Mentioned in 5 classes

Aquinas, Commentary on 1 Corinthians 2 #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 29

Aquinas on whether the soul is composed of matter (objections 1 and 2) #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 67

De Malo q.1 a.4 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 68

De Malo q.1 a.5 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 68

De Potentia q.2 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 96

De Veritate q.2 a.1 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 201

De Malo q.2 a.2 #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Aquinas, De Potentia q.2 a.2 #

Mentioned in 3 classes

De Veritate q.2 a.2 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 201

Catena Aurea (John 2, John 4) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 33

De Potentia q.2 a.6 ad 1 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Wisdom (2006, Colorado) 6

Sentences of Peter Lombard I d.3 #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 110

De Potentia q.3 a.13 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Wisdom (2006, Colorado) 6

De Potentia q.4 #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 108

Aquinas, Disputed Question on Spiritual Creatures a.4, a.10 #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Thomas Aquinas, Commentary lectio 5 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 6

De Veritate q.5 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 150

Aquinas commentary on Romans 5 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Wisdom (2005) 54

Thomas’s commentary on Boethius’s De Trinitate, questions 5 and 6 #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 141

Sentences III d.6 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 15

Sentences III d.6 (Peter Lombard) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 8

Aquinas, Commentary on Boethius De Trinitate q.6 a.1 #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 3

Sentences I d.7 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 141

Aquinas, De Veritate/Sapiential books (Wisdom 8) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Wisdom (2006, Colorado) 53

Thomas’s commentary on Psalm 8 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 148

Thomas, Commentary on Psalm 8 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 140

De Potentia q.8 a.3 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 15

De Veritate q.8 a.6 obj. 3 and ad 3 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 48

De Veritate q.8 a.6 obj. 11 and ad 11 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 48

De Veritate q.8 a.8 #

Mentioned in 2 classes

De Veritate q.8-10 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 201

Catena Aurea on Matthew 10 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 58

De Potentia q.10 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 122

De Potentia q.10 a.1 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 122

De Veritate q.11 (De Magistro) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 207

De Veritate q.11 a.1 #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Thomas Aquinas, Lectura super Ioannem, ch. 11 lectio 3 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 88

Aquinas, commentary on the Second Epistle to the Corinthians (chapter 12) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 20

Cajetan on Sentences III d.14 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 36

Gospel of John 14 (Catena Aurea) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 78

Scriptum super Sententiis III d.14 a.1 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Wisdom (2006, Colorado) 26

Sentences III d.14 a.3 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 30

Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on John 17 #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 44

Scriptum super Sententiis I d.17 q.1 a.1 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Wisdom (2006, Colorado) 6

Commentary on the Sentences IV d.17 q.1 a.5 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Wisdom (2006, Colorado) 17

Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew 18 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 203

Sentences III d.18 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 30

Sentences of Peter Lombard, Aquinas commentary, Book III d.19 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 255

Aquinas, Commentary on the Sentences II d.19 a.1 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 229 (2×)

Aquinas, Commentary on Psalm 20 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Wisdom (2006, Colorado) 18

De Veritate q.20 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 38

De Veritate q.20 a.1 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Wisdom (2006, Colorado) 26

Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on John (chs. 20-21) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 72

De Veritate q.21 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 23

Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate (de Bonitate) q.21 #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 139

De Veritate q.22 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 41

Peter Lombard, Sentences III d.22 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 111

De Veritate q.22 a.5 #

Mentioned in 2 classes

De Veritate q.23 a.4 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Wisdom (2006, Colorado) 6

Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Psalms (Psalm 24) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 52

Peter Lombard, Sentences II d.24 #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Aquinas, De Veritate q.24 a.2 #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 132

Sentences I d.24 q.2 a.2 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 114

Aquinas, Scriptum super Sentences II d.24 q.3 a.1 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Wisdom (2006, Colorado) 18

De Veritate q.25 a.2 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Wisdom (2006, Colorado) 6

Aquinas, Commentary on the Sentences III d.26 #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Lombard Sentences I d.26 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 138

Sentences III d.26 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 262

De Veritate q.26 a.5 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 68

Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew 28 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Alia 1

Aquinas De Veritate q.28 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 47

Peter Lombard, Sentences I d.31 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 143

Sentences III d.31-32 #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Sentences II d.34 q.1 a.2 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Wisdom (2006, Colorado) 27

Thomas, Commentary on Psalm 35 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 40

Aquinas, Scriptum super Sentences III d.35 q.1 a.2 sol.1 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Wisdom (2006, Colorado) 18

Aquinas, Scriptum on the Sentences I d.42 q.1 a.1 #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Commentary on the Sentences IV d.43 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 50

Sentences II d.44 q.1 a.1 #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Psalms (Psalm 48) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 131

12. Name and Speech, and Aristotle on Learning from Pre-existing Knowledge: Syllogism, Induction, Enthymeme, Example

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens by defining “name” and “speech” according to whether their component parts carry meaning independently, locating this within logic’s threefold task of definition, statement, and syllogism. He then takes up Aristotle’s claim that all learning proceeds from pre-existing knowledge, illustrating demonstration through Euclidean geometry and drawing on Plato’s Theaetetus and Phaedo to set demonstrative reasoning against dialectical syllogism and induction, and against rhetorical enthymeme and example. He closes by weighing Albert the Great’s twofold division of logic against Aquinas’s threefold one, tracing both back to the structure of Plato’s Meno.

12. Heraclitus: Contradiction, Hidden Harmony, Strife and Fire

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with Plato’s Parmenides and its axiom that being and non-being cannot both be affirmed, arguing that reason itself forces this conclusion before change can even be discussed. Against it he sets Heraclitus, working through fragments on hidden harmony, the unity of opposites, “war is father of all,” and fire as first principle, drawn from the “Natural Fragments” and “Note for Book One of Natural Hearing” handouts. He connects these fragments to Socratic dialectic and previews how Aristotle, in Aquinas’s Physics I commentary, will later reconcile real change with the law of non-contradiction. The class closes comparing Heraclitus’ fire to Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Heisenberg’s energy.

12. The Soul as First Act of a Natural Body Composed of Tools; How Body and Soul Are One

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s definition of soul as “the first act of a natural body having life potentially” in Book II of the De Anima, pausing on the Greek organikon, which he argues means a body “composed of tools” rather than the vaguer “organic.” That distinction lets him explain soul and body as form and matter making one substance, against Plato’s dualism and the Pythagorean doctrine of transmigration. He draws analogies from art’s relation to its tools and from political philosophy’s relation between constitutions and custom, and closes by previewing Aristotle’s coming comparisons of artificial tools like an axe to natural ones like the eye, plus a note on how a soul remains proportioned to its own body even after death.

12. Does Love Make the Lover Better or Worse? Love's Effect on the Lover (Aquinas ST I-II q.28 a.5)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Does loving make a person better, or can it corrupt him? Berquist takes up the closing articles of Aquinas’s treatment of love, turning from how love relates to the beloved to what it does to the lover’s own character. He draws Aquinas’s key distinction: love of a suitable good perfects the one who loves, while love of an unsuitable good corrupts him. He then walks through love’s four proximate effects—melting, enjoyment, faintness, and raging—testing each against scenes from Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona, Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing, and The Merchant of Venice, along with passages from Cooper’s The Spy and Eliot’s Silas Marner.

12. Metaphysics IX: How Rational and Non-Rational Powers Pass into Act (Choice as Lord)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s distinction between powers whose act precedes the power itself—like sensation—and powers acquired through practice or instruction. He then turns to the sharper contrast at the heart of Book IX: non-rational powers act automatically whenever agent and patient meet, while rational powers, capable of opposite effects, need desire or choice to settle which act occurs. He draws in related material from the Nicomachean Ethics on virtue and choice and from the De Anima’s account of the moved mover, and answers student questions about free will, the indeterminacy of choice, and what exactly makes a power fully “capable” of its act.

13. Quantity by Its Parts and Measures: Two Definitions of the Continuous, Logician versus Wise Man, and Music versus Painting

Thu, 01 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Reading from his handout on chapter six, Berquist asks what it means to call something continuous, and why the logician’s account of quantity differs from the wise man’s fuller treatment of number, magnitude, time, and place. He works the line-versus-number case to show how divisibility separates the species of quantity, then digresses through Heisenberg’s unacknowledged debt to Aristotelian potency before settling the question of whether music or painting ranks higher among the arts. Throughout, he ties these finer distinctions back to what he calls the “goodness of the doctrine,” the reason for going beyond the bare text.

13. Beatitude Is Not in the Soul or Any Created Good (Summa I-II q.2 aa.7–8)

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s distinction between beatitude as possessed, which belongs to the soul, and the object in which beatitude consists, which lies outside it. He follows article 8’s argument that no created good, however excellent, can satisfy the will’s desire for universal good, since the will naturally reaches toward good as such and only God answers to that. Along the way he draws on Augustine and Dionysius from the article’s objections, and digresses into Euclid’s Book VIII on proportional means and Aristotle on perfection to sharpen what “satisfying the will” actually means.

13. Summa III, Q.3, Arts. 3–6: Assuming a Nature Without Personality, the Son Alone Incarnate, Whether Father or Spirit Could Assume Flesh, and Three Persons in One Human Nature

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist reads four consecutive articles of Aquinas on the Incarnation. He asks whether the divine nature, considered apart from the properties distinguishing the three Persons, could itself assume a created nature; whether one Person could assume flesh without the others also doing so; whether the Father or the Holy Spirit, rather than the Son, could have become incarnate; and whether several divine Persons could jointly assume a single human nature. Working through each article’s objections, sed contra, and resolution, he leans on Aquinas’s distinction between the act of assuming and its term, and between common divine power and personal termination, drawing comparisons to Augustine, Damascene, and Dionysius along the way.

13. Summa I, q.2, a.3: Objections Against God's Existence and the First Two Ways (Motion and Efficient Cause)

Thu, 26 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with Aquinas’s commentary on Psalm 21 and Psalm 24—David as a figure of Christ, and the distinction of via, semita, command, and counsel illustrated through St. Thérèse of Lisieux—before turning to Summa Theologiae I, q.2, a.3. He lays out the objections against God’s existence and works carefully through the first way, from motion, unpacking potency, act, and why a regress of moved movers cannot proceed infinitely, then the second way, from efficient causality. He compares this treatment with the parallel argument in the Summa Contra Gentiles, noting how Aquinas orders and develops the material differently there, and draws on Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics as background, using anecdotes from a seminar with Charles De Koninck and from teaching a child language to clarify the principles at stake.

13. Anaxagoras on Matter and Mind: Infinite Division, the Continuous, and Why the Ruler Must Be Separate

Thu, 17 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Anaxagoras’s claim that nothing truly comes to be or perishes but only mixes and separates, since everything already contains a portion of everything else. Working from the handout on Book One, lectio nine, alongside the collected Natural Fragments, he traces how this forces Anaxagoras into infinite divisibility of matter, and asks how points, lines, and number bear on that claim. The class turns to the culminating fragment on Mind as unlimited and unmixed, ruling matter precisely by standing outside it, and asks why the ruler must be separate from what it orders.

13. Why Names Come Before Definition: Equivocal Words, Parts and Wholes, and Two Senses of 'Its Own'

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins Thomas’s division of logic into the arts of definition, statement, and argument, asking why names come first: we name things before defining them, we use names to ask what a thing is, and definitions themselves are made of names. Drawing on Porphyry’s fivefold distinction of names, Aristotle’s Categories and Metaphysics V, and Boethius, he works out the definition of “name” itself and distinguishes the logician’s use of words from the grammarian’s and the poet’s. He then takes up the puzzle of defining a thing by its own name rather than another’s, and the equivocal senses of “part,” “whole,” and “one’s own,” closing with their bearing on demonstration, division, and reasoning about common goods.

13. Reason's Inclination to Unity and Simplicity: From the Greeks to Einstein and Aquinas on God

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks why the intellect keeps reaching for what is one, simple, unlimited, and unchanging, starting from the earliest Greek philosophers’ hunt for a single first principle. He follows that same inclination through seventeenth-century science in Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, then into twentieth-century physics with Planck, Einstein, Born, Jeans, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, and Weizsäcker, using Euclid, Shakespeare, and Aristotle’s Poetics to show the pattern at work in mathematics and art as well. He closes by linking these four marks—one, simple, unlimited, unchanging—to Aquinas’s treatment of the divine attributes in the Summa Theologiae and Summa Contra Gentiles, setting up the next classes on Empedocles and Anaxagoras before returning to the moderns on the movers.

13. The Soul as First Act of a Natural Body Made of Tools: Explaining the Definition by Comparisons (Axe and Eye)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the opening chapter of Book II of Aristotle’s De Anima, tracing the chain of distinctions—substance, matter, form, composite, first act versus second act—that culminates in the definition of soul as the first act of a natural body equipped with organs, or “composed of tools.” He explains Aristotle’s two proportional comparisons, the axe’s capacity to cut and the eye’s capacity to see, used to show what “first act” means as opposed to actual operation. He closes on a question the text leaves open: whether the soul is in the body the way a sailor is in a ship, or in some other way, raising the issue of the soul’s partial separability from matter.

13. Is Love the Cause of All That the Lover Does? Love as the Root of All Passions

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether love is the root cause of all that a lover does, weighing the objections against Dionysius’s claim that everything acts from love of the good, and tying this back to the good as “that which all desire.” He shows how hate, fear, hope, and anger all presuppose some prior love, drawing on Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida, and Dickens’s David Copperfield to make the point concrete. The class closes by turning to Bernard of Clairvaux’s stages of love and how these relate to the order of faith, hope, and charity.

13. Shakespeare's Definition of Reason, the Exhortation to Use Reason, and Wisdom

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Hamlet’s line on “godlike reason” and argues Shakespeare is offering a genuine definition: reason as discourse, the ability to know one thing through another, capable of large-scale inference and of looking before and after. He defends this against defining reason by self-evident knowledge instead, and ties it to Aristotle’s account of wisdom as reason’s highest perfection, drawing on Aquinas’s proemium to the Nicomachean Ethics and Metaphysics. He then works through Shakespeare’s exhortation to use reason as a compact five-part argument, comparing it to similar exhortations in Aristotle and Aquinas, before turning briefly to Book Nine of the Metaphysics on act and potency.

14. Divisions of Five, the One Convertible with Being, and the Species of Quantity

Thu, 05 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Reading closely from the handout on Categories, chapter 6, Berquist takes up Aristotle’s division of quantity into discrete kinds like number and continuous kinds like line, surface, and body, asking why number counts as a “quasi-genus” rather than a genus proper. He sets this alongside the recurring pattern of five-fold divisions found elsewhere in the tradition—five ways, five external senses, five kinds of continuous quantity—and turns to the kinds of composition Aquinas excludes in arguing for divine simplicity. Personal recollections of his own teachers punctuate the technical exposition.

14. What Beatitude Is: Created, and an Operation (Summa I-II q.3 aa.1–2)

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through the first two articles of question 3 on beatitude, asking first whether beatitude is something uncreated—God himself—or something created in the one who is blessed, and second whether it consists in an operation. Drawing on Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy and Aristotle’s Ethics, he separates beatitude’s object and cause, which is God, from its essence, which is a created human act. He explains why that act must be immanent rather than transitive, since only an act remaining in the agent can perfect it, and brings in related passages on the angels from the Prima Pars along with digressions on Augustine and Chesterton to sharpen the contrast between contemplative and active life.

14. Summa III, Q.3, Arts. 7–8: One Person in Two Human Natures, the Fallacy of the Accident, Marx on Making, and Why the Son Became Incarnate

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Article Seven’s question of whether a single divine person could assume two distinct human natures, working through objections about suppositum, personal unity, and the communication of properties, with a digression into the logical fallacies of accident and figure of speech. He then turns to Article Eight: why fittingness argues for the Son’s incarnation rather than the Father’s or Holy Spirit’s, developing three reasons—the Word as exemplar of creation, natural sonship grounding adoptive sonship, and the Word as remedy for the first sin’s disordered desire for knowledge. He closes with a tangent on Aristotle’s distinction between making and self-perfection.

14. Summa I, q.2, a.3: The Third, Fourth and Fifth Ways, the Most Universals, and Replies on Evil and Enough Causes

Thu, 26 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist follows Aquinas’s Latin text of the Five Ways from possibility and necessity through gradations of perfection to governance and finality, pausing on Aristotle’s Metaphysics II — read closely against a handout, “Note for Readings Two through Four” — as the source behind Aquinas’s talk of degrees of truth and being. He illustrates the arguments with fire and heat, geometric proofs, and ordinary cause-and-effect, while tracing the fifth way back through Aristotle’s Physics and John Damascene. Along the way he digresses on perseverance in grace and the prayer Anima Christi, then opens the first objection to the Five Ways, on the existence of evil, pointing ahead to Augustine and the Summa Contra Gentiles.

14. Anaxagoras on Mind, Part 2: How the Mind Rules Itself, the Ten Attributes of Mind, and a Greater Mind That Is Angelic Rather Than Divine

Thu, 17 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist returns to Anaxagoras’s fragment on Nous, walking through its ten stated characteristics—self-rule, purity, thinness, universal knowledge, power, and its work of ordering and separating the cosmos. He confronts an apparent contradiction: how can mind be self-ruling if ruler must be separated from ruled? Turning to Socrates and Plato’s Republic, especially the analogy between the just city and the just soul, he argues self-rule means mind governing what it doesn’t know by what it does know, not two distinct parts. He closes by weighing Anaxagoras’s “greater mind” against Einstein’s pantheism and Aristotle’s later remarks on mind and purpose, concluding it resembles an angelic rather than a divine intellect, since it orders matter through motion rather than creating it.

14. Defining by Names Common to Many Things: Univocal and Equivocal Names, Genus, Species and Difference

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks what it means to define a thing by a name “common” to it—shared rather than exclusive—likening this to how latitude and longitude together pinpoint a single location. He first separates calling something by its own proper name from calling it by another’s, covering figurative uses like metaphor, irony, and synecdoche, and insists definitions must stick to proper names, illustrated with examples from Romeo and Juliet and Aristotle’s Poetics. This sets up the distinction between univocal and equivocal naming, which Porphyry uses to introduce genus, species, and difference as the elements definitions are built from, moving the mind from confused to distinct knowledge of a thing’s nature.

14. Empedocles: The Four Elements, Numerical Ratios, and Change as Change of Place

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Empedocles’ break with the earlier monists, who had reduced all things to a single underlying stuff. Working through fragments DK6, DK38, DK96, and the cluster DK8, DK9, DK11, DK12, and DK15, he shows how Empedocles posits four irreducible roots—earth, air, fire, water—distinguished by hot, cold, wet, and dry, and combined in fixed numerical ratios (borrowed from the Pythagoreans) to yield compounds like flesh, blood, and bone. The key move Berquist isolates is Empedocles’ denial of genuine generation and corruption: what looks like coming-to-be is really mixture, and perishing is separation, so all change is at bottom change of place. He closes by tracing the line from this position forward to Aristotle’s doctrine of potency and sideways to analogous questions in modern physics.

14. De Anima II.2: Definition and Demonstration, Wonder, and Reasoning from the Soul's Activities

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Chapter Two of Book II of Aristotle’s De Anima, asking how the definition of soul reached in Chapter One can be demonstrated by reasoning from what is more known to us back to what is more fundamental in nature. Drawing on the Posterior Analytics, he works through how a definition can function as a demonstration’s conclusion, premise, or condensed whole, illustrating the point with the geometric case of the mean proportional and homelier examples like a knife, marriage, and temperance. He then turns this apparatus toward Aristotle’s coming argument, in which the soul as the body’s first act gets shown through the more familiar operations of life—living, sensing, moving, understanding—functioning as a kind of middle term.

14. Aristotle's Six Reasons to Study Friendship, and Friendship in Shakespeare: Its Excellence, Concord, and Return of Love

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins the Nicomachean Ethics’ proemium on friendship, working through Aristotle’s reasons for devoting such extensive treatment to it: its kinship with virtue, its necessity at every age, its natural roots in parent-child and kindred bonds, its role in holding cities together, its superiority to mere justice, and its intrinsic nobility. He introduces the older quarrel among Euripides, Heraclitus, and Empedocles over whether friends are drawn together by likeness or by opposites. He closes by turning to the handout “Effects of Love” and to Shakespeare, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, and Smollett for concrete illustrations, tying the discussion back to Aquinas’s commentary and to caritas as a form of friendship.

14. Native Words vs. Imported Words, and Aristotle's Examples of Act (Metaphysics IX)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins with a defense of translating philosophical Greek and Latin into plain English—“before” rather than “prior,” “beginning” rather than “principle,” “ability” rather than “potency”—arguing that native words keep thought concrete and ordered, though some terms admit no real English equivalent. He then takes up Metaphysics IX, the fifth and sixth readings with Aquinas’s commentary, on why act (energeia) cannot be defined but only shown through examples—the statue, geometrical construction, understanding—since act is too fundamental to be explained by anything prior. He closes by contrasting this with Descartes and Locke, who treated motion as undefinable without seeing that Aristotle had already grounded definition itself in act and potency.

15. Quantity, Time and Reason: Individuation, the Properties of Quantity, and Number as Abstraction

Thu, 05 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist reads closely through the Categories’ account of continuous quantity, asking why its species—line, surface, body, place, time, number, speech—divide as they do depending on whether their parts share a common boundary and whether those parts have positional order. Time gets special attention as the strange case of order without position. Drawing on Aquinas, he presses quantity’s odd nearness to substance: it individuates itself and even individuates other accidents like color, and lacks contraries. He ties this to the Eucharistic accidents, the distinction between numbering and numbered number, and the verb’s signification of time as it bears on the Peri Hermeneias.

15. Summa I-II q.3 a.3–4: Beatitude, the Senses, and Why Happiness Is Not Essentially an Act of the Will

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up two articles from Aquinas’s treatise on beatitude. First, does happiness consist in an operation of the senses? He argues sensory delight belongs only to imperfect, earthly happiness, and returns after the resurrection when glorified bodies share in the soul’s joy. Second, is happiness essentially an act of will rather than intellect? Aquinas locates its essence in the intellect’s vision of God, with the will’s delight following as a consequence. Berquist illustrates the arguments with asides on angels, glorified bodies, music, Mozart, geometry, and Augustine on peace and joy.

15. Summa III, Q.4, Arts. 1–3: Why Human Nature Could Be Assumed, and Why Not a Person or a Man (with a Digression on the Two Senses of 'Through')

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Question 4 of the Tertia Pars, asking why human nature—rather than an irrational creature, an angel, or the whole universe—was fitting for the Word to assume. He then works through whether the Son of God assumed a person or a man, sorting out the technical vocabulary of person, suppositum, and nature. Along the way he digresses into the Disputed Questions on the Power of God, where relations like paternity constitute and distinguish the divine persons, and closes by distinguishing two senses of ’through’ as applied to generation, creation, and the sacraments.

15. God's simplicity, perfection, infinity, unchangeableness and unity: why the mind looks for one, simple, unlimited, unchanging beginning, and an overview of the question on simplicity

Wed, 01 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins Aquinas’s treatise on the divine substance by asking why Question 3 of the Summa Theologiae orders its inquiry as it does: simplicity, then perfection, infinity, immutability, and unity, with simplicity and unity bound together since both deny God any composition of parts. He turns to the Presocratics—Thales, Anaximander, Anaxagoras—and to modern physicists like Born and Einstein, showing that the mind is naturally drawn to posit one simple, unlimited, unchanging first principle, whether as matter or as maker. Drawing on Summa Contra Gentiles IV, chapter 15, he argues Aquinas resolves this tension by identifying the first cause as pure act rather than potency. He closes by previewing the eight articles through which Question 3 strips away every kind of composition found in creatures.

15. Leucippus and Democritus: Determinism, Atoms, the Void and Man as Microcosm; Why Book Two of Wisdom Begins with Truth

Thu, 24 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through Leucippus’s principle that nothing happens by chance but everything by necessity and reason, tracing its afterlife in modern science from Galileo and Laplace through Claude Bernard to the Heisenberg-Einstein dispute over quantum indeterminacy. He then takes up Democritus’s atomism and his claim that sense qualities like sweet and bitter are not real but only convention, alongside his sayings comparing man to a small world, an imitator of nature. From there Berquist pivots to Aristotle’s Metaphysics, asking how the road of any science, and finally wisdom itself, gets determined—a question Book Two, “Alpha the Lesser,” roots in man’s natural relation to knowing the truth.

15. Porphyry's Five Predicables: Property, Accident, and Genus vs. Species as Relative Distinctions

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Porphyry’s Isagoge and its division of names into genus, species, difference, property, and accident—asking why this fivefold scheme matters for definition, division, and demonstration. He illustrates property and accident with examples drawn from geometry, arithmetic, and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, showing how each attaches to a thing without belonging to its essence. He then turns to the difference between relative and absolute distinctions, contrasting genus and species with pairs like whole and part, or father and son, and uses this to press the question, drawn from Aristotle’s Categories and Physics, of whether a lowest species or a highest genus can be found.

15. Empedocles' Love and Hate, Chance vs. Mind, and Anaxagoras on Matter and the Continuous

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through Empedocles’ fragments on whether void exists and how Love and Strife act as opposing efficient causes driving the mixture and separation of the four elements. He examines Empedocles’ striking account of chance combinations of creatures, with only the fit surviving—a mindless picture of natural causation. Against this he sets Anaxagoras, who argues by analogy from human craft to nature for a cosmic ordering Mind. The class closes with Empedocles’ materialist theory of cognition, locating thought in blood and defending the principle that like knows like, drawing on Diels-Kranz fragments of Empedocles with comparative reference to Democritus and Anaxagoras.

15. The Levels of Life, the Soul's Powers, and the Soul as That by Which We First Live

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks what separates the living from the non-living, following Aristotle’s De Anima as it ranks life’s powers: nutrition can exist without sensation or understanding in mortal things, but never the reverse. He builds toward Aristotle’s account of soul as the substantial form of an organic body, using the analogies of science to soul and health to body to show what it means for soul to be “that by which” something first lives, senses, and understands. Along the way he distinguishes reason from imagination and brings in Aquinas’s commentary, along with theological parallels such as spiritual “feeding” and fatherhood among angels.

15. Envy, Flattery, Virtue and Self-Love as Tests of Friendship: Shakespeare, the Novelists and Homer

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

What makes envy so destructive to friendship, and why is flattery a subtler danger? Berquist starts from Aquinas’s definition of envy as sadness at another’s good fortune, treated alongside charity, and asks why friendships between equals are most exposed to it while parent-child love—and supremely the love within the Trinity—tends to escape it. He tests the distinction against a wide sweep of literature: Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Hamlet, King Lear, and the Sonnets, Homer’s Iliad, and scenes from Smollett, Thackeray, Fielding, and Washington Irving, using their portraits of jealous rivals and flatterers to show how each vice works against real goodwill.

15. Act Cannot Be Defined: Induction by Proportion, Descartes and Locke, and the Love of Wisdom

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Why can’t “act” be given a single definition the way a species can? Berquist works through Book IX of the Metaphysics to show that “act” is said in proportion—like Euclid’s ratios—across different things, not by one common note. He reads at length from a handout on man’s end or purpose and one on dividing Shakespeare’s plays, using Plato’s definition of a thing’s own act and the induction toward Aristotle’s account of happiness as test cases. The class closes on Augustine’s De Trinitate and the Metaphysics I proemium, tying the love of wisdom to the love of reason itself.

16. Categories, Chapter 6 on Quantity: Intentions of the Mind, Number and the Unity of Piles

Thu, 12 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s Categories, chapter 6, on quantity, reading closely from his own handout while drawing in Aquinas’s commentary on the Sentences, the Proemium to the Nicomachean Ethics commentary, De Potentia, and Metaphysics VII. He distinguishes concepts like “man,” grounded directly in things, from second intentions like “genus,” which depend on how the mind understands rather than on the thing itself, then asks what this means for number—including whether it applies properly to the divine persons—and for unity, contrasting something one simply (like a man) with something one only in a qualified sense (a mere pile, per Democritus’s atomism), using examples from Shakespeare’s sonnets and campaign rhetoric.

16. Summa I-II q.3 a.4–5: Replies on Peace, Charity vs. Faith, and Beatitude in the Speculative Intellect

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s article on whether happiness consists in an act of the intellect or of the will, working through the objections and replies with help from Augustine, Dionysius, and Aristotle’s Ethics. He traces the argument that the speculative intellect, in contemplating God as the highest knowable truth, attains a union closed to the practical intellect and even to the will taken by itself. Along the way he touches on the order found among the blessed and how faith, hope, and charity relate to this vision, weighing the comparative dignity of intellect against will in reaching final beatitude.

16. Summa III, Q.4, Arts. 4–6: Not Abstract Human Nature, Not All Individuals, but from Adam's Stock (with a Digression on Universal Cause vs. Universal Predication)

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up three articles from Aquinas’s question on the Incarnation: whether the Son of God should have assumed an abstract human nature, whether he should have assumed it in all individuals, and why he took it specifically from Adam’s line. He walks through Aquinas’s rejection of a separately-subsisting universal nature, aimed at Platonist thinking, and his distinction between a cause that is universal and a predicate that is universal—drawing on Aristotle’s Metaphysics for the point. He also explains Aquinas’s reasoning for Christ assuming nature from Adam’s corrupted lineage rather than from an unfallen source, with digressions through Heraclitus, Plato, Spinoza, and Hegel to sharpen the contrast.

16. Is God a body, or made of matter and form? Aquinas's arguments, second-figure syllogisms, scriptural metaphors, and 'divina substantia forma est'

Wed, 01 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether God is a body and whether God is composed of matter and form, reading through the objections, sed contra, and responsio of Summa Theologiae I, q. 3, articles 1 and 2. He lays out the second-figure syllogisms by which Aquinas argues God cannot be a body — from pure act, indivisibility, and nobility — and shows why scriptural language about God’s hands or face must be read as metaphor, not literal predication. Along the way he brings in Aristotle’s Prior Analytics on syllogistic conversion, Dionysius’s Divine Names, and parallels drawn from liturgical texts like the Gloria and Sanctus.

16. Is Truth Easy or Difficult? Aristotle's Metaphysics Book Two, First Reading: The Bat's Eye and Our Debt to Predecessors

Thu, 24 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through the opening lines of Book Two, where Aristotle calls the study of truth both easy and hard. He distinguishes three senses in which it is easy: the small truth anyone can hit, the larger truth built up cumulatively by many contributors, and the shared first truths, like the whole being greater than the part, that everyone already grasps. Difficulty, by contrast, traces either to a weakness in the knower or to something in the object itself, and Aristotle’s image of the bat’s eye in daylight explains why the most knowable things, the first causes and God, are hardest for minds like ours to see.

16. Genus, Difference, and Lowest Species Reviewed: Why the Division Is Exhaustive, and Are There Lowest Species?

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist continues through Porphyry’s Isagoge, tracing the five predicables—genus, difference, species, property, accident—and asking precisely what genus, difference, and lowest species have in common and where their definitions part ways. He turns to Aristotle’s Poetics for how differences order the definition of tragedy and comedy, then to the Posterior Analytics with Aquinas’s commentary to explain why our confused, outward way of knowing forces definitions built from combinations of non-convertible differences. Brief detours through Aquinas’s Summa contra Gentiles on univocal predication of God and creatures, and Plato’s Meno on defining versus reasoning, set up a close of the class applying “before and after” to genus-species order and to causality and the eternity of the world.

16. Anaxagoras: Everything in Everything, All Things Forever Equal, and Q&A on Good and Evil

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through fragments of Anaxagoras to show that great and small are relational, that nothing is ever wholly separated from anything else, and that the apparent order of the world results from a circular motion begun by Mind rather than genuine generation or corruption. He traces how “all things are forever equal” anticipates the logic of conservation laws in modern equations, and sets Anaxagoras against Empedocles, Heraclitus, and Socrates’s argument in the Phaedo, then previews Aristotle’s later criticism of Anaxagoras on quantity in natural philosophy versus mathematics. He closes toward the famous fragment on Mind and reflects on method: how a philosopher like Aristotle reads and judges his predecessors.

16. 'In Him We Live and Move': Worshipping God, the Beatific Vision, and Devotion

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins from Paul’s address at the Areopagus, “in Him we live, and move, and have our being,” and notes that Aquinas never comments on the verse directly. He instead borrows a parallel distinction from the Summa Contra Gentiles, where God is treated as our end, our mover, and our creator and sustainer, and uses it to read Paul’s words. From there he moves outward to the beatific vision as the soul’s union with God as both object and form of understanding, the light of glory, and how God moves the will without forcing it. He closes on devotion, hope, and love as they bear on prayer, drawing on Aristotle, Anselm, and saints such as Gertrude the Great and Francis of Assisi.

16. Self-Love, Likeness, Time and Rootedness in Friendship: Shakespeare, Johnson and Irving

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with Aquinas on the Magi and shepherds before turning to friendship itself, using literary examples to prime students for Aristotle’s systematic treatment. Reading from the “Causes of Love” and “Effects of Love” handouts alongside Two Gentlemen of Verona, Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Sonnet 62, he asks whether one is more truly oneself through reason and will or through passion. Passages from Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Washington Irving, and Jane Austen show how likeness causes friendship and how shared time and history give it a maturity and rootedness that sudden romantic love lacks.

16. Defining Motion by Act: Imperfect Abstraction and Two Kinds of Distinction

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks how “act” can mean the same thing across motion and form when the two seem so different — is the word univocal, equivocal, or something else? He argues for an imperfectly abstracted common notion, comparing the difficulty to defining “substance,” “person,” and “thing,” where a single term must stretch to cover really distinct cases without losing its unity. Working from the handout Note on the Eight Books of Natural Hearing, he ties this analysis of act and potency back to the unmoved-mover argument for God’s existence, and contrasts Aristotle’s framework with the departures taken by Descartes, Kant, and Marx. He also recalls studying this material under Charles De Koninck and Kazimierz at Laval.

17. From Quantity to 'Towards Something': Categories, Chapter 7 on Relation

Thu, 12 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist closes out chapter six of Aristotle’s Categories, working through quantity’s division into discrete and continuous, ordered and unordered species, the difference between quantity per se and per accidens, and quantity’s peculiar properties: it admits no contrary and no more-or-less, only equal and unequal. He then turns to chapter seven and the category of relation, asking why Aristotle treats it before quality even though he enumerates quality first. Using Plato’s original definition of relatives and its later revision—meant to keep substance from dissolving into a bundle of relations—he distinguishes things relative by their whole nature, like double and half, from things only relative in a qualified sense, like knowledge or love, which are really qualities that a relation follows upon. Family relationships and units of measure serve as running examples.

17. Aquinas on Beatitude I: Seeing God and Sinlessness, the Speculative Sciences, and Knowing the Angels (Prima Secundae q.3 a.6–7)

Thu, 31 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 3, articles six and seven, asking whether perfect happiness could consist in the speculative sciences or in the contemplation of separated substances—angels. He builds Thomas’s case through proportional reasoning and the Aristotelian split between perfect and imperfect happiness, arguing that truth and being are had by participation, so any created object of knowledge, however excellent, falls short. Along the way he takes up a related question from the treatise on angels: whether an angel who sees God face to face can still sin. Aristotle, Dionysius, and Jeremiah are called in to sharpen the distinctions, closing on the claim that only God contemplated essentially satisfies beatitude.

17. Summa III q.5 a.1–2: Did the Son of God Take a True, Earthly Body? (with notes on the Compendium of Theology)

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with notes on Aquinas’s Compendium Theologiae — the causality of Christ’s death and resurrection, and why Christ is called “firstborn” of the resurrection — before turning to Summa III, q. 5. There Aquinas asks whether the Son of God took a real, earthly human body, weighing objections rooted in Manichaean and Valentinian errors that would make the body apparent or heavenly rather than truly human. Berquist follows Aquinas’s replies, which draw on Scripture, Augustine, Hilary, Damascene, and Aristotle, to defend the truth of the Incarnation and what it means for divine dignity. The class ends partway into article two, mid-argument.

17. Summa Theologiae I, Q.3, Articles 3–4: God is His own nature and His own existence

Thu, 16 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Why can’t essence, existence, and nature be distinguished in God the way they are in creatures? Berquist follows Aquinas’s objections and responses in q. 3, aa. 3–4, leaning on the concrete/abstract distinction in language — “wise” versus “wisdom” — to show why speech about divine simplicity always falls short, since the mind knows only through sensible, composite things. Examples from geometry and natural philosophy fill out the point. He closes by warning against collapsing this identity of essence and existence in God with the “being” said commonly of all things, an error that produces pantheism, as in Hegel.

17. Why Truth Belongs to the Wise Man: Wisdom, Truth, and the Balance of Hope and Fear (Metaphysics II, Reading 2)

Thu, 03 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Working from Aristotle’s Metaphysics II and Aquinas’s commentary on it, Berquist asks why truth belongs above all to the wise man rather than to other knowers, distinguishing speculative from practical knowledge and showing that a cause is more true than what it causes—so the science of first causes has the greatest claim to truth. He traces a subplot running through Books I and II: the gradual discovery that there are four kinds of causes, each with its own first cause, paralleling the structure of the Nicomachean Ethics. He closes on the pedagogy of pursuing such truth, weighing hope against caution, and illustrates the point with Socrates in Plato’s Phaedo and stories from his own teachers.

17. Dividing the Categories: Substance, Quality, Relation, and Habitus

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist traces Aristotle’s ten categories as a schema built from successive divisions: what is said of an individual substance—Socrates, a horse—either names the substance itself or an accident, and accidents split into those said absolutely (quantity, quality), those said relatively, and six said through something extrinsic, among them habitus, the category of “outfit” peculiar to man. Working from Aristotle’s Categories, Topics, and Metaphysics, and Aquinas’s scattered commentary remarks, he shows Thomas’s habit of dividing genera by twos and threes, pausing over quantity against Descartes, the Greek pros ti behind relation, and man’s need for tools and clothing.

17. Anaxagoras on the Mind: Unlimited, Self-Ruling, and Separate

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist reads closely through Anaxagoras’s fragment on Mind, tracking its claims that Nous is unlimited, self-ruling, unmixed with other things, the thinnest and purest of all things, and the possessor of all knowledge and power that orders especially living things. He pauses on an apparent contradiction: if a ruler must be separate from what it rules, how can mind be called “self-ruling”? He resolves this by way of Socrates’ distinction between what mind truly knows and does not know, then maps each attribute of Nous onto a branch of philosophy—logic, the study of nature and soul, ethics and politics—drawing supporting comparisons from Plato’s Phaedo and Republic, Aristotle, and modern figures like Bacon, Heisenberg, and Einstein.

17. Councils on the soul as form of the body; the five kinds of powers, four grades of life and three souls

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins with two conciliar texts—Vienne against Olivi and Fifth Lateran against Pomponazzi—establishing as doctrine that the rational soul is truly and essentially the body’s form. He then works through Aristotle’s De Anima, Book II, chapter 3, on the five genera of powers: nutritive, sensitive, appetitive, locomotive, and rational. Drawing on Aquinas’s commentary, he shows how these five reduce to four grades of life and finally to three kinds of souls—vegetative, sensitive, and rational. Along the way he pauses over equivocal predication, the Greek behind Aristotle’s terms, and a comparison to the five notions, four relations, and three persons of Trinitarian theology.

17. Number and Freedom in Friendship, then Aristotle's Ethics: What Is Friendship? The Three Lovables and Perfect Friendship

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with a handout on the “Effects of Love” before turning to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, asking what friendship actually is and why it must involve mutual, known goodwill rather than one-sided affection. He walks through Aristotle’s division of friendship into three kinds—based on the good, the pleasant, and the useful—arguing that only friendship grounded in virtue is stable and complete. Shakespeare supplies running examples: Hamlet and Horatio for true friendship, Julius Caesar and Timon of Athens for its failures, alongside Boswell’s “friends but no friend” story about Garrick and Homer’s Achilles and Patroclus. He closes by noting Aristotle’s remarks on how rare the highest friendship is and how friendship works between unequals.

17. Act as Form and Act as Operation: Metaphysics IX, Perfect vs. Imperfect Act, and Happiness

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist reads Aristotle’s Metaphysics Book IX, reading 5, tracking how “act” is said analogically: first as form, then as motion or operation, with a detour through the peculiar actuality of the infinite. The heart of the class is Aristotle’s division between imperfect act—kinēsis, or motion, exemplified by walking home or building a house—and perfect act—energeia, or operation, exemplified by seeing or understanding—and what turns on this for why happiness must be a perfect operation rather than a motion or a making. Berquist brings in Aquinas’s commentary on the text along with parallels from the De Potentia and the Commentary on the Sentences to clarify the equivocal-by-analogy naming of act and potency, and uses the distinction to correct Marxist notions of self-perfection through making.

18. Predication and the Category of 'Towards Something': Cajetan, Aristotle's Two Definitions, and the Senses of Being

Thu, 19 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Cajetan’s treatment of the category of relation in Aristotle’s Categories, asking what makes something genuinely relative rather than merely spoken of in relation to another. He lays out the two definitions: Plato’s relativa secundum dici, things simply said toward another, against Aristotle’s stricter relativa secundum esse, things whose very nature consists in being toward another—illustrated through double and half, knowledge, and paternity. From there he distinguishes senses of “being” in Aristotle and Aquinas—quiddity, act of existence, and truth of a proposition—and uses that distinction to read Aquinas’s account of relation applied to the Trinity.

18. Aquinas on Beatitude II: The Vision of God's Essence, the Wonder to Know What Things Are, and Pleasure in Beatitude (q.3 a.8, q.4 a.1)

Thu, 31 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks whether man’s final happiness lies in seeing the divine essence itself, weighing an objection drawn from Dionysius against Aquinas’s answer: that the mind, once it grasps that a cause exists, naturally desires to know what that cause is. He backs this with parallel passages from Aristotle’s Ethics, Physics, and De Anima, and from Augustine and Francis de Sales, then turns to the next question, on whether delight belongs to beatitude, arguing that pleasure follows perfect activity rather than competing with it. Along the way he reads from a handout on Plato’s Phaedo and reaches for examples—wine-tasting, music, ballet versus opera—to make the point concrete.

18. Summa III q.5 a.3–4 and q.6 a.1: Christ's Soul and Mind, and the Order of the Assumption (Flesh Assumed Through the Soul)

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist reads Aquinas’s articles on whether the Word assumed a human soul and a human intellect, laying out the Arian and Apollinarian positions that reduced Christ to flesh alone, or to a soul without a mind, and showing why Scripture and the Fathers require both. He then opens question six’s article on the order of the union—whether the Word took on flesh through the medium of the soul, in time, dignity, and causality—citing Augustine, John Damascene, and Aristotle. He pauses over John 1:14 and the Magnificat’s “soul” and “spirit,” comparing the union to sacramental and miraculous causality.

18. Summa Theologiae I, Q.3, Articles 5–6: God is in no genus and has no accidents

Thu, 16 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up two arguments in Aquinas’s treatise on divine simplicity: that God is in no genus, and that no accidents inhere in Him. Leaning on Aristotle’s Metaphysics V on whole and part, Porphyry’s Isagoge on genus and species, and Boethius’s De Hebdomadibus, he shows why genus-plus-difference composition would introduce potency into God, and why being itself cannot function as a genus. He then argues that since God is pure act and subsistent existence, nothing further, like an accident, can be added to Him. He ties both articles back to the earlier questions on body, matter and form, and essence and existence, and notes parallel treatments in the Summa Contra Gentiles.

18. No Infinite Regress: The Moved Mover, the Train, and the First Matter (Metaphysics II, Readings 2–3)

Thu, 03 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s argument, in the second reading on Book II of the Metaphysics, that no series of causes can proceed infinitely, whether in a straight line or across the four kinds of cause. He works through the case of the moved mover, using a train of linked cars to show why motion demands a first, unmoved source, then turns to matter itself, distinguishing generation that moves from imperfect to perfect from generation between reciprocal contraries to show why material coming-to-be also requires a starting point. Along the way he draws on the Poetics on plot, Albert the Great on experience, and the Ethics on happiness as self-sufficient, to place the argument in Aristotle’s wider thought.

18. Lowest Species and Highest Genera: Why Being Is Not a Genus

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s logic of genus and species, drawing on examples from geometry, drama, zoology, and politics to show that division doesn’t always terminate in a clean “lowest species,” and that a genus need not always have a further genus above it—an infinite regress of definitions would make knowledge impossible. He then examines words like “being,” “thing,” and “something,” arguing these are equivocal rather than univocal, using the substance/accident distinction and Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” as illustrations. This leads into Aristotle’s Categories and its division of the highest genera, chiefly substance versus accident and universal versus individual.

18. Heraclitus to the Moderns, Determinism, and Democritus's Atoms

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks what has moved things in nature according to the first philosophers, pairing Heraclitus’s fire and strife, Empedocles’s love and hate, and Anaxagoras’s cosmic mind with strikingly similar lines from Heisenberg, Darwin, Lenin, Helmholtz, Newton, Einstein, and Tocqueville read from the Natural Fragments handout. He then takes up Leucippus and Democritus on necessity and the unreality of sensible qualities, tracing how their determinism rose to dominate modern science through Claude Bernard, Freud, and Laplace, then cracked under quantum theory and the Bohr-Einstein debates. Throughout he weighs matter against mover and notes Aristotle’s later break from strict determinism.

18. The desiring powers: sense desire, the emotions, love, and Mill on pleasure

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s De Anima account of the appetitive powers, distinguishing sense desire (epithumia), the irascible or spirited appetite (thumos), and rational will (boulesis), tracking the Greek terms into their Latin equivalents and back to Plato’s tripartite soul-city analogy in the Republic. He then catalogs the specific passions belonging to each appetite—love, desire, joy, hatred, sorrow, hope, despair, fear, boldness, anger—drawing examples from cats, soldiers, Sleepy Hollow, and Hamlet. The class ends by sorting out the vocabulary of love (eros, philia, agape, amor, dilectio) and weighing Aristotle, Mill, and Aquinas against each other on the nature and place of pleasure in human life.

18. Aristotle on Friendship: Lesser Friendships, Habit vs. Act, and Choice

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s account of friendship, first distinguishing the imperfect friendships of pleasure and utility from perfect friendship grounded in virtue, weighing their durability and asking whether even bad men can be friends, and why only virtuous friendship escapes suspicion and rests on trust. He then turns to whether friendship is a habit or an act, arguing it survives absence unless neglect wears it away, that living together matters to it, and that real friendship comes from reasoned choice rather than passing feeling. He draws on history, politics, Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, and his own experience to make the distinctions concrete.

18. Thomas on Operation, Motion and Doing: Immanent vs. Transitive Action

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks what it means to act without acting on anything outside oneself. Starting from Summa Contra Gentiles III.22, with support from the Sentences commentary, De Spiritualibus Creaturis, and the Prima Pars, he sorts act into transitive operation (heating, cutting—acting on another), passive undergoing, and immanent operation, which perfects the agent from within. He weighs candidate names for this last kind—operatio, motus, doing—against Aristotle’s use of “motion” in the De Anima, then applies the distinction to happiness, arguing it must be immanent activity rather than transitive making, against a Marxist stress on production. He closes by showing immanent acts are not a real middle between knower and known but follow a prior union of power and object.

19. Real Relations and Relations of Reason: Knowledge, God's Unchanging Eternity, the Trinity, and Why God Allows Evil

Thu, 19 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s category of relation and Aquinas’s sharpening of it in a text from the Disputed Questions on the Power of God, which separates relatives secundum esse from relatives secundum dici, and real relations from mere relations of reason. He works through examples—knower and known, the two sides of a pillar, creature and God—to show when a relation is grounded in reality on both sides and when only in thought. From there he moves to how Father, Son, and Holy Spirit each possess the one divine nature differently, and closes with the Prima Pars and Thomas’s commentary on Job on providence: why God’s letting creatures share in causing good opens the possibility of evil and error.

19. Shakespeare's Definition of Reason and the Trinity; Is Beatitude Chiefly Vision or Pleasure? (Summa I-II, Q.4, A.2)

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with Shakespeare’s charge to “use reason”—understood as looking before and after—and uses it to approach the Trinity three ways: as a footprint in beginning, middle, and end, as an image in the mind’s procession of thought and love, and through direct reasoning about processions, relations, and persons. Along the way he digresses on the meter of Shakespeare’s lines, Marian titles, and the figure of antonomasia in Latin and English. He then turns to Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 4, a. 2, asking whether beatitude consists chiefly in the act of vision or in the delight that follows it, and works through Aquinas’s answer that pleasure perfects the act of seeing God without being beatitude’s essence, drawing also on the Summa Contra Gentiles.

19. Aquinas on the Incarnation (ST III q.6 a.2–3): Spirit, Soul and Body, and Why Christ's Soul Did Not Exist Before His Flesh

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of the order of the Incarnation: did the Word assume spirit, then soul, then flesh—or flesh through soul, and soul through spirit? Working through articles 2 and 3, he draws on Augustine, John Damascene, and Leo the Great, and sets Paul’s spirit-soul-body language in 1 Thessalonians alongside Teresa of Ávila’s account of Trinitarian visions. He also confronts Origen’s theory that souls pre-exist their bodies, using it to sharpen the distinction between priority in time and priority in nature, and asks why God fittingly assumed a rational rather than an animal or angelic nature.

19. Summa I, Q.3, Art.7: Is God Altogether Simple? Five Arguments, Pure Act, and the Mistake About the First Cause

Thu, 23 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist reads Article Seven of Question Three closely, where Aquinas asks whether God is altogether simple, first summing up the six kinds of composition already denied of God and then laying out five separate arguments for God’s total lack of composition — as first being, as first cause, as pure act, and as identical with His own existence. He brings in supporting texts, including the Summa Contra Gentiles, Aristotle’s Metaphysics and logic, and Boethius’s De Trinitate, and pauses over how simplicity is known only through negation. He also flags a recurring logical trap: confusing “simply” speaking with speaking “in a qualified sense,” a distinction that governs whether the argument holds.

19. Endless Ends and Endless Definitions, and the Influence of Custom on Thinking (Metaphysics II, Readings 4–5)

Thu, 03 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s argument, in Metaphysics Book II, that an endless series of means would destroy the very possibility of a good, of definition, and of knowledge (episteme) ever coming to rest—so the causes called “end” and “form” cannot proceed to infinity. He ties this back to the earlier case against infinite regress in efficient and material causes, and singles out the end as in some way the cause of the other causes, which is why the metaphysician, searching for first causes, has special interest in it. He closes by introducing the text’s next question: how custom, rather than reasoned argument, influences the “road” or method one takes up in any science, wisdom included.

19. Aristotle's Ten Categories and Porphyry's Isagoge: Quantity, Quality, Relation, and the Predicables

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist traces the division of substance from material to immaterial, living to non-living, down through genus and species to an individual like Socrates, then examines quantity as discrete or continuous (number, line, surface, body) and quality (habit, natural ability, sensible qualities, shape). He draws out the discrete character of thought against the continuous character of bodily reality as a mark of reason’s immateriality. Turning to Porphyry’s Isagoge, he explains its role as an introduction to the Categories and works through the five predicables—genus, species, difference, property, and accident—as the tools definition, division, and demonstration depend on.

19. Despair, Boldness, and Finding What Is Common Among Disagreeing Philosophers

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist traces Aristotle’s logical division of his predecessors’ views on the principles of things, following the branching disagreements from Parmenides and Melissus through the natural philosophers, Empedocles, Democritus, and Anaxagoras. He then steps back to a harder question: what should such persistent disagreement do to someone seeking the truth—drive him to despair, or tempt him to Descartes-like overconfidence? Drawing on the Phaedo and his own anecdotes, Berquist argues for a balance of hope and fear in the pursuit of truth. He closes with two ways forward, drawn from Empedocles and Heraclitus—gathering truth’s scattered pieces from disputants, or first finding what all of them hold in common—favoring the second as truer to how we naturally move from the more known to the less known.

19. Touch, thinking vs. understanding, and studying the soul through its objects, acts and powers

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist continues his reading of Aristotle’s De Anima with Aquinas’s commentary, tracing how touch connects to pleasure, pain, and desire in animals, and how the soul’s powers—nutritive, sensitive, locomotive, rational—stand in a hierarchy he compares to nested geometric figures. He insists on a fixed order of inquiry: object before act, act before power, when trying to define any capacity of the soul. Along the way he works through the Greek terms behind desire and knowing—epithumia, boulesis, nous, dianoetikon, episteme, logismos—and their Latin equivalents, using Boethius’s image of rest and motion to distinguish understanding from discursive reasoning. He closes with a brief aside about Abraham Lincoln, unrelated to the text.

19. Aristotle on Friendship: Who Can Be a Friend, Friends Among Unequals, and God and Man

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks in whom and how fully each kind of friendship can actually be realized, working through Book VIII of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. He argues that friendship grounded in virtue is inherently rare and usually confined to a single person, given its intensity, the difficulty of pleasing another in countless small ways, and the time required to build shared experience—unlike friendships of utility or pleasure, which spread more easily among many. He then turns to friendships between unequals, such as father and son, husband and wife, and ruler and ruled, showing that these require a proportional rather than strict equality, differing from the equality proper to justice.

19. Prior and Posterior: The Order of Thomas's Proofs, and Aristotle's Physics on Reason's Look Before and After

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks why Thomas orders his proofs differently in the Summa Theologiae and the Summa Contra Gentiles—treating simplicity before unchangeability in one, infinity before unity in the other—and what this shows about how different truths get demonstrated by syllogism. He weighs “materia” against “hule” for naming matter’s tie to nature, then works through a reading from the Physics on the senses of “prior and posterior,” drawing on geometry, grammar, and political anecdotes about Lincoln, Reagan, and Dirksen to show reason’s habit of “looking before and after.” He ties this to Plato’s Apology on the ordering of goods, with digressions on Kierkegaard’s Either/Or and the ordered ascent of taste in education.

20. Relation, Part 1: Relatives Secundum Esse and Secundum Dici, the Trinity, and Beings of Reason

Thu, 26 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through Aristotle’s account of relation in chapter 7 of the Categories, drawing the key distinction between relativa secundum esse—things like double and half, whose entire being consists in being toward something else—and relativa secundum dici, things fundamentally absolute in themselves, such as knowledge or power, which only imply a relation without being constituted by it. He extends this distinction to Trinitarian theology, considering how the one divine nature is communicated among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit through real relations, then contrasts real relations with mere relations of reason, such as that between genus and species, situating the whole discussion within Aristotle’s broader treatment of being in the Metaphysics.

20. Comprehension and Rectitude of Will in Beatitude (Summa I-II, Q.4, A.3–4)

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks whether beatitude requires comprehension of God and whether a rightly ordered will is necessary for attaining it, working through Summa I-II, Q.4, A.3–4. He draws out Aquinas’s distinction between two senses of “comprehension”—enclosing or limiting an object versus simply holding or possessing what is present to you—showing how the latter, not the former, applies to the soul’s vision of God. He brings in Augustine’s letters and Retractions, Paul’s epistles, and Aristotle’s accounts of perfection in the Metaphysics and Ethics, along with anecdotes like Sherlock Holmes and the philosopher’s love of wisdom, to show how vision, possession, and delight together make up beatitude, and why the will must be rightly ordered both before and in the act of attaining it.

20. Aquinas on the Incarnation (ST III q.6 a.4–6): Flesh and Soul Assumed Together, the Whole Before the Parts, and the Role of Grace

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up three articles from Aquinas’s question on the union of the Word with the body: whether the flesh was assumed before the rational soul, whether the Word took on human nature through its parts or as a whole, and whether grace acted as a medium in the hypostatic union. Leaning on Aristotle’s account of soul as the substantial form of an organic body, along with Augustine and John Damascene, he sorts out the order of nature from the order of time, and distinguishes intention from execution. He digresses briefly into ensoulment and abortion before closing with a look ahead to question 7, on the grace, knowledge, and power assumed together with Christ’s human nature.

20. Q.3, Art.7 Replies and Art.8: Why the Simpler Can Be More Perfect, Why God Is Not Part of Other Things, and Things That Are Other by Themselves

Thu, 23 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Article 8 of Question 3: can God be part of another thing, as world-soul, as the formal principle of all things, or, per David of Dinant, as prime matter itself? He answers no on three grounds tied to God as first efficient cause and first being. Before that he returns to Article 7 on divine simplicity, using Euclid’s geometry, the comparison of tragedy and epic, and Mozart’s music to show why greater simplicity in immaterial things means greater perfection rather than less. He closes by rereading the prologue to Question 3, tracing how simplicity, perfection, infinity, and immutability hang together in Aquinas’s account of the divine substance.

20. Metaphysics II, Reading 5: Custom, Certitude, and Matching the Way of Proceeding to the Subject

Thu, 17 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist reads through the fifth lectio of Book II of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, with Aquinas’s commentary, asking why habit and custom often carry more weight with a mind than argument does, and why people expect proof to come mathematically, by example, or on authority depending on how they’ve been trained. From there he takes up Aristotle’s rule that the manner of proceeding in a science must match its subject matter, working the point through comparisons to the crafts and to the senses—sight, hearing, taste. He presses the point that demanding the wrong kind of certitude or pleasure for the matter at hand, like mathematical rigor everywhere or a lollipop’s pleasure from a kiss, is simply a mistake in reasoning.

Aristotle, Physics

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Aristotle, Physics #

11 passages treated in 43 classes; 34 passages mentioned in passing

All works

Book I #

Aristotle, Physics I (Aquinas’s commentary, lectio 1) #

Text: aquinas.cc, Latin – English · aquinas.cc, Latin – Greek · isidore.co, Latin – English

Treated in:

Aristotle, Physics I (Aquinas’s commentary, lectio 2) #

Text: aquinas.cc, Latin – English · aquinas.cc, Latin – Greek · isidore.co, Latin – English

20. Figurative Naming and Names Equivocal by Reason: Synecdoche, Antonomasia, Metonymy, Metaphor, Irony, and the Kept Name

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks how a single name comes to cover things that aren’t strictly the same, working through five figures of speech in turn: synecdoche (whole for part, as finger for thumb), antonomasia, metonymy (cause for effect), metaphor (likeness), and irony (opposition), drawing examples from Scripture and from Aquinas’s commentaries on the Psalms and on St. Paul. He then turns to names “equivocal by reason,” showing two ways a common name divides: one thing keeps it properly while another gets a new name, either by adding something notable or by possessing the meaning only imperfectly—illustrated with animal and man, understanding and reason.

20. The Common Basis of the Life of the Mind, Pride and Humility, and Pantheism Q&A

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with Heraclitus’s claim that anyone who would speak with understanding must stand on common ground, and asks what that shared basis is for teacher and student, or for two people in genuine dispute. He connects this to Aristotle’s practice, early in his own inquiry, of surveying earlier thinkers’ disagreements to find what they hold in common, previewing later readings on contradiction as a spur to philosophical inquiry, with Anaxagoras and Aristotle’s Metaphysics in the background. The class then turns discursive, touching Aquinas, St. Paul, and Augustine on pride and humility, and closing with digressions on pantheism, angelic versus divine minds in Anaxagoras, and stories about teachers like De Koninck—all circling the contrast between shared truth and private worlds of mere opinion.

20. The Nutritive Soul: Answering Empedocles, Food as Object, Nourishment, Growth and Generation, and the Sacraments

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks why the nutritive soul, though lowest, is called “first” in De Anima Book II: it is the power most common to all living things. He traces Aristotle’s claim that nourishment serves generation, the most natural act of life, echoing Plato’s Symposium on mortal beings imitating divine eternity by producing offspring. Turning to Aquinas’s commentary, he explains the soul as threefold cause of the body—mover, end, and substantial form, never matter—using the four causes from the Physics and homely examples like crafts and farm tools. He closes by comparing this threefold causality to how God causes the universe.

20. Summa Theologiae II-II, Q.27, A.1: Loving, Not Being Loved, Is the Act of Friendship

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s claim that most people prefer being loved to loving, tracing it to the desire for honor and to flattery’s appeal. Against this, he draws on Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 27, a. 1 to show that loving is the truer perfection: it is an act of the lover, while being loved is only an external sign of one’s worth. He tests the distinction against Aristotle’s example of mothers who hand children over to wet-nurses or give them up for adoption yet keep loving them, since real love seeks the other’s good rather than a return of affection.

20. Substantial vs. Accidental Form, Existence as Act, and the Transcendentals

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks what separates a substantial form, which makes a thing what it fundamentally is, from an accidental form, which merely modifies something already existing. Working closely from a handout keyed to Physics I, lectio 13 of Aquinas’s commentary, he reads through the text with students to pin down Aristotle’s reasoning. He then draws an analogy between form and matter on one hand and existence and essence on the other, using the example of clay shaped into a sphere or a cube to show how a single underlying subject can take different determinations. Along the way he touches on the transcendentals “being” and “thing” and on Aristotle’s dialectical method of distinguishing senses of a word.

21. Relation, Part 2: Thomas on Real Relations and Relations of Reason, and the Weak Being of Relation

Thu, 26 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s account of relation as the weakest of the categories of being, weaker in its hold on reality than substance, quantity, or quality. He works through the distinction between relatives spoken of “secundum esse,” whose whole being consists in referring to another, and those “secundum dici,” where the relation is only named, and asks what makes a relation real versus a mere relation of reason. Familiar cases—one thing being taller than another, a teacher’s knowledge of a student, ties of family—illustrate the ordinary run of real relations, while the puzzling case of Father, Son, and Creator in God tests how far the category can be stretched. Aristotle and Boethius stand behind Aquinas throughout as the authorities he is interpreting and correcting.

21. Loving God as a Friend, Knowing God "Too Much," and Whether Souls Without Bodies Can Be Blessed (I-II, Q.4, a.5)

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens by distinguishing love of concupiscence from love of friendship as it applies to charity toward God—what could it mean to wish God well, when God already possesses complete self-knowledge and self-love? He contrasts this with the discursive, step-by-step character of human knowing in this life against the timeless completeness of the beatific vision. The class then turns to Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 4, a. 5, tracking Thomas’s objections and response on whether the body is required for happiness: imperfect beatitude here below depends on bodily images, while the separated soul can already possess perfect beatitude in seeing God, though the body still adds to its fuller operation. Along the way Berquist draws in supporting passages from Aristotle’s Ethics, the Summa Contra Gentiles, and Augustine’s commentary on Genesis.

21. Can a Human Being Be God? Nature and Person, and Christ's Habitual Grace (ST III, q.7, a.1)

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins from a current event—a priest publicly denying Christ’s divinity—and asks how someone could hold that a man cannot also be God. He shows that Aristotle’s logic, especially the distinction between an individual substance or person and a nature, dissolves the apparent contradiction, and he explains why Scripture’s language of the Word “becoming” flesh implies no change in God, using examples like a geometric point and relative height. He then moves into Summa Theologiae III, question 7, laying out the structure of the treatise on Christ’s grace before working through article 1’s case for habitual grace in Christ’s soul, grounded in union with the Word, the soul’s nobility, and Christ’s mediatorial role.

21. Summa I, Q.4 aa.1–2: God Is Perfect and Holds Every Perfection, Despite His Simplicity

Thu, 02 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Summa Theologiae I, q. 4: whether God is perfect, and whether He possesses the perfections of all things universally. Working through the objections and Aquinas’s replies, he draws on Aristotle’s Metaphysics—Book IX on act and potency, Book V on what “perfect” means—and on Dionysius’s Divine Names, distinguishing a word’s etymology from its meaning and “simply” perfect from perfect in a qualified sense. Examples from geometry, Mozart, and the chicken-and-egg problem sharpen the distinctions. He connects the argument back to divine simplicity and God as pure act, then forward to question 93 on how creatures can be said to resemble God.

21. Metaphysics III, Reading 1: Tying and Untying the Knots — Doubting Well and How Discoveries Are Made

Thu, 17 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist reads Book Three of Aristotle’s Metaphysics as a plot, comparing its work of raising roughly twenty-three disputed questions of wisdom to the way Shakespeare ties dramatic knots in Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night—knots that Books Four through Fourteen will later untie. The heart of the reading is Aristotle’s claim that canvassing every opposing argument, doubting well, is the necessary path to real discovery. Berquist traces this method through Augustine and Aquinas’s disputed questions, Socrates’ questioning of the slave boy in Plato’s Meno, and remarks by Einstein and Heisenberg on how confronting contradictions drives scientific breakthroughs.

Aristotle, Metaphysics

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Aristotle, Metaphysics #

9 passages treated in 43 classes; 40 passages mentioned in passing

All works

Book I #

Aristotle, Metaphysics I #

Text: aquinas.cc, Latin – English · aquinas.cc, Latin – Greek · isidore.co, Latin – English

Treated in:

Mentioned in 5 classes

Book II #

Aristotle, Metaphysics II (Aquinas’s commentary, lectio 2) #

Text: aquinas.cc, Latin – English · aquinas.cc, Latin – Greek · isidore.co, Latin – English

21. Names Carried Over: Dropping Meaning and Ratios, Analogy, Metaphor in Scripture and Poetry, and Examples

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks how a single word comes to carry more than one related meaning. He distinguishes two paths: dropping part of an original sense, as “passion” or “suffering” loosens from mere undergoing toward the perfection found in sensing and understanding; and naming by ratio or proportional likeness, as “healthy,” “before,” and “philosophy” get applied beyond their first, strict use. He then separates this analogical naming, where something is added to a common meaning, from metaphor proper, working through examples from Aristotle and Aquinas alongside illustrations drawn from Shakespeare, Dante, and Homer, and touching on Ammonius and the Summa Contra Gentiles.

21. Anaxagoras' Mind, Hope and Fear, and Heraclitus' Common Ways Forward

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks what kind of cause Anaxagoras’s “greater mind” is, setting it beside Empedocles’ love and hate as principles of separation and combination, and questioning whether this mind is more angelic or divine—while faulting the Marx/Engels split of philosophers into materialists and idealists for missing Anaxagoras’s middle, dualist position. He then reads Aristotle’s Physics I, lectio 2, where the Presocratics are catalogued as disagreeing over whether principles are one or many, finite or infinite, mobile or immobile. Turning to Heraclitus’s fragments, he argues the right response to such disagreement isn’t despair or Cartesian audacity but seeking the common ground shared by reason and nature—the method Aristotle himself follows in the readings that come after.

21. Purity and Temperance: Shame and Honestas, Catharsis, and Aristotle's Rules for Acquiring Virtue

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s account of the nutritive soul in the De Anima, starting from Aristotle’s critique of Empedocles, who tried to explain plant growth purely through the elements. Against this, Aristotle insists that fire and the elements cannot by themselves account for why living things grow to a finite, ordered limit; only soul explains that limit. Berquist then examines food as the proper object of the nutritive soul, distinguishing its three powers—feeding, growth, and reproduction—and, following Aquinas, compares these to baptism, confirmation, and the Eucharist. Along the way he draws on Heisenberg, Shakespeare, and Scripture to open up the range of Aristotle’s language.

21. When Is a Thing Truly in Ability? Proximate Matter and 'One Step Away'

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Aristotle asks, in Metaphysics IX.7, what makes matter genuinely “in potency” to becoming something, rather than merely capable of it after many further changes. Berquist works through the criterion of proximate matter — being “one step away” from the form — using cases from generation, medicine, geometry, and house-building to show why we call something “wooden” rather than “wood” once it stands ready for a further act. He then turns to how ordinary speech marks this readiness through denominative terms. The class closes with a digression on the fallacy of confusing what holds “simply” with what holds “in a qualified way,” traced through Plato’s Meno and the contrast between divine and human wisdom.

22. Relation (Ad Aliquid): Real Relations, Their Causes, and the Knower and the Known

Thu, 02 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s account of relation as its own category of being, asking what a real relation is founded on. Working from Aristotle’s Categories and Metaphysics alongside Thomas’s Sentences commentary, Summa Theologiae, and De Potentia, he shows that real relations depend on a founding cause—quantity, or action and passion—rather than on their terms, using paternity, sonship, and equality as running examples. He then turns to the harder case of the Trinity, and uses Aristotle’s example of knowledge and the knowable, against the mutual relation of lover and beloved, to distinguish real relations from mere relations of reason.

22. Replies on the Separated Soul; Does Beatitude Need a Perfect Body or Outside Goods? (I-II, Q.4, aa.5–7)

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up three articles of I-II, q. 4 on the conditions for beatitude: whether the body’s disposition is required for it, whether the body itself belongs to beatitude, and whether external goods are needed for it. He fills out Thomas’s replies with Aristotelian arguments from the De Anima and Metaphysics on the immateriality of intellect and the priority of act over potency, and he reads Augustine on the soul’s overflow into the body. He also works from handout passages on Book One of the Physics and on the causes of love. The class closes on Thomas’s distinction between the body-dependent beatitude of this life and the perfect beatitude of the vision of God, which needs no exterior goods.

22. Virtues, Faith, Hope, the Gifts and Fear of the Lord in Christ (ST III, q.7, aa.2–6)

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up five articles of the Tertia Pars in which Aquinas asks whether Christ possessed the virtues, faith, hope, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and fear. Working through objections and replies, he traces Thomas’s argument that Christ’s perfect grace included every virtue except those that imply imperfection or unfulfilled expectation—faith, hope, and servile or “chaste” fear—while still allowing him a filial fear of the Lord grounded in reverence for divine excellence rather than dread of punishment. Along the way Berquist draws on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Augustine, and digresses into Aristotelian moral psychology, the distinction between the soul’s powers and its essence, and a brief aside on Shakespearean textual emendation.

22. Summa I, Q.4 a.3 and Q.5 Introduction: How Creatures Are Like God, and the Most Universal Things (Being, One, True, Good)

Thu, 02 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist closes out the replies on God’s perfection, including the Dionysian point that esse subsistens contains life and wisdom eminently, then turns to Summa I, Q.4, a.3: can a creature be like God? Working through all four objections, the sed contra, corpus, and replies, he stresses that likeness runs asymmetrically—creatures are like God, but God is not properly said to be like creatures—and invokes the principle of ever-greater dissimilarity within similarity. He then opens Question 5 by laying out Aristotle’s and Avicenna’s account of the most universal notions, being, one, true, and good, distinguishing each from its opposite, using portraits, ratios, and religious orders imitating Christ as illustrations throughout.

22. The Role of Contradiction in Discovery: Heraclitus, Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg, Einstein and Theology

Thu, 31 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks what role contradiction plays in coming to know something new. Starting from Heraclitus’s fragments on strife and a harmony that hides itself, he moves through the twentieth-century physicists’ own accounts—Planck, Gamow, Bohr, Heisenberg, Einstein—of how apparent contradictions in nature forced genuine scientific breakthroughs. He draws the same pattern out in Socrates’ questioning of the slave boy in the Meno and in Aquinas’s disputed-question method, then turns to Matthew 22, where Christ presses an apparent contradiction in Scripture—David calling the Messiah “Lord”—to disclose the hidden truth of his own divine and human nature. The thread throughout is that facing contradiction squarely, rather than smoothing it over, is what opens the mind to deeper truth.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics #

4 passages treated in 6 classes; 18 passages mentioned in passing

All works

Book I #

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I (Aquinas’s commentary, lectio 1) #

Text: aquinas.cc, Latin – English · aquinas.cc, Latin – Greek · isidore.co, Latin – English

Treated in:

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I (Aquinas’s commentary, lectio 2) #

Text: aquinas.cc, Latin – English · aquinas.cc, Latin – Greek · isidore.co, Latin – English

22. The Art of Definition I: Definition of a Thing vs. a Name, Full Definition and Encircling, Cause and Effect

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks what makes a definition full rather than merely approximate, contrasting definition of a name with definition of a thing, and full definition through genus and species-making difference with “encircling” definitions that work instead through a thing’s property or effect. He works out the order between these kinds of definition and extends the same distinction to definition by cause versus definition by effect, using examples such as Socrates’ questioning in the Euthyphro, Augustine’s account of the good, and Aristotle’s treatment of happiness to show why grasping a cause matters for real understanding. He closes by pointing toward division as the tool that complements definition in moving thought from confused to distinct knowledge.

22. Change by Contraries: Aristotle Becomes Strong in the Common Basis

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s argument, via Aquinas’s Physics I, lectio 10, that thinkers East and West, ancient and modern, converge on explaining change through contraries—and works through the syllogism showing why these first principles must be contraries rather than derived one from another. He sets Aristotle’s claim that this conclusion is “forced on the mind” against Einstein’s picture of freely invented hypotheses, and brings in the yin-yang of the I Ching and figures like Helmholtz and Newton as parallel cases. The class closes by asking what distinguishes the grounds of experimental science, philosophy, and theology, and how custom, as opposed to reasoned argument, shapes what people come to believe.

22. Sensing as Undergoing: Empedocles, Potency and Act (De Anima II.5, Part 1)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through the opening of Chapter 5 of De Anima, where Aristotle calls sensing a form of undergoing rather than acting. He pauses over the Greek and Latin terms behind this claim—paschein/passio, dunamis/potentia, aisthesis—showing how their standard English translations flatten meanings that shift across contexts. He then takes up Aristotle’s critique of Empedocles, whose theory that like knows like through material likeness would absurdly make the senses know themselves and perceive absent objects. Drawing on parallels from the Physics, Generation and Corruption, and Sophistical Refutations, Berquist uses the refutation to introduce the potency/act distinction governing sensation.

22. Denominative Speech, Nature's Steps, and the Order of the Acts of Reason

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist reads Aristotle on denomination: why a thing coming to be is named from its proximate matter rather than some remoter stuff, with Heraclitus’s fire tested as a candidate first matter and the point tied back to the Categories. From there he opens onto Aquinas’s prooemium to the Posterior Analytics and the order of understanding, judgment, and reasoning, using Plato’s Meno to show guessing precedes knowing. Cooking, teaching, and embryonic development serve as running examples for a single principle: a subject is only truly “capable” of its very next state, never a distant one—which he uses to explain why dialectic precedes demonstration in texts like the Metaphysics and Euclid.

23. Relations of Reason in De Potentia, and Aristotle's Chapter on Quality

Thu, 02 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with Aquinas’s Disputed Questions on the Power of God, sorting relations of reason into distinct kinds: purely logical ones like genus and species, and those arising from the mind’s need to order things not yet distinct in reality, such as the future. He applies this to explain how “Lord” and “Creator” name God truly even though God bears no real relation to what he creates. The class then shifts to Aristotle’s Categories, chapter 8, working from a handout on quality, covering its four species—habit, natural capacity, affection, and shape—and the traits proper to quality, including admitting contraries and grounding likeness.

23. Aquinas on Beatitude: Whether Friends Are Needed in Heaven, and Whether Man Can Achieve Beatitude (I-II, Q.4 a.8 – Q.5 a.1)

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether friendship is required for beatitude, distinguishing imperfect earthly happiness, which genuinely benefits from friends, from perfect beatitude in heaven, which consists essentially in the vision of God and does not strictly need companionship, even though companionship remains fitting to it. He then turns to whether man, whose intellect works discursively over time rather than by immediate understanding like the angels, is nonetheless capable of reaching that perfect good. Along the way he draws in Aristotle, Augustine, Boethius, Plato, and Scripture, with digressions on glory, charity, and the difference between understanding and reasoning.

23. Summa III q.7 a.7–9: Christ's Freely Given Graces, Prophecy, and the Fullness of His Grace

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up three articles of Question 7 on the grace of Christ. He asks whether Christ possessed the “graces gratuitously given”—gifts like prophecy ordered to others’ benefit rather than his own sanctification—and how prophecy could belong to one who already saw God face to face as comprehensor while still journeying as viator. Working through objections, sed contra, and Thomas’s replies, he ties Christ’s teaching office to the shape of Matthew’s Gospel and distinguishes sanctifying grace from these gratuitous gifts. He closes by looking ahead to whether the fullness of grace found in Christ belongs to him alone, glancing at Mary’s own “fullness of grace.”

23. Summa I, Q.5: Are Good and Being the Same? (Arts. 1–2, first part): Simply vs. in Some Way, and Why Dionysius Names God Good Before Being

Thu, 16 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist previews the six articles of Question 5, “On the Good in General”—whether good and being are really identical, which comes first in our understanding, their convertibility, the good’s reduction to final causality, its structure of mode-species-order, and its division into honorable, useful, and pleasant. He then works through Article 1, where Aquinas argues good and being are one thing in reality but differ in meaning, the good adding desirability tied to perfection and actuality, and answers Boethius’s objection from De Hebdomadibus by distinguishing “simply” from “in a qualified sense.” Along the way he reviews standard distinctions—equivocation of word versus sentence, per se versus per accidens—and opens Article 2’s claim, drawn from Aristotle, Dionysius, Augustine, and Boethius, that being precedes good in the order of understanding.

23. Metaphysics III, Second Reading: Which Causes Wisdom Studies, the Axioms, and Whether the Way We Know Must Be the Way Things Are

Thu, 31 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s second reading of Metaphysics III, where the questions concern what wisdom is about rather than the things themselves. He tracks the first two aporiai: does wisdom consider all four causes or only some, and must it also treat common axioms like non-contradiction and “the whole is greater than the part”? Working from his handouts and Aquinas’s commentary, he uses Zeno-style sophisms, a whole/part equivocation, and a Chaucer/Shakespeare example to show why self-evident principles still need philosophical defense. He closes with a digression contrasting Plato and Aristotle on whether knowing must mirror the way things are.

Aristotle, On the Soul (De Anima)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Aristotle, On the Soul (De Anima) #

2 passages treated in 2 classes; 29 passages mentioned in passing

All works

Book II #

Aristotle, On the Soul (De Anima) II (Aquinas’s commentary, lectio 2) #

Text: aquinas.cc, Latin – English

Treated in:

De Anima — 13. The Soul as First Act of a Natural Body Made of Tools: Explaining the Definition by Comparisons (Axe and Eye) (from 0:25)

Aristotle, On the Soul (De Anima) II (Aquinas’s commentary, lectio 5) #

Text: aquinas.cc, Latin – English

23. The Art of Definition II: Substance and Accident, and How to Hunt Down a Definition

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works out a third distinction in the logic of definition: some things, substances, are defined by themselves, while others, accidents such as health, wisdom, and love, can only be defined in relation to a subject—body, reason, heart. Turning to Aristotle’s Categories and Metaphysics, he then asks a practical question: how does one actually find a definition? He answers with a military image—attacking a fortress from above, below, or the side—corresponding to three starting points, genus, examples, and convertible properties, each calling for its own reasoning: division, induction, and syllogism, illustrated through the Shakespearean sonnet, Euclid, and Aristotle’s account of wisdom and moral virtue in the Nicomachean Ethics.

23. Three Kinds of Beginnings, Custom, and the Role of Contradiction

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Working through Aquinas’s tenth and eleventh readings on Aristotle’s Physics, Book I, Berquist asks how the early philosophers arrived at contrary principles and why Aristotle argues that two contraries alone cannot account for change—an underlying third element is required, standing to the contraries proportionally and hierarchically, as better to worse. He illustrates the force of contradiction in the mind’s progress with Heraclitus, Heisenberg, and Einstein, then turns to Aquinas’s teaching on the qualities of a good student, drawing examples from Shakespeare’s wordplay on “before” in Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and All’s Well That Ends Well.

23. Two Abilities and Two Acts: Knowing, Learning and the Senses (De Anima II.5, Part 2)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks what it means to have a science versus actually thinking with it, tracing Aristotle’s distinction between two potencies—the ability to acquire knowledge and the ability to exercise knowledge already had—and their corresponding first and second actualities. He turns to Plato’s Meno and the doubling of the square to show what learning itself accomplishes, and to the etymology of “understanding” and the difference between alteration and a habit’s perfective actualization. He then applies the same structure analogically to sensation: the senses are acquired through generation as sciences are acquired through learning, and the act of sensing parallels actual consideration, though sensation grasps singulars outside the soul while understanding grasps universals within it.

23. Metaphysics IX, Lectio Seven: Actuality is Prior to Potency in Definition, Time, and Substance

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the third part of Book Nine of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, where the question is whether actuality or potency comes first. Working closely with the text of lectio seven, alongside Aquinas’s commentary, he follows Aristotle’s argument that act is prior to potency in definition, then in time—resting on the principle that nothing gives what it does not have—and finally in substance and perfection. He tests the argument through Aristotle’s own examples, such as a man coming from a man and a musician being formed by a musician. He closes by pointing ahead to how this priority of act bears on the later treatment of goodness, truth, and nobility.

24. Relations of Reason and the Four Species of Quality: Dividing by Two or Three, Virtue as the Road to Happiness, and Number in the Trinity

Fri, 10 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with a short aside on Aquinas’s De Potentia and Contra Errores Graecorum, touching the Filioque dispute with the Orthodox, before turning to Categories ch. 8. There he takes up Aristotle’s four species of quality—habits and dispositions, natural capacities, affective qualities, and shape or form—asking why Aristotle orders them as he does and whether they can also be grouped into two or three kinds. He shows how Aquinas uses this same division in the Prima Secundae’s treatment of virtue, drawing comparisons along the way to Plato, Avicenna, and Augustine’s Enchiridion, with attention to how examples are ordered in both texts.

24. Aquinas on Degrees of Beatitude, Happiness in This Life, and Whether Beatitude Can Be Lost (I-II, Q.5 aa.2–4)

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up three articles of Aquinas’s question on beatitude: can one person be more blessed than another, is beatitude possible in this life, and can perfect beatitude, once possessed, be lost. He follows Thomas through objections, sed contra, and responses, drawing on Aristotle’s Ethics, Augustine’s Confessions, City of God, and De Trinitate, Boethius’s definition of eternity, and scriptural passages from Matthew, John, Psalms, and Job. Along the way he digresses into Heidegger’s question of being and Origen’s mistaken view that the blessed could fall from beatitude. The class breaks off mid-way through the fourth article, on why perfect beatitude cannot be lost.

24. Summa III q.7 a.10–11: Is Fullness of Grace Christ's Alone? Mary, Envy in Heaven, and Whether Christ's Grace Is Infinite

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up two articles from the Summa on Christ’s grace. First he asks whether fullness of grace is Christ’s alone, distinguishing fullness “on the side of grace itself,” which is Christ’s exclusively, from fullness “on the side of the subject,” which others, including Mary, can share by degree. He then turns to whether Christ’s grace is infinite, working through Aquinas’s objections and answers by separating infinity “simply” from infinity “in some way.” Along the way he draws on Luke, Acts, Ephesians, and John, and digresses at length on envy, friendship, and historical and literary examples before closing with a remark on papal encyclicals.

24. Summa I, Q.5: Is Good Prior to Being, and Is Every Being Good? (Arts. 2–3): Per Se vs. Per Accidens, Evil as Privation, First Matter and Mathematics

Thu, 16 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the second and third objections to Article 1 of Question 5—whether good adds anything real to being—before turning to Article 3, whether every being is good. He distinguishes per se from per accidens desirability and act from potency, arguing that “good” names only a relation of reason added to being, not a further determination of it. First matter and the objects of mathematics come up as cases where this distinction gets tested: things desirable or intelligible in different ways than a complete being is. He also treats evil as privation, drawing on Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics and, briefly, literary examples from Shakespeare and Dostoevsky.

24. Wisdom's Questions About Substance and the Plan of the Third Reading: Is There a Cause Besides Matter?

Thu, 07 Apr 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist returns to the aporiai Aristotle poses before settling wisdom’s subject: does it treat only material things, or also causes existing apart from matter? He shows how these questions cluster around Plato’s separated Forms and mathematical entities, and sets them against the older natural philosophers—Thales, Anaximenes, Anaxagoras—and against Aristotle’s own Physics, leaning on Aquinas’s commentary to lay out the order in which the questions follow from one another. He reads a stretch of “The Royal Fragment” and works from DHB Vol. I, pausing along the way over Plato’s Protagoras, the nature of virtue and contrariety, and the etymology of “understanding” to show dialectic in action.

Aristotle, Posterior Analytics

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Aristotle, Posterior Analytics #

2 passages treated in 2 classes; 6 passages mentioned in passing

All works

Book I #

Aristotle, Posterior Analytics I (Aquinas’s commentary, lectio 1) #

Text: aquinas.cc, Latin – English · aquinas.cc, Latin – Greek

Treated in:

Introduction to Philosophy & Logic (1999) — 10. Thomas’s Proemia: Logic as the Art of Arts and Its Division by the Three Acts of Reason (from 1:45)

Aristotle, Posterior Analytics I (Aquinas’s commentary, lectio 40) #

Text: aquinas.cc, Latin – English · aquinas.cc, Latin – Greek

24. The Art of Division: Integral and Universal Wholes, Distinction, and the Rule of Two or Three

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens by distinguishing two senses of “whole” that division can cut: the integral whole, made of physical parts, and the universal whole, made of subordinate kinds, drawing examples from grammar, geometry, chemistry, and biology to keep the two straight. He then asks what governs a proper division, proposing a “rule of two or three” and setting Plato’s habitual dichotomies against Hegel’s trichotomies. He applies this to Aquinas’s derivation of the seven sacraments through nested twofold and threefold cuts. He closes with a question about rank: why judging a lower science against a higher one—philosophy against theology, sense against reason—always falls to the higher, wisdom-bearing discipline.

24. Modern Physics, Knowing by Making, and the Closed Circle of Man

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Following a reading in Aristotle’s Physics I, Berquist opens a discussion of how modern physicists — Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Weizsäcker, Einstein — talk about matter, energy, and substance, and whether that talk still reaches things as they are. The class tests Bohr’s claim that science “extends the range of experience and reduces it to order,” asking whether such order belongs to nature or is imposed by the experimenter, and draws this to Kant’s and Marx’s principle that we know only what we make. Passages from the Summa Contra Gentiles, Weizsäcker’s The World View of Physics, and Kant’s second preface anchor the exchange, which closes on whether experimental, interventionist science can still count as genuine knowledge of nature.

24. The Kinds of Sensibles (De Anima II.6), Sweetness as Metaphor, and Happiness vs. Joy

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Chapter Six of Book Two of Aristotle’s De Anima, where the sensible divides into three kinds: proper sensibles grasped by only one sense, common sensibles like shape and motion grasped by several, and accidental sensibles known only indirectly, through the intellect’s judgment. He works the distinction with plain cases—hearing a cat as opposed to merely hearing a sound, mistaking sugar for salt—before following a tangent into the metaphorical use of “sweet” and the etymology behind eudaimonia, felicitas, and happiness. The session closes by setting up the coming treatment of sight and touch.

24. Act Before Ability: The First Cause as Pure Act and the Sophistical Objection (Metaphysics IX)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks why act must be prior to potency, testing the claim first on straightforward cases like teaching and house-building, then on the harder case of the self-taught discoverer, where the one who comes to know and the one who teaches are the same person. He follows Aristotle into Metaphysics IX and Aquinas into Summa Contra Gentiles I.16-17 to show how this priority underwrites the argument for God as pure act. He contrasts this with materialist positions that take potency as prior simply speaking, naming the sophistical error of confusing “simply” with “in some respect,” and draws parallel cases from Plato’s Republic and Meno and from Aristotle’s ethics on acquiring virtue.

25. Quality Said in Many Ways: Qualis and 'How', Why Habit Comes First (Prima Secundae), Modus, and the Four Senses of End

Fri, 10 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist reads closely through Categories, ch. 8, tracking how “quality” answers the question “what sort?” (qualis, “how”) across its several kinds: figure and shape, natural capacity and incapacity, affective qualities and passions, and finally habit and disposition. He asks why habit is treated first among these in Aquinas’s ordering, drawing out the sense of quality bound up with a thing’s good or bad orientation toward its nature. He then turns to Aristotle’s four senses of “end” (terminus), probing how each might be said of God as beginning and end. Along the way he brings in square and cube numbers and poetic meter to show how far a single word like “how” or “end” can stretch across genuinely different senses.

25. Summa I-II q.5 a.5-6: Can Man Reach Beatitude by His Natural Powers or Through an Angel?

Thu, 26 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas on whether happiness lies within man’s natural reach or requires a gift from beyond him. Working through the objections and replies of article 5, he distinguishes an imperfect, natural happiness proportioned to created powers from the perfect beatitude of the beatific vision, which exceeds every created nature and can be given only by God. Article 6 then asks whether an angel could confer this blessedness, and Berquist explains how a higher creature can dispose or prepare a soul toward its end without itself being the cause of it. He fills out the argument with analogies drawn from teaching, shipbuilding, and medicine.

25. Can Christ's Grace Increase? (ST III, Q.7, a.12): Natural Limits, 'Simply' vs. 'In a Qualified Sense', and Freedom from Envy

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Starting from Pius X’s encyclical on St. Anselm and a look at Cur Deus Homo as a forerunner of Aquinas’s method, Berquist turns to Article 12 of Question 7 in the Tertia Pars: could Christ’s grace have increased? He draws Aquinas’s distinction between a limit set by the recipient and a limit set by the form itself, reaching for analogies from Planck and Einstein and the technical difference between something being true “simply” versus “in a qualified sense.” He closes on the fullness of Christ’s grace from conception, grace proportioned to one’s end, and a short reflection on why the blessed are free from envy.

25. Summa I, Q.5, A.4: Why We Want the Good, and the Good as Final Cause

Thu, 23 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Article 4 of Question 5, where Aquinas asks whether goodness has the character of a final cause, given the prior article’s claim that “good” names what is desired rather than the ground of its own desirability. He traces Aquinas’s argument that good is formally the end—that for the sake of which a thing acts—while still presupposing efficient and formal causality, using the example of fire producing heat. He also examines the reply to the first objection, which distinguishes the good, tied to appetite and the end, from the beautiful, tied to form and cognition, with discussion of Aristotle, Dionysius, and Augustine. The class closes on how “mover” is analogically extended from efficient to final cause, applied to God as unmoved mover.

25. Dividing to Reach the Beginnings: Kinds of Whole and Part, Universals, and Hegel's Error

Thu, 07 Apr 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens by widening “matter” beyond physical stuff to any part of a whole—material, definitional, or otherwise—and separates division from distinction and from definition proper. He then turns to a set of opening questions on how thinkers try to reach the first principles of reality: dividing toward the smallest, least universal elements, as Empedocles and Democritus do; dividing toward the most universal terms, the path of Plato and, he argues, Hegel; and dividing by definition. He measures these against Aristotle’s four senses of whole and part, and closes by flagging the next question: whether the causes are one or many, and whether they exist in potency or in act.

Aristotle, On Interpretation

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Aristotle, On Interpretation #

1 passages mentioned in passing

All works

Mentioned in passing #

Aristotle, On Interpretation #

Text: Logic Museum, Greek – Latin – English

Mentioned in 86 classes

25. Logic of the Second Act: Distinctions, Division, and the Statement

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist closes out the logic of the first act by reviewing the division of composed and universal wholes and three governing distinctions—equivocal senses of words, per se versus per accidens, and simple versus qualified predication—before turning to the logic of the second act. Opening Aristotle’s Peri Hermeneias, he works through the definition of statement as speech signifying true or false, distinguishes simple statements from compound ones joined by if-then or either-or, and divides the simple statement into noun and verb, or subject, predicate, and copula, ending with affirmation and negation. He draws on Aquinas and Ammonius alongside examples from Plato’s Meno, Shakespeare, and ordinary speech.

25. Aristotle's Physics I.11: Why Two Contraries Need a Third Thing

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Reading closely in Physics I, lectio 11, Berquist asks why the beginnings of change can be neither one nor infinite in number, invoking the same instinct for explanatory economy he finds in Empedocles, Newton, and Einstein. He then presses the harder question: why can’t two contraries by themselves account for change? Using hardness and softness as his example, he shows that a contrary cannot become its opposite “as such” without contradiction, so a third thing—an underlying subject—must persist beneath the change. Along the way he ties this back to Heraclitus’s puzzles and the move from confused to distinct knowledge.

25. Purity, Light and the Transparent: Aristotle's De Anima II.7 and Empedocles' Photons

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae on the virtues annexed to temperance, showing how purity and mildness rein in the unruly passions of lust and anger, drawing on Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Romeo and Juliet and on the etymology of “temper” and “wretched.” He then turns to Aristotle’s De Anima, Book II, working through the account of the transparent, light, and color, and Aristotle’s rejection of Empedocles’s claim that light is a body traveling through space. Against this he sets Aristotle’s argument that illumination happens all at once rather than by locomotion, comparing this with Newton, Huygens, and Einstein on light, and reflecting on definition and demonstration as instruments of reasoning.

25. Before and After in the Acts of Reason: Guessing, Thinking Out, and Discourse

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks what has to happen, in what order, before reason arrives at a genuine “before and after.” He works through Aristotle’s senses of “in,” “out,” and “beginning,” and Shakespeare’s line that reason is “looking before and after,” to show discourse—not sight—as the path to seeing causal and evaluative priority. Socrates’s searches for the good and the pious in the Meno, Phaedo, Euthyphro, and Symposium supply the test cases, alongside the ethical question of ranking goods of soul, body, and external goods. MacArthur’s Inchon landing and a childhood dialogue about desire round out the induction.

26. Quality in Theology: Powers, Grace, Sacramental Character and Words Taken from the Continuous

Thu, 16 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the treatise on quality in Categories, chapter 8, asking why relation comes third among the genera and why power and knowledge count as qualities rather than relations. He walks through the four species—habit and disposition, natural power and inability, sensible and passible qualities, figure and shape—noting that alteration properly belongs only to the third. Turning to theology, he uses texts from the Summa Theologiae, De Spiritualibus Creaturis, and a disputed question on sacramental character to show how grace and sacramental character get “reduced” to the first and second species even though neither fits Aristotle’s categories exactly. He closes by tracing how words like procession, “in,” “before,” and reason itself borrow their meaning analogically from continuous quantity, place, motion, and time.

26. Summa I-II q.5 a.7-8: Are Good Works Needed for Beatitude, and Does Everyone Desire It? With the Logical Division of the Second Part

Thu, 26 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up two articles closing Aquinas’s treatise on man’s last end: whether human works are required to attain beatitude, and whether every man desires beatitude. He follows Aquinas’s replies and the authorities behind them—Aristotle, Augustine, St. Paul—testing the claim against hard cases like Christ’s beatific vision from the moment of conception and the case of an infant dying after baptism. He closes by distinguishing the logical division of the Summa’s Second Part from its merely editorial referencing, using a parallel from Matthew’s Gospel, to show how Question 5 hands off to the coming treatment of human acts in general and in particular.

26. Habitual Grace Follows the Union (Q.7, a.13); Mixing Up Word Senses; Introduction to Q.8 on Christ as Head of the Church

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Article 13 of Question 7, where Thomas asks whether Christ’s habitual grace follows upon the union of natures — answering that it does, in the order of nature though not of time, using the analogies of the divine processions, light proceeding from the sun, and the priority of a suppositum to its action. He then works through the replies to the three objections, distinguishing Augustine’s sense of “grace,” dispositive from consequent properties via the fire-and-heat example, and what is common versus private within and across genera, pausing to warn against mixing senses of terms. He closes by outlining the eight articles of Question 8, on Christ’s grace as head of the Church.

26. Summa I, Q.5, AA.5–6: Mode, Species and Order; the Noble, the Useful and the Pleasant

Thu, 23 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up article five’s question of whether the notion of good consists in “mode, species, and order,” tracing Augustine’s triad back to Wisdom 11’s “measure, number, and weight” and untangling objections by distinguishing how goodness is said of these principles themselves versus of the things they perfect. He then turns to article six’s division of good into the honestum, the useful, and the pleasant, working it out through the image of motion toward an end. Along the way he digresses into Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and takes aim at pleasure-based, utilitarian accounts of ethics.

26. Metaphysics Book III, Part 1: How Many First Causes? Corruptible and Incorruptible Things, the One and Being, and Universal vs. Individual Causes

Thu, 21 Apr 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist continues his commentary on the “Book of Doubts,” Metaphysics Book III, turning to a second group of aporiai. He asks whether principles are limited in kind or number, whether the same causes account for both corruptible and incorruptible things, and whether unity and being are themselves the substance of things—as the Pythagoreans and Platonists held—or belong instead to some underlying subject, as Empedocles and the pluralists maintained. He closes by raising whether ultimate principles are universal or individual, using ordinary examples like typewriters, tea, and fruit to keep the one/many and act/potency structure concrete, while pointing ahead to Anaxagoras’s mind and Aquinas’s later use of these questions.

Aristotle, Categories

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Aristotle, Categories #

5 passages treated in 19 classes; 17 passages mentioned in passing

All works

Aristotle, Categories, ch. 4 #

Text: Logic Museum, Greek – Latin – English

Treated in:

Aristotle, Categories, ch. 5 #

Text: Logic Museum, Greek – Latin – English

26. True and False in the Simple Statement: Saying More or Less Than the Truth, and Contradictories

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up truth and falsity in the simple statement, defined as the mind saying of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not. Falsity, he shows, comes in two forms: saying what is not, is (adding to the truth), or saying what is, is not (subtracting from it). He illustrates both errors with courtroom oath language, lines from King Lear and Othello, and the Christological and Trinitarian heresies—Arianism, Patripassianism, Nestorianism, Monophysitism—as historical cases of overshooting or falling short of a “modest” middle truth. He closes by defining contradictory statements and the three ways—sense, definition, reasoning—by which one determines which of a pair is true.

26. Contradiction and the Progress of Knowledge: Heraclitus, Aristotle and the Untying of Knots

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Why does real understanding advance only by working through apparent contradictions rather than avoiding them? Berquist takes up Heraclitus’s fragments alongside Aristotle’s account in Physics Book I of change as requiring both contrary terms and an underlying subject, then turns to Metaphysics Book III on the necessity of dialectically “tying” and “untying” knotted difficulties before any question can be settled. He extends the pattern to Plato’s Phaedo, to Aquinas’s treatment of divine simplicity and his use of disputed questions, and to modern physicists like Einstein, Bohr, and Heisenberg, whose theories advanced by confronting conflicts with observed reality. Analogies from Haydn, Mozart, and Shakespeare illustrate the same structure of knot and resolution at work outside philosophy.

26. Sight versus Hearing, the Continuous, and Socrates and Christ as Spoken Teachers

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s De Sensu et Sensato, read through Aquinas’s commentary, on why sight outranks the other senses for grasping the common sensibles—magnitude, figure, motion, number—all bound up with the continuous, while hearing holds a peculiar privilege: it is the sense through which a student receives speech from a teacher. From there he traces how terms like “before,” “beginning,” and “end,” which get their first meaning from continuous quantity, are later said analogically of God. He closes by weighing the spoken word against the written, drawing out the parallel between Socrates and Christ as teachers who taught by speaking rather than writing.

26. Act Before Ability in Perfection: Metaphysics IX, Readings 8-9

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks how act can be shown prior to potency not just in time or notion but in perfection itself. He follows Aristotle’s argument in two steps: first through act’s relation to form and end, drawn out with examples from natural powers, the arts, and the difference between immanent and transitive operation; second through comparing incorruptible beings to corruptible ones. Along the way he brings in Aristotle’s account of “perfect” in Metaphysics V, Aquinas’s De Veritate on the true and the good, and texts on substance and accident from the Summa Contra Gentiles and the Scriptum on the Sentences, warning against confusing “simply” with “in some respect.” He closes by connecting the reading to Aquinas’s proofs for God as pure act.

27. The Last Six Categories, God's Eternity, and a Review of the Ante- and Post-Predicaments

Thu, 16 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the six categories left untreated so far—where, when, position, having, action, and passion—showing, from the Antepredicamenta of Aristotle’s Categories, how each names a subject denominatively, from something outside it, unlike substance, quantity, quality, and relation. He reviews the traditional threefold structure of the work into Antepredicaments, Predicaments, and Postpredicaments, working through equivocal, univocal, and denominative naming and the ordering of universal and particular substance and accident. He also covers the Postpredicaments—opposition, priority, simultaneity, motion, and having—with digressions on divine eternity, Boethius, and the modern misuse of dialectical opposition in Marxist thought, illustrated throughout with examples drawn from clothing, posture, and wine measures.

27. Summa I-II Q6 Art. 1: The Plan of the Treatise on Human Acts and Whether Human Acts Are Voluntary

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins by laying out how Question Six launches Aquinas’s treatise on human acts, separating the study of acts themselves from their principles—habits, law, and grace. He then reads closely through Question 6, Article 1, where Aquinas defines the voluntary as an intrinsic principle of action joined with knowledge of the end, drawing on Aristotle, Gregory of Nyssa, and John Damascene. Objections concerning external movers, animal motion, and divine causality are answered in turn. He also distinguishes acts proper to man from those shared with animals, and separates voluntariness from freedom, or liberum arbitrium.

27. Aquinas, Summa III q.8, Articles 1-3: Christ as Head of the Church, in Body and Soul, and of All Men

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with John 6 and John 3 on the Father as source of grace and the Eucharist, then turns to Summa III, q. 8. He follows Thomas’s three articles asking whether Christ is head of the Church according to his human nature, whether that headship governs bodies as well as souls, and whether he is head of all men or only the faithful—including Thomas’s fivefold gradation of union with Christ, from glory and charity down through faith, potency, and non-predestination. Along the way he brings in Ephesians, Romans, Corinthians, 1 John, and Augustine to explain the headship metaphor.

27. Summa Theologiae I, Q.6, aa.1–3: God Is Good, the Highest Good, and Good by His Essence

Thu, 30 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Question 6 of the Prima Pars, on the divine goodness. In Article 1 he shows why goodness belongs to God: an effect’s perfection reflects its cause, so every agent, above all God as first efficient cause, has the nature of the good and desirable — weighed against objections turning on mode, species, and order, and on the definition of good as “what all desire.” Article 2 asks whether God is the highest good, distinguishing God’s equivocal causality from univocal causation and meeting objections from composition, cross-genus comparison, and the scriptural line that “no one is good but God alone.” He then opens Article 3, on whether goodness belongs to God through His essence alone, with running digressions through Dionysius, Boethius, Aristotle, and Plato’s Symposium.

27. Metaphysics Book III, Part 2: Which Comes First, Ability or Act? Mathematical Things, and the Start of Book IV (Knowledge of Being as Being)

Thu, 21 Apr 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the aporiai of Metaphysics Book III: does ability or act come first, does everything come to be through motion or can something come to be by creation, and are mathematical things like numbers, lines, and figures substances? He tests Aristotle’s answers against materialists, Platonists, Pythagoreans, Hegel, Marxists, and Descartes, and reaches for the chicken-and-egg puzzle, the Locke-Berkeley dispute over general ideas, the Eucharist, and Shakespeare’s dramatic structure to make the stakes concrete for the soul and the first cause. He closes by describing Book III as tying knots that Books IV through XIV will untie, setting up being qua being and the axioms as wisdom’s proper subject.

Aristotle, other works

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Aristotle, other works #

45 passages mentioned in passing

All works

Mentioned in passing #

Aristotle, On the Heavens #

Mentioned in 20 classes

Aristotle, On the Heavens I #

Mentioned in 19 classes

Aristotle, On the Heavens II #

Mentioned in 13 classes

Aristotle, On the Heavens III #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics #

Mentioned in 19 classes

Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics VII #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Aristotle, Generation of Animals #

Mentioned in 28 classes

Aristotle, On Generation and Corruption #

Mentioned in 13 classes

Aristotle, On Generation and Corruption I #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Aristotle, History of Animals #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Natural Hearing 5
De Anima 1 (2×)

Aristotle, History of Animals X #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Aristotle, De Incessu Animalium #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Aristotle, De Motu Animalium #

Mentioned in 6 classes

Aristotle, De Memoria et Reminiscentia #

Mentioned in 17 classes

Aristotle, Meteorology #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 92

Aristotle, Meteorology I #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 202

Aristotle, Meteorology IV #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Aristotle, Organon #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Aristotle, Parts of Animals #

Mentioned in 16 classes

Aristotle, Parts of Animals I #

Mentioned in 15 classes

Aristotle, Poetics #

Text: Perseus, Greek · Perseus, English

27. Compound Statements and the Square of Opposition

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks what makes an if-then or an either-or statement true, and shows that a conditional’s truth turns not on whether its parts are true but on whether the connection between them is necessary—illustrated with the sixth theorem of Euclid’s Book I, a line from Shakespeare, and an example from Aquinas. He then takes up the square of opposition, sorting which pairs of universal and particular affirmatives and negatives sharing a subject are genuine contradictories rather than mere contraries. The class closes by tying this back to Aristotle’s distinction between demonstrative and dialectical reasoning, read alongside Aquinas’s commentary on the Posterior Analytics and a page of the handout “The Art About Statement.”

27. Contradiction in Science and Theology: Planck, Bohr, Einstein, Augustine and Thomas, plus Q&A

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks what apparent contradiction is good for, using episodes from modern physics—Planck’s quantum, Bohr’s atom, Heisenberg and Einstein on particle-wave duality—where seeming contradictions pushed scientists toward more comprehensive theories rather than being simply resolved away. He carries the same pattern into theology: Christ’s questioning of the Pharisees in Matthew, Augustine’s observation that heresy forces the Church to articulate doctrine more precisely, and the Second Vatican Council’s decree on priestly formation, which commends Aquinas’s method in the Summa Theologiae of raising and resolving difficulties. He closes with Aquinas’s commentary on Ephesians on faith, hope, and charity as “pillars of the church,” and class scheduling notes.

27. Touch, the Four Elements, and Reception Without Matter (De Anima II, chs. 11-12)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s treatment of touch, showing how hot/cold and wet/dry are the basic differences of body as body, tied to the old four-element theory of matter. He then turns to chapter twelve’s claim that sensation receives sensible form without matter, drawing on Aquinas’s commentary to distinguish material reception, where a new form displaces an old one as in carved wood or wax, from cognitive reception, where the form of another thing is grasped while one’s own nature stays intact. He closes on why sense organs, though they receive form immaterially, remain bodily and can be damaged by excessive sensibles, since each sense is a kind of proportion that can be thrown out of balance, like a musical instrument’s harmony.

27. Good, Bad and Privation: Why Act Is Better than Ability

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Turning from priority in time and definition to priority in perfection, Berquist asks why act is better than potency, taking health and sickness as his example: the capacity for one is inseparably the capacity for its opposite, while the actuality is not so divided. He follows this into Aristotle’s treatment of evil as a privation—a lack of what a subject ought naturally to have—rather than something positive, with the consequence that purely actual, eternal beings admit no evil. Drawing on Physics I and Aquinas’s Sentences commentary and Summa Theologiae, he distinguishes three analogical senses of “bad”: the privation itself, the subject bearing it, and the cause that induces it.

28. The Post-Predicaments I: Opposites, Distinction, and Speaking of Nothing

Thu, 23 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the Categories’ account of opposition—relatives, contraries, privation and possession, and contradictories—along with priority and simultaneity, following Aquinas’s commentary closely. He shows the reach of this logical apparatus by tracing it into Trinitarian theology, where the persons are distinguished by relation, into the Physics’ treatment of place and time, and into the soul’s causal relation to the body, pausing along the way over illustrations from Shakespeare and Mozart. The class closes on chapter ten’s further remarks on opposition, setting up the next session’s turn to truth and falsity in disjunctive statements.

28. Summa I-II Q6 Art. 2-4: The Voluntary in Animals, Voluntary Omission, and Whether the Will Can Be Forced

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up three articles on the voluntary in Aquinas’s treatise on human acts. He asks first whether animals, which lack knowledge of the end as end, can still be said to act voluntarily, distinguishing perfect from imperfect knowledge of the end. He then asks whether a person can voluntarily fail to act at all, showing how omission can still be voluntary through indirect rather than direct causation. Finally he takes up whether violence can be done to the will itself, separating the will’s own interior act from acts merely commanded by it, drawing on Aristotle, Damascene, Gregory, and Augustine, and illustrating the distinctions with examples from animal behavior and moral responsibility.

28. Aquinas, Summa III q.8, Articles 4-8: Christ as Head of the Angels, Grace of the Head, Other Heads, and the Devil and Antichrist as Heads of the Wicked

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up five articles of question 8 on Christ’s headship, moving from Christ’s rule over the angels through the question of whether the grace by which he heads the Church is one with his own personal grace. He examines how headship can extend, analogously, to popes, bishops, and other ministers within the body, distinguishing genuine headship from merely partial or delegated influence. The class then turns to the grim counterpart: whether the devil, and finally the Antichrist, can be called head of the wicked, sorting out headship by interior influence versus mere external rule, and by order, perfection, and causal power. Along the way he brings in Ephesians, Colossians, and Job to fill out the scriptural background.

28. Summa I, Q.6 a.4 and Q.7 a.1: All Things Good by the Divine Goodness; the Infinity of God

Thu, 30 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up two questions from the Prima Pars: whether all things are called good by the divine goodness, and whether God is infinite. He works through Thomas’s engagement with Augustine, Boethius, and Dionysius against Plato’s theory of separated forms, distinguishing God’s causality as exemplar, efficient, and final cause of goodness from the goodness intrinsic to creatures themselves. Turning to infinity, he separates the imperfect infinity of quantity, bound to matter, from the perfect infinity proper to subsisting being itself, drawing on Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics and the pre-Socratics Anaximander and Anaximenes for contrast.

28. Wisdom as the Knowledge of Being as Being: 'Through Itself', the First Cause, and Words Equivocal by Reason

Thu, 28 Apr 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins with Aristotle’s distinction between what belongs to a thing through itself, as part of its definition, and what follows as a proper property, drawing examples from geometry, logic, and ethics. He then turns to the opening chapters of the Metaphysics, showing that because the highest cause corresponds to the most universal subject, the science seeking first causes must be the science of being as being—just as knowledge of the king or of the end of human life reaches further than knowledge of subordinate causes. He closes on the problem of equivocity, showing “being” is said not univocally, like a genus, but analogically, as “healthy” or “political” are, each ordered back to one primary sense, which is what makes a single science of being possible.

28. Logic of the Second Act Wrap-Up, Mr. Anti-Statement, and What Reasoning Is

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist ties together the three acts of the mind, showing why reasoning presupposes judgment, which presupposes simple apprehension. He revisits the second act through “Mr. Anti-Statement,” a figure who contradicts every statement made to him, using the square of opposition to sharpen what contradiction and truth-value actually require. He then asks what reasoning itself is: a movement from statements already known or accepted to a new statement, illustrated with Socrates in the Meno, Heraclitus, and Einstein, and set apart from mere reasonable or wild guessing. He closes by naming the four kinds of argument—example, induction, enthymeme, and syllogism—to be taken up next.

28. Substance, Accident and Dialectical Probability: Resolving the Apparent Contradiction in Physics I

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist continues his close reading of Physics I, taking up the second and third arguments for why change requires a subject underlying two contraries, built on the substance-accident distinction, and arriving at Aristotle’s conclusion that matter plus two contraries suffice as principles of change. He then confronts an apparent contradiction in Aristotle’s treatment of contrariety in substance, working out its resolution through Aquinas’s commentary, lectio 11, by distinguishing dialectical or probable reasoning from strict demonstration. Along the way he contrasts Aristotle’s hylomorphic account of matter and form with Plato’s theory of forms, and closes by pointing toward how this reasoning about composition and change bears on later arguments concerning the nature of God.

28. Senses vs. Reason, Excess of Objects, and a Discussion of Evil as Privation

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist closes out De Anima Book II, chapter 12, asking why a sense organ can be overwhelmed and injured by an excessively strong object—too loud a sound, too bright a light, too intense a taste—while reason suffers no comparable damage from a supremely intelligible object. He traces the answer to the materiality of the sense organs against the immateriality of the intellect. A student’s question about whether non-existence can be called bad prompts a lengthy digression on privation and the goodness of creation, and along the way Berquist works through a passage in Aquinas’s Summa contra Gentiles, Book IV, on how the Son receives the divine nature. The class ends looking ahead to Book III of De Anima and the inner senses.

28. Bad as Non-Being, Faith and the Road to Knowing

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Working through the third division of the third part of Book Nine of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Berquist asks why act, and even potency ordered to act, must count as good and knowable, while evil turns out to be a privation rather than a positive being. He tests the point against Scripture, Augustine, and Sartre’s identification of freedom with non-being, showing where the modern account goes wrong. The class then shifts to how belief works: using the image of a road and Plato’s Protagoras, he explains how trusting a reliable guide can itself become a path to genuine knowledge, illustrated by following Aristotle’s own argument up to the first cause as pure act.

29. The Post-Predicaments II: Before, Together, Motion, and Having (God's Goodness and Seeing Him Face to Face)

Thu, 23 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist continues through Aristotle’s post-predicaments, distinguishing the several senses of “prior”—in time, in an irreversible order of being, in knowledge, and in worth—before turning to “simultaneous,” a brief pass through the six kinds of motion, and an extended treatment of the seven senses of “having.” He keeps returning to Aquinas, asking how these logical distinctions let us speak rightly of the Father and Son, and of divine attributes like wisdom and goodness, without implying real priority or division in God. Examples drawn from music history, ordinary speech, and personal anecdote illustrate how each sense of the terms is analogically rooted in more basic notions of quantity, place, and motion.

29. Violence, Fear and the Involuntary (Prima Secundae Q.6, aa.5–6)

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether violence and fear cause involuntariness. He distinguishes acts elicited by the will from acts merely commanded by it, and natural inclinations arising from active versus passive principles, to show why violence—acting directly on the passive body—destroys voluntariness outright, whereas fear leaves the will’s choice intact and so produces an act voluntary in itself but involuntary “in a qualified sense.” He illustrates the point with Aristotle’s ship-jettisoning example from the Nicomachean Ethics, a merchant throwing cargo overboard in a storm, a reluctant child, and converts acting under threat of death. He closes with brief remarks on Gregory of Nyssa’s role in this distinction and on God’s antecedent versus consequent will.

29. The Knowledge of Christ I: Why Christ Has Human Knowledge and the Beatific Vision (ST III, q.9, aa.1-2)

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the opening articles of Summa Theologiae III, q. 9, where Aquinas asks whether Christ, besides his divine knowledge, also had a created human knowledge, and then whether that knowledge included the vision the blessed have of God. He walks through Aquinas’s arguments, objections, and replies, drawing on Aristotle’s De Anima and Metaphysics, Ambrose, and the letter to the Hebrews to explain why a merely divine intellect would leave Christ’s human nature incomplete. Along the way he addresses Christ’s headship over the Church and warns against errors that either overstate his self-emptying or reduce him to ordinary humanity, before turning toward the next article’s question of innate versus infused knowledge.

29. Summa I, Q7, Articles 2–3: Can anything besides God be infinite, in essence or in size? (Simply vs. in some way, first matter, and useful fictions in physics)

Thu, 06 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Question 7, article 2: can any creature be infinite in essence? He works through Aquinas’s answer by way of the distinction between being infinite simpliciter and secundum quid, applying it in turn to prime matter, form, created intellects, and angels, showing why each falls short of unqualified infinity. He then opens article 3, on whether an actually infinite continuous magnitude — an infinite body — is possible, drawing on Aristotle’s Physics and Categories. Along the way he digresses on Aristotle’s use of examples and on how physics and astronomy employ useful fictions.

29. Substance as the First Meaning of Being, the Philosopher, and Why Wisdom Must Consider the Axioms

Thu, 28 Apr 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s claim that “being” is not one univocal term but is said in many ways ordered to a primary sense, substance, much as “healthy” and “medical” are said in reference to a central meaning rather than as pure equivocations. Working through Aquinas’s commentary, he lays out the fourfold division of being—substance, accident, generation and corruption, and privation—and explains why metaphysics takes substance rather than God as its proper subject, even though it culminates in knowledge of God, marking the difference from revealed theology. He then turns to the Posterior Analytics distinction between axioms, self-evident statements known to everyone, and principles known only to the learned, asking why philosophy must still scrutinize axioms given their equivocal terms and exposure to sophistical objections.

29. Example, Induction and Enthymeme: Arguments Near the Senses

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up a handout on the four kinds of argument to ask what separates example, induction, and enthymeme from the strict syllogism. He shows that example argues from one particular to a similar particular, induction climbs from many singulars to a universal claim, and enthymeme reasons from likelihood or sign rather than necessity. Along the way he traces the etymologies linking sample to example and induction to introduction and inducement, drawing illustrations from Henry V, Julius Caesar, Richard III, and Cicero as well as homely cases like picking a restaurant or a car. The recurring point: none of these arguments produces a necessary conclusion, only a probability that varies with how close the likeness or sign really is.

29. Three Is Enough: The Number Three in Logic, Rhetoric, Music, Physics and Theology

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up a puzzle from Aristotle’s Physics I: are the principles of change—subject and contraries—really two, or do they amount to three? Working from a handout on “whether the beginnings are two, three or more,” he uses this question as a springboard to trace how the number three keeps turning up as sufficient across the arts and sciences—in logic and rhetoric, in poetic examples from Shakespeare and Milton, in music from Handel, Corelli, and Mozart, and even in Heisenberg’s universal constants. He keeps returning to Aristotle’s own texts—the Poetics, the Rhetoric, On the Heavens, the Physics—as anchors, while cautioning that threefold division is a common but not universal pattern of intellectual analysis.

29. De Anima III.1: Why Only Five Senses, and the Accidental Perception of Shape, Motion, and Number

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with Aquinas’s commentary on 1 Corinthians 2, working out the distinction between the “animalis homo” and the “spiritualis” man from the definition of soul as form of the body, contrasting the soul’s cognitive and appetitive powers with intellect and will. He then turns to Aristotle’s De Anima, Book III, chapter 1, where Aristotle argues, with only probable certainty, that no sixth sense exists beyond the traditional five, reasoning from the sense organs’ relation to the four elements, and explains why common sensibles like shape, motion, and number are known only accidentally through the proper senses. Along the way he draws in Mary’s Magnificat, the soul-spirit distinction, and the nature of number and infinity.

29. Act Before Ability: Knowability, Truth and the End of Book IX

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist closes his treatment of act and potency in Book Theta by asking why badness must be understood as a privation rather than a positive principle, drawing on Aquinas’s threefold division of evil. Working through Lectio 10 and 11, he uses geometrical examples and the composition of truth and falsity to argue that act is more knowable and more true than potency. He ties this back to Physics I’s distinction between what is known to us and known by nature, and to points from the Ethics and Sophistical Refutations, using them to diagnose errors in Descartes, Marx, and materialism. He closes by previewing how Metaphysics XI–XII moves from imperfect to perfect being toward the treatment of the first cause, God.

30. Kinds of Opposites and the Trinity: Heaven's Praise, Evil as Privation, and Why the Father Is Not Before the Son

Thu, 02 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens by linking the beatific vision’s seeing, loving, and praising to the three theological virtues and Aristotle’s remark that three is the “perfect” number. He then turns to Aristotle’s four kinds of opposition—contradiction, privation, contraries, and relatives—drawing on Aquinas’s brief remarks on the Categories, the Scriptum super Sententiis, and De Malo. This doctrine is put to work on two problems: how evil is rightly understood as privation, and how the divine Persons are distinguished by relative opposition. The class closes with Aquinas on “before” (prius) in the Sentences commentary, using opposition and simultaneity to show, negatively, that the Father is in no way prior to the Son.

30. Concupiscence, Ignorance and the Circumstances of Human Acts (Q.6, aa.7–8; Q.7, aa.1–2)

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Does concupiscence make an act involuntary, and does ignorance? Berquist works through Aquinas’s articles on both questions, distinguishing the voluntary from the involuntary and from the merely non-voluntary, then sorts ignorance into its concomitant, consequent, and antecedent kinds to show which excuses from responsibility and which does not. He then turns to q. 7, asking what a circumstance of a human act actually is and why the moral theologian must attend to it at all. Along the way he reaches for Oedipus, Shakespeare, and current news stories, tying the analysis back to how a confessor judges culpability.

30. The Knowledge of Christ II: Infused and Acquired Knowledge, and Knowing the Same Thing in Different Ways (ST III, q.9, aa.3-4)

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the objections and responses of Article 3 of Summa Theologiae III, q. 9—whether Christ possessed infused, or “endowed,” knowledge in addition to the beatific knowledge of his soul—before turning to the opening of Article 4 on acquired knowledge gained through the senses and experience. He distinguishes blessed, infused, and acquired knowing by analogy to Augustine’s angelic “morning” and “evening” knowledge and to Aristotle’s agent and possible intellect from the De Anima, asking why one kind of knowledge does not simply make the others redundant. Along the way he digresses on brevity and wisdom, contrasts Cartesian epistemology with Thomistic dialectical method, and notes the inverse relation between certitude and precision.

30. Summa I, Q7, Article 4 and Q8, Article 1: No actual infinite multitude, Weizsäcker on a finite universe, and how God is in all things

Thu, 06 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether an infinite multitude can exist in act. He argues it cannot—only an infinite in potency, as in the successive division of a continuum—and along the way brings in Aristotle’s Physics on number and division, plus modern physics (Weizsäcker, quantum theory, relativity) on whether the universe itself is finite. He then moves to q. 8, a. 1, asking how God is “in” all things, distinguishing this omnipresence from any spatial containment: God is present everywhere as the sustaining cause of being, not as a body occupying space.

30. Why Wisdom Defends the Axioms and the 'Great Turnaround' in the Order of Wisdom (Book IV, Reading 5; Overview of Book V)

Thu, 12 May 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Why should the metaphysician, who studies being as being, also be the one to defend the common axioms rather than leaving that task to some other science? Berquist works through Reading 5 of Book IV of Aristotle’s Metaphysics to show that the axioms, like the principle of non-contradiction, hold universally of being and so fall under the wise man’s charge. He uses this text to explain the “great turnaround” in the order of wisdom: how first causes, being as being, and the axioms get treated in an order opposite to how they are first introduced, each conclusion becoming a premise for what follows across the fourteen books. He also touches on the old identification of wisdom with natural philosophy and paradoxes from Zeno and Heraclitus that the axioms resolve.

30. The Syllogism, Its Likeness to Calculation, and Dividing the Four Arguments

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s definition of the syllogism as speech in which stated premises necessarily yield a conclusion, and asks how this differs from mere calculation, which looks similar but belongs to a different art. He then divides the four kinds of argument two ways: by resemblance, pairing syllogism with enthymeme and induction with example, and by practical use, setting syllogism and induction toward universal, dialectical conclusions against enthymeme and example’s work persuading about particulars in rhetoric. He tests these distinctions against Othello, Aesop’s fables, and courtroom and political speech, showing how imagination can mislead where reasoning from premises would not.

30. Becoming, the General Before the Particular, and Why the End Is Better Than the Means

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens a new stretch of Aristotle’s Physics, moving from “change” to “becoming” as the common basis he wants readers to grasp first from how all men speak, before lectio thirteen tightens an earlier merely probable claim about contraries into a necessary conclusion. He interrupts the preview with a long excursus on why learning proceeds from the general to the particular, working the point through the words “change” and “becoming,” then “going” and “coming,” and through examples of desire and virtue from the Nicomachean Ethics to show why the end is better known and better than the means. He closes with brief remarks on the next meeting.

30. Custom, Abstraction, and Sensing Our Own Sensing (De Anima III, ch. 2)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with examples—idiom and translation, travel abroad, C.S. Lewis on reading old books, and specialists like Claude Bernard and Descartes who absolutize one way of knowing—to show how custom and limited experience slow reason down when ideas have never occurred apart. He then moves to close commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima, Book III, chapter 2, with Aquinas’s commentary alongside it, asking whether the very sense that perceives color or sound also perceives its own act of seeing or hearing. He works through how sensible-in-act and sense-in-act are one in being but differ in definition, setting up Aristotle’s case for an inward common sense that can tell white from sweet.

30. First Cause, First Being, and the Order of the Books of Wisdom

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks why Aristotle’s Metaphysics moves so tightly from the axioms through being as being to the first causes, and why Aquinas follows a parallel path in calling God both “first being” and “first cause.” Through close questioning he sorts out the different senses of “before” and “necessary,” pressing the class to say which sense is at work when Thomas argues in SCG I.16 that God is pure act, a claim resting on the Metaphysics IX conclusion that act is prior to potency. He also shows how Metaphysics V’s account of “necessary” and “cause” both finishes defending the first axiom and opens the inquiry into being qua being, so that each stage’s conclusion becomes the next stage’s starting point.

Scripture: Old Testament

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Scripture: Old Testament #

605 passages mentioned in passing

All works

Mentioned in passing #

Genesis #

Mentioned in 13 classes

Genesis 1 #

Text: drbo.org, Douay-Rheims and Vulgate

Mentioned in 7 classes

Genesis 1:1 #

Text: drbo.org, Douay-Rheims and Vulgate

31. Relations of Reason, Eternity as 'Whole at Once', Motion Among the Post-Predicaments, and an Introduction to the Second Act of Reason

Thu, 02 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up a text of Aquinas, drawn from Aristotle, Avicenna, and Boethius, on whether God’s priority to the world names a real relation or merely a relation of reason, running through the four Avicennian cases where reason alone grounds such relations. He then dwells on Boethius’s definition of eternity from the Consolation of Philosophy—“the whole and perfect possession of unending life at once”—drawing out how eternity’s simultaneity differs from time’s before-and-after. He turns next to the categories of motion and habit, touching place, alteration, and growth, and closes by introducing the mind’s three acts—simple apprehension, judgment, and reasoning—and their corresponding kinds of speech, name, statement, and argument, as the foundation for the divisions of logic.

31. Circumstances of Human Acts and Whether the Will Wants Only the Good (Q.7 aa.3–4; Q.8 a.1)

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist treats Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 7, aa. 3–4 on how circumstances like time, place, manner, cause, and object bear on the substance of a human act, drawing on Aristotle’s Ethics and Cicero’s Rhetoric for the relevant categories. He then turns to q. 8, a. 1, asking whether the will’s object is only the good, working through the objections and Aquinas’s responses. Along the way he digresses into Aristotle’s Poetics and Bernard of Clairvaux, and repeatedly points out Aquinas’s habit of organizing distinctions in twos and threes.

31. Aquinas on Christ's Beatific Knowledge (ST III q.10 a.1–2): The Soul of Christ Does Not Comprehend God but Knows All Things in the Word

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Summa Theologiae III, q. 10, on Christ’s beatific knowledge, asking first whether his human soul comprehended the divine essence and then whether it knew all things in the Word. He distinguishes scientia visionis from scientia simplicis intelligentiae, and comprehension from vision, showing that clarity of knowledge is not the same as quantity of things known. Objections drawn from Isidore, Damascene, and Augustine are weighed, along with the Gospel’s troubling statement that Christ did not know “the day or the hour.” The discussion situates these questions within the hypostatic union, touching along the way on divine and human love and judgment.

31. Is God in All Things and Everywhere? (Summa I, q.8, a.1–2)

Thu, 20 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of divine presence: is God in all things, and is God everywhere? He works through the objections and replies, ruling out presence as part-in-whole or as an accident inheres in its subject, and instead grounds it in God as agent-cause most intimately united to the esse of every effect. Drawing on Aristotle’s Physics IV for the senses of “in” and “place,” he sets the question within the order of divine attributes already established—infinity, perfection, immutability, simplicity, unity—and brings in Boethius’s De Trinitate and Aquinas’s treatment of the Incarnation, using everyday illustrations to show why infinite power, not bodily extension, explains omnipresence.

31. Book V: The Meanings of 'Beginning' and of 'Being' (By Happening, by the Figures of Predication, as True)

Thu, 12 May 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through the start of Book Five, where Aristotle catalogues the ways “beginning” is said—from a road’s starting point and a ship’s keel to a father, the axioms of demonstration, and wonder as the beginning of philosophy—up to the broadest sense in which any cause counts as a beginning. A theological aside considers why this notion of “before” cannot apply to the Trinity. He then turns to Aristotle’s opening treatment of “being,” setting accidental being, as in a “Christian geometer,” against being per se, analyzed through the figures of predication—substance, quality, quantity, relation—drawing throughout on Aquinas’s commentary and on examples like Marxist dialectics and affirmative-action hiring.

31. Three Kinds of Syllogism: The Four Forms of If-Then Speech, the Meno and Euclid

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist distinguishes the three forms of syllogism: simple categorical, hypothetical (if-then), and disjunctive (either-or). He works through the four possible moves in a conditional argument, showing why affirming the antecedent and denying the consequent are valid while affirming the consequent and denying the antecedent are not, drawing examples from Aristotle’s Physics, Metaphysics, and Poetics. He then turns to Euclid’s Book I, Proposition 6, and to Plato’s Meno, where Socrates builds rival hypothetical syllogisms over whether virtue can be taught. He closes by noting how modern scientific hypothesis-testing repeats the classic error of affirming the consequent.

31. Heisenberg on Natural Language, Number and One, and Student Questions on Nature and Motion

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins with Heisenberg’s lecture on philosophy since Descartes, weighing the res cogitans/res extensa split against Heisenberg’s observation that natural-language words like mind, soul, life, and God hold their meaning more stably than technical scientific terms. He then returns to Aristotle’s Physics I, lectio 12, on nature as defined by motion and on Euclid’s equivocal-by-analogy uses of “number” and “one.” Shakespeare enters next: Hamlet’s advice to the players and the example of Romeo and Juliet illustrate nature, virtue, and vice in action. The class closes with an inductive demonstration, via the propter quod principle, that the end is better than the means, applied to goods of soul versus body.

31. Sensible in Act, Sound in the Forest, and Praying with Other Religions

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through De Anima Book III, pressing the puzzle of whether something “tasty” is actual or only potential before it is actually tasted, and considers concord and ratio in the act of hearing. He previews the next class’s question of whether one sense, or two senses together, can tell that white and sweet belong to different objects. The discussion then opens out into looser exchanges with students on pity and mercy, whether love is an act of will or of feeling, the difference between vocal and mental prayer, and whether one may pray together with people of other religions.

31. Can Objections Undo Faith or the Axioms? Introducing Book II and How Man Knows Truth

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up a hard case: what happens when someone raises an objection to an article of faith, or to a self-evident axiom, that you cannot personally refute? He argues that certitude itself—natural or by faith—guarantees the objection hides a flaw, even if unfound, working the point through Hegel’s paradox of “becoming” and a parallel puzzle in Eucharistic theology. He then turns to Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Book II, and Aquinas’s commentary on it, introducing the opening question of whether the pursuit of truth is easy or difficult, and setting Aristotle’s confidence against modern doubts about whether truth can be known at all, from Descartes through Kant and Cassirer.

Scripture: New Testament

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Scripture: New Testament #

621 passages mentioned in passing

All works

Mentioned in passing #

Matthew #

Mentioned in 71 classes

Matthew 1 #

Text: drbo.org, Douay-Rheims and Vulgate

32. Senses of Before and After, and the Eight Senses of 'In' as Ways of Thinking Out

Thu, 09 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with prayer and moves into a cluster of Aristotelian distinctions: the several senses of “before and after,” a further causal sense among them, and the difference between confused and distinct knowledge. He argues for “ability” over “power” or “potency” to name active and passive capacities, then takes up the eight senses of “in” from Book IV of the Physics, pairing each with a way of reasoning things out—through parts, wholes, genus, species, form and matter, conclusions, and word-meanings. Illustrations range from wine-tasting and teeth in the mouth to Marxist dialectics and Shakespeare, with the discussion circling back to angelic mediation of prophecy, the word “intelligere,” and how these distinctions bear on the Trinity and divine wisdom.

32. Does the Will Want the End Only, or the Means Too? One Act or Two? (Q.8 aa.2–3)

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Question 8 of the Prima Secundae, asking whether the will’s act pertains only to the end or also to the things ordered to it, and whether the will moves toward end and means by one act or by two. Reading Thomas’s articles closely alongside Aristotle’s Ethics, he shows how the end serves as the “reason for willing” the means—comparing this to how light is seen together with color, and to how understanding reaches conclusions through first principles. Along the way he digresses into Aristotle’s Metaphysics, the philomythos-philosopher comparison, and his own formation through literature and Greek study.

32. Christ's Knowledge of the Infinite and His Supreme Vision of God (ST III q.10 a.3–4), with a Digression on 'Simply' vs. 'In Some Way' and the Prologue to Infused Knowledge (q.11)

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether Christ’s human soul knows infinite things, distinguishing an infinity of form from the infinity of privation or matter, and knowledge held in act from knowledge held only in potency. He then moves into article 4, asking whether Christ’s soul sees the Word more perfectly than any other creature, comparing the grades of grace and vision given to Christ, Mary, and the angels. Along the way he digresses on Berkeley and Anaxagoras and on the sophism of “simply” versus “in a certain respect,” tracing it back to Plato’s Meno and Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations. The class ends with the proemium to question 11, previewing the treatment of Christ’s infused knowledge.

32. God Present by Essence, Presence and Power; God Alone Everywhere; the Unchangeable God (q.8 a.3–4, q.9 a.1)

Thu, 20 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks how God can be said to be “in” creatures at all, distinguishing His presence as agent cause from His presence as an object known and loved. He explains why omnipresence belongs to God alone—unlike creatures, God is wholly present everywhere, not spread out through parts—drawing on Gregory the Great, Augustine, and Ambrose alongside Aquinas’s own objections and replies. Turning to q. 9, he opens the question of divine immutability, arguing that God’s pure actuality, simplicity, and infinity rule out any change in Him. Along the way he pauses over Aristotelian terms—act and potency, motion versus perfect operation, love of friendship versus love of desire—needed to follow the arguments.

32. Metaphysics V, Reading 17: The Senses of Being – Being by Happening, the Ten Categories, Being as True, and Act and Ability

Thu, 19 May 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s commentary on this reading, asking how many ways “being” is said. He separates accidental being from being per se, then divides being per se into being according to the ten categories, being as true or false, and being as act or potency—moving from the less universal to the more universal sense. He ties the division back to Book IV’s account of being as an analogical term centered on substance, drawing examples from creaturely composition, divine simplicity, and the puzzle of becoming, with a nod to motion, time, and transubstantiation. The aim throughout is to locate this inquiry within wisdom’s study of being qua being.

32. Form and Matter of the Syllogism: Either-Or and If-Then Syllogisms, Right Opinion, and Proportion

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens by separating formal logic—whether a conclusion necessarily follows—from material logic—whether the premises are true—citing Albert the Great’s claim that the syllogism is logic’s central act. He then works through either-or (disjunctive) syllogisms before turning at length to the four forms of if-then speech, showing that affirming the antecedent and denying the consequent are valid while the other two forms are fallacious, drawing examples from Euclid, Aquinas’s Summa and Summa Contra Gentiles, and Socrates’ reasoning in Plato. He closes by tracing how chained conditional syllogisms operate and how this reasoning appears implicitly in Socrates and Melissus before Aristotle gave it formal shape.

32. Reading 12: Common Understanding of Becoming: Three Things in Every Becoming

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s treatment of becoming as something all people, not just natural philosophers, already understand, and argues it rests on a more evident necessity than the earlier account of change. Working from ordinary speech—“the young man becomes old,” “from young to old”—he shows that every becoming involves a persisting subject, an opposite or privation that is lost, and the new thing that comes to be. Two inductive surveys, one from substances and accidents and one from the common modes of coming-to-be (shaping, addition, subtraction, alteration, composition), confirm that nothing comes from nothing. He closes by noting that everything which becomes is therefore composite, unlike the utterly simple, unchanging God.

32. De Anima III, Lectio 3: The Common Sense and Judging White from Sweet

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the question of how we can judge that white and sweet are different, when sight grasps one and taste the other—no single exterior sense can compare qualities it doesn’t itself perceive. Following Aristotle’s argument in Book III, Lectio 3 of the De Anima, read through Aquinas’s commentary, he shows why a unifying “common sense” is needed to discern such differences, using comparisons to syllogistic reasoning and spelling, and the image of a point as the shared origin of several lines. He extends that same point-analogy to the two natures and one person of Christ. Brief opening remarks mark the feast of St. Pius X.

32. Dispositions of the Will for the Philosopher, and Hope and Fear in Pursuing Truth (Metaphysics II intro)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins by tracing how the order of causes and the order of being correspond yet differ in Aquinas, following the theme through the Summa’s first four ways and back into Aristotle’s own treatment of causality. He then moves to Book Two of the Metaphysics, arguing that before Aristotle can claim that considering truth belongs to the wise man, he pauses to examine what dispositions of will—love of wisdom, desire for truth, avoidance of error, hope, fear, docility, humility—are needed to pursue it at all. He illustrates these through Plato’s Phaedo and stories from his own teachers, closing with Book Two as this preparatory turn toward man’s relationship to truth.

33. The Order of Thinking Out: Definition, Understanding What a Thing Is, Name and Speech

Thu, 09 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works out the sequence by which reason moves from grasping what a thing is to saying something true or false about it. He distinguishes name from speech, and definition—speech signifying what a thing is—from statement, which signifies truth or falsity, using even, odd, and perfect numbers and Euclid’s Elements as test cases, alongside Aristotle’s Categories, Porphyry’s Isagoge, and Aquinas’s proemium to logic on the first two acts of understanding and the third act of reasoning. He closes by turning these tools on a live question: whether one can rightly call something true or false about sex and gender before first understanding what the thing itself is.

33. Dividing Theology, the End as a Cause, and Whether the Understanding Moves the Will (Question 9, Article 1)

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with a digression on structuring theology and prayer by a “rule of two or three,” using the Our Father and the two Summas as examples, before turning to Question 9 of the Prima Secundae, on what moves the will. In Article 1 he asks whether the intellect moves the will, and works out how the two move each other: the intellect as an efficient cause with respect to the will’s exercise of its act, the will’s own object, apprehended as good, as its formal or final cause. He reads through the article closely, checking it against Aristotle’s account of appetite and intellect in De Anima II, lectio 5, and a handout note on the same readings.

33. Studiorum Ducem and Christ's Infused Knowledge: Does It Reach All Things, and Does It Need Images? (Summa III, Q.11, aa.1–2)

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins with Pius XI’s encyclical Studiorum Ducem and John XXII’s praise of Aquinas as Doctor of the Eucharist, then turns to Summa III, q. 11, on Christ’s infused knowledge. Working through article 1, he asks whether this knowledge reaches all things a human mind can know; in article 2, whether understanding through it still requires turning to phantasms, the mental images Aristotle’s De Anima makes central to ordinary human cognition. He compares Christ’s mode of knowing to that of angels and separated souls, who know without recourse to images. The class also digresses into harmonizing the Gospel accounts of Christ’s seven last words.

33. God's Unchangeableness (Summa I, Q.9): Pure Act, Motion vs. Doing, and How Angels Are in Place

Thu, 27 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Article One of Question Nine, where Thomas argues from pure act, from divine simplicity, and from infinity that God is altogether unchangeable, weighing objections drawn from Augustine, Wisdom, and James along the way. He then turns to the harder question, from Article Two, of how creatures without bodies can still be called changeable: Thomas’s distinction between motion and mere operation lets him explain, with help from Dionysius, how an angel can be “in a place” without occupying it the way a body does. Berquist brings in Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics, Boethius, and modern figures like Locke, Berkeley, and Descartes to show why the act/potency framework is needed once imagination fails.

33. Metaphysics V, Reading 18 on 'Perfect' and the Start of Book VI: How Wisdom Differs from the Making and Doing Sciences

Thu, 19 May 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through the term “perfect” or “complete,” the first word of the third group of terms in Book Five of the Metaphysics, reading it alongside Aquinas’s commentary. He distinguishes three senses: having all one’s parts, possessing the full range of ability proper to one’s kind, and having attained one’s end, drawing examples from Homer, Shakespeare, and Mozart. He notes that creatures are perfect only within a genus, while God alone is perfect without qualification. The class closes by turning to the start of Book Six, where Aristotle begins distinguishing wisdom from natural philosophy, art, and choice.

33. The Syllogism: Set of All, Set of None, and the Sixteen Moods of the First Figure

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the categorical syllogism from the handout on the form of the simple syllogism, asking why the middle term’s position in the first figure lets some of the sixteen possible premise-pairs yield a necessary conclusion while others fail. He grounds the answer in two principles: the “dictum de omni,” what is said of every member of a set, and the “dictum de nullo,” what is said of none. Working through combinations with examples like animals, plants, dogs, cats, and stones, he shows concretely how invalid moods break down. He closes by touching on conversion of universal statements and a passage from Aquinas’s Summa Contra Gentiles that uses a disjunctive syllogism about God’s relation to creatures.

33. Reading 13: Only Two Causes, and Lack versus Contrary (Virtue, Vice, Ignorance, Error)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist continues his commentary on Physics I, taking up the thirteenth reading. He shows that although every becoming involves matter, form, and privation, only matter and form count as causes, since the privation—such as the softness lost when butter hardens—is never actually present in the thing that results. Reviewing how the principles get numbered as two or three, he then sharpens an earlier point: change requires only the absence of the form to be acquired, not the presence of its full contrary. He works this out through ethical examples—virtue and vice, continence and incontinence—and through the difference between error and ignorance, drawing on Plato’s Meno.

33. De Anima III.3: Grasping and Judging, Sensing vs. Reason, and the Prevalence of Error

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the opening of De Anima III.3, where Aristotle begins separating the senses—including the inward senses—from reason, a distinction he’ll complete in chapter four. The core question: why did earlier thinkers like Empedocles and Anaxagoras collapse understanding into sensing, treating knowledge as a bodily process on the assumption that “like knows like”? Berquist answers by laying out grasping and judging as the two constituents of knowledge, working through examples from geometry and Shakespeare. He closes by tracing how the mind’s natural bent toward sensible and imaginable objects shapes, and constrains, Thomas’s later teaching on theological language about God.

33. Is Truth Easy or Difficult? Metaphysics II: Three Ways It Is Easy, Two Causes of Difficulty, and Gratitude to Predecessors

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through the first chapter of Aristotle’s Metaphysics Book II, where Aristotle claims that knowing truth is in one way easy and in another way hard. Truth is easy because no one wholly misses it, because truths accumulate through many hands, and because everyone grasps first principles like the axioms. Difficulty has two sources: one in the object itself, as with matter, motion, and time, which are only partly actual; the other in our own intellect’s weakness before immaterial things, like a bat blinded by daylight. Berquist connects the passage to related discussions in the Physics, De Anima, and Posterior Analytics, and to Aquinas’s commentary, using the text’s own image of debtors owing thanks even to those who erred before us.

34. Truth and Falsity in Statements: Either/Or and If-Then Statements and Syllogisms

Thu, 09 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks why a bare name like “goat-stag” is neither true nor false while a statement can be, tracing the simple statement’s division into noun, verb, and copula and the peculiar role of the verb in signifying time. He then turns to compound statements, working out the logic of either-or claims and, at greater length, if-then statements: which patterns of affirming or denying the antecedent or consequent give necessary conclusions and which give only probability. Examples come from Aristotle, Aquinas on the Trinity, Euclid, and Shakespeare, all in service of his running method of “thinking out” a subject’s parts, order, and definition.

34. Whether Sense Desire Moves the Will, and Whether the Will Moves Itself (Question 9, Articles 2–3)

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks how passion can make something appear good “here and now” even against reason’s universal judgment, tracing Aquinas’s answer through Augustine, Aristotle’s Physics, Ethics, Politics, and De Anima. He then turns to whether the will can move itself, comparing this self-motion to how the intellect moves from known principles to conclusions. Along the way he draws on Homer and Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, and contrasts lived experience with theoretical knowledge, to show how reason, passion, and free choice actually interact in a person.

34. Christ's Infused Knowledge: Reasoning Step by Step, Compared with the Angels, Held as a Habit, Split into Many Habits (Summa III, Q.11, aa.3–6)

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up four articles on Christ’s infused knowledge. He asks whether that knowledge proceeded discursively, distinguishing knowledge gained through reasoning from knowledge that is simply used in a reasoning process, then compares Christ’s knowledge to that of the angels. He turns to whether this knowledge was habitual, weighing the knowledge’s divine source against the human soul that receives it, and finally whether it should be divided into several distinct habits rather than one. Along the way he digresses into Mozart’s sacred music, the hidden life of Christ, and anecdotes about Aquinas.

34. The Eternity of God (Summa I, Q.10, aa.1–2): Boethius' Definition and the Via Negativa

Thu, 27 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s treatment of eternity in Question 10, starting from Boethius’s definition in the Consolation of Philosophy: eternity as “the whole, simultaneous and perfect possession of unending life.” He works through the objections raised against each element of that phrase—unending, life, whole, simultaneous, perfect, possession—before turning to Article Two’s question of whether eternity properly belongs to God. There he shows how Aquinas ties eternity to divine immutability on the model of time following upon motion in the Physics, checking the argument against related passages from Augustine, the Liber de Causis, and Exodus. Throughout, he stresses the negative method by which we approach a simplicity we cannot grasp directly.

34. Metaphysics Book 6, Part 1: Wisdom's Subject, and How the Making, Doing and Looking Sciences Are Divided

Thu, 15 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins with a prayer to St. Thomas and a note on Paul VI’s Lumen Ecclesiae before turning to what he calls the books of wisdom, Metaphysics Book Six. He asks what sets wisdom apart from the other sciences, and answers that it alone considers being as being and seeks the most universal, first causes. From there he separates the three theoretical sciences—natural philosophy, mathematics, and wisdom—from the practical and productive sciences, contrasting causes arising from nature, from choice, and from art. He works through examples from geometry, carpentry, family life, and civic decision-making to show how each science’s subject and end fix its proper universality and its way of explaining causes.

34. Second Figure Syllogisms, the Power of the Figures, and Why Universal Negatives Convert

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist tests the second figure of the syllogism systematically, running every combination of universal, particular, affirmative, and negative premises to see which convert back to the first figure and actually necessitate a conclusion. Where the pattern fails, he builds counterexamples—animal, dog, cat, stone—showing true premises compatible with both a universal affirmative and a universal negative conclusion, so nothing follows of necessity. He illustrates the stakes with Socrates’ argument against the soul-as-harmony thesis in the Phaedo and with reasoning about God’s unchangeability, then closes comparing the three figures, noting that only the first can conclude to all four categorical forms.

34. Reading 13: First Matter Known by Proportion, Ability, and the Soul as Substantial Form

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s claim, in Physics I, Reading 13, that prime matter—pure potency underlying substantial change—cannot be known directly but only by proportion, as clay is to a shaped sphere or cube. He warns against pressing that analogy too far, then traces the same failure to grasp potency in Anaxagoras and in modern physicists like Heisenberg and de Broglie. Turning to the Phaedo’s dispute over the soul, he argues that the soul must be understood as substantial form, a middle position between treating it as a separate substance and treating it as a mere harmony of the body.

34. De Anima III.3: Imagining vs. Thinking, the Estimative Power, and Digressions (Trinity, Hegel, Irving)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist follows Aristotle’s arguments in De Anima Book III, first separating sensation from understanding, then drawing the harder line between imagining and thinking, with Aquinas’s commentary guiding the reading throughout. He tests the distinction against Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, showing where each confuses images with ideas. Turning to the internal senses, he explains common sense, memory, and especially the estimative power, using animal behavior to show how a creature perceives a non-sensible quality like “enemy” in what it sees. He closes with a digression from Metaphysics V’s treatment of unity and “part” to Aquinas’s theology of the Trinity and its traces in creation.

34. Truth and the Cause: Why Wisdom Most Considers Truth, and the Beginning of the First-Cause Argument

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s argument, via Aquinas’s commentary, that theoretical wisdom is concerned with truth above all other sciences, since truth is its very end and it studies the first causes from which every other truth derives. He then turns to the opening of the next reading, where Aristotle sets out to establish a first cause within each of the four kinds of cause, and asks why matter and the efficient cause are treated before form and end—a question tied back to the different senses of “beginning” from Metaphysics Book Five. Along the way he draws on Plato’s Meno and the Theaetetus’s account of wonder as philosophy’s origin.

35. If-Then Arguments, Conversion of Statements, and the First Figure of the Syllogism

Thu, 16 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens by reviewing compound statements—especially either-or and if-then forms—and walks through all four possible combinations of if-then syllogisms, showing by counterexample and by insight into necessity which two combinations force a true conclusion and which two do not. He then turns to the “Form of the Simple Syllogism” handout to lay out the dictum de omni et nullo and the three figures of the syllogism, distinguished by where the middle term falls. Working through the rules for converting universal and particular affirmative and negative statements, he tests valid and invalid moods of the first figure against concrete cases—animals, dogs, stones, trees—and closes with a brief aside via Boethius, as read by Aquinas, on logic’s kinship to wisdom.

35. Summa I-II, Question 9, Articles 4–6: Is the Will Moved by Something Outside It, by the Heavenly Bodies, or by God Alone?

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up three linked questions from Question 9 of the Prima Secundae: whether the will is moved by something exterior to it, whether a celestial body can move it, and whether only God or an angel can move it. Reading closely in Latin and English, he traces Aquinas’s argument that the will moves itself proximately but requires God as first mover, since only God causes the rational soul’s very orientation to the universal good; angels and heavenly bodies can affect the will only indirectly, by presenting objects or stirring the sense appetite. Along the way he digresses on astrology, the soul’s immateriality, and free will’s resistance to bodily passion.

35. Christ's Acquired Knowledge: Did He Know All Things, Grow in Knowledge, or Learn from Men? (ST III, Q.12, aa.1–3)

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Question 12 of the Tertia Pars, on Christ’s acquired or experiential knowledge, distinguishing it from the infused and beatific knowledge treated earlier in Question 9. He asks whether by this acquired knowledge Christ knew all things, whether he made progress in knowledge, and whether he learned anything from men or angels, working through the objections and responses article by article and noting where Aquinas revised a position he had held in the earlier Commentary on the Sentences. The session opens with remarks on Pius XI’s encyclical Miserentissimus Redemptor on Mary as co-offerer and mediatrix, linked to Christ’s words from the Cross in Luke and John.

35. Summa I q.10 a.3-5: Is Only God Eternal? How Eternity Differs from Time, and the Aevum Introduced

Thu, 18 May 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Article Three’s question of whether eternity belongs to God alone, then Article Four’s comparison of eternity and time, moving through each article’s objections, sed contra, and replies with Boethius’s Consolation, Aristotle’s Physics and Categories, and Augustine as running references. He digresses along the way into geometry, logic, and the “now” as it differs in time and in eternity, using purgatory as a case where duration is neither straightforwardly temporal nor eternal. The class closes by opening Article Five, laying out the objections that introduce the aevum, the intermediate duration proper to angels and spiritual substances, as the next problem to be resolved.

35. Metaphysics Book 6, Part 2: Natural Philosophy, Mathematics and First Philosophy; Introducing Accidental Being

Thu, 15 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks why speculative philosophy has exactly three parts—natural philosophy, mathematics, and first philosophy—rather than four, grounding the answer in Aquinas’s commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics. The division turns on whether a subject’s existence depends on matter and change, and whether it can be defined without reference to matter, as with a sphere considered apart from any sensible material. He illustrates the “crisscrossed division” that yields only three real members with examples from the Trinity and Aristotle’s Poetics, touches on Thales, Anaxagoras, the Pythagoreans, and the medieval Paris curriculum, then closes by previewing Book Six’s move into accidental being and being as truth.

35. Conversion and the Second Figure Mixed Cases, Then Nature, Faith and Reason

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist continues his reading of the Prior Analytics, first proving that universal negative statements convert, then moving systematically through the second figure of the syllogism. He sorts valid mixed forms from invalid ones by building counterexamples with terms like animal, dog, and stone, showing why this figure yields only negative conclusions, unlike the broader first figure. He then draws the logic outward, using Plato’s Phaedo, Shakespeare’s As You Like It, and Aquinas’s account of faith and belief to illustrate reasoning about opposites and about natural kinds.

35. Anaxagoras Refuted: Fewness, Infinity and the Limits of Natural Quantity (Part 1)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s eightfold critique of Anaxagoras, who held that all things are already present in all things, mixed together without limit. Against this he lays out prime matter as pure potency rather than any actual ingredient, illustrating the difference between potency and act with clay becoming a sphere or cube and with the letters that compose the word “cat.” He ties Aristotle’s demand for explanatory simplicity to later scientific practice in Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, and contrasts it with Empedocles, while a detour through Aristotle’s eight senses of “in” from Physics IV exposes related confusions in Locke and Berkeley about universals. The class opens with a short aside on angels as “spirits” and “flame of fire” from the Catena Aurea on Hebrews 1.

35. Reason Is Most Man; What Imagination Is Not (Aristotle's De Anima, Reading 5)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the fifth reading of Aquinas’s commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima, where Aristotle proceeds by elimination: before saying what imagination is, he shows what it is not. Berquist follows the arguments separating imagination from sensation, from science or understanding, and from opinion, using dreams, optical illusions, and the sun’s apparent versus actual size as test cases. He also takes up Plato’s account in the Sophist, which treats imagination as a blend of opinion and sensation, and shows why Aristotle rejects it. The class ends at the threshold of reading six, where Aristotle turns to his own positive definition.

35. No Infinite Regress in the Causes: The Middle, the Moved Mover, and Matter's Downward Direction

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Why can’t a series of causes go back forever? Berquist takes up Aristotle’s “middle term” argument in Metaphysics Book II, chapter 2, beginning at 994b, tracing it through moved movers and through means sought for the sake of ends. A train of pulled railway cars and a chain of desired means show why a series without a first term collapses into contradiction, and why Aristotle treats matter’s causality differently from the efficient, final, and formal causes. Leaning on Aquinas’s commentary, he digresses into how Greek and Latin causal language compares to modern scientific talk of “law” and “quantum jump,” and to Heisenberg’s remarks on elementary particles as bearing on prime matter.

36. Reason Knowing Itself; The Second and Third Figures of the Syllogism

Thu, 16 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the second and third figures of the categorical syllogism from “The Form of the Simple Syllogism,” testing combinations of universal premises through conversion and counterexample—dog, animal, stone, cat—to determine which yield a necessary conclusion and which fail. He then turns to “Reasoning and the Four Kinds of Argument” and “Know Thyself,” asking what it means for logic to be self-reflexive: how equivocal terms work, what a definition of definition would be, and how distinction itself gets distinguished. He ties these questions back to the Delphic command “know thyself” and previews how the same syllogistic forms bear on statements made about God in the Summa.

36. Summa I-II, Question 10, Articles 1–2: Does the Will Will Anything Naturally, and Is It Moved Necessarily by Its Object?

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s Question 10: does the will naturally will certain things, and is it necessarily moved by its object? He tracks article 1’s answer that the will does will some things naturally—the good in general, the last end, whatever belongs to one’s own nature—and then article 2’s distinction between exercise and specification of the act, showing that only a perfect, universal good, beatitude itself, moves the will of necessity, while every particular good leaves it free. Along the way he brings in Boethius on eternity and foreknowledge, Aristotle on nature and rational powers, and a handout passage read aloud, before pointing ahead to next week’s question on the sensitive appetite.

36. Christ, the Angels, and the Limits of His Soul's Power: Omnipotence and Changing Creatures (ST III, Q.12 a.4; Q.13 aa.1–2)

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up two linked questions in the Tertia Pars: whether Christ’s human soul received knowledge from the angels, and whether that soul held omnipotence, absolutely and in its power to change creatures. Working through the articles’ objections and responses, he draws on Dionysius’s Celestial Hierarchy, Bede, Augustine, and Jerome to sort infused knowledge from experiential knowledge, and speculative from practical knowledge. The key distinction is between power belonging to Christ’s soul by nature and power exercised as the Word’s instrument. He illustrates the points with references ranging from Aristotle’s Ethics to Shakespeare and Cajetan’s commentary.

36. Common Doctor, Dividing into Twos and Threes, the Aevum (q.10 a.5-6), and the Philosophy of the Continuous

Thu, 18 May 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins with Heraclitus’s fragment on the “common” to explain why Aquinas is called the Common Doctor, then turns to his habit of dividing questions into twos and threes, tracing the pattern through the Summa Contra Gentiles and the biblical commentaries. The core of the class is q.10, articles 5 and 6, where Aquinas asks whether the aevum differs from time and eternity, and how angelic being is measured by it—leaning on Aristotle’s Physics, Book VI, on the continuous. Objections are worked through in detail, with side discussions on Eucharistic change and on Hegel’s misreading of becoming.

36. Metaphysics VI, Reading 2: Accidental Being and Why No Reasoned-Out Knowledge Is About It

Thu, 22 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s fourfold division of being—accidental being, being as true, being according to the categories, and being as act and potency—and asks why accidental being alone resists scientific demonstration. Working closely through the text with help from Aquinas’s commentary, he distinguishes an accident in this loose sense from the categorial “accidents,” and necessity from what happens merely “for the most part,” illustrating with the housebuilder, the geometer, and stock sophistical puzzles about the sick and the healthy. He then turns to Romeo and Juliet, Oedipus, and Senator Styles Bridges to show that what escapes philosophical science—the chance coincidence, the unplanned meeting—is exactly the material history, biography, and poetry are made of.

36. Demonstration: Cause, Necessity and Through Itself

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist traces how cause, necessity, and “through itself” bear on definition and certitude, drawing on the Posterior Analytics alongside Metaphysics Book V, the Prior Analytics, and Plato’s Meno and Phaedo. He distinguishes demonstration propter quid, which gives the reasoned cause, from demonstration quia, which shows only that something is so, and sets demonstrative reasoning against dialectical reasoning. He closes with the four questions of inquiry from Book II of the Posterior Analytics—whether, what, that, and why—as the culmination of Aristotle’s logic of wonder, after opening with a short reading from a handout titled “Shakespeare on Error” and personal reminiscences of deceased acquaintances.

36. Smallest Pieces and Modern Physics: Arguments 2-7 Against Anaxagoras, Locke and Ability

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist traces a linked sequence of arguments Aristotle brings against Anaxagoras’s claim that all things are mixed in all things. He shows first that natural parts like flesh and bone cannot diminish infinitely, then that a finite body cannot yield infinite extractions of the same substance, and finally that the smallest piece of flesh cannot itself contain bone. Berquist reads this as Aristotle uncovering a second difference between mathematical and natural quantity: nature imposes size limits that pure mathematics does not. He closes by comparing this ancient insight to quantum theory and relativity, which reasserted limits in the small and large after centuries of classical physics treating quantity as boundlessly divisible.

36. Imagination as a Moved Mover: Deception in the Senses (Reading 6)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s De Anima, Book III, chapter 3 (roughly 428a–429a), reading it through Aquinas’s sixth and seventh lessons on the text. Against the idea that imagination freely combines images—a golden mountain—he argues it is instead a residual motion in the sense organ caused by a prior act of sensing, weaker than sensation and especially liable to err about common sensibles like size, shape, and motion rather than proper sensibles like color. He distinguishes the three kinds of sensibles and traces how error compounds as one moves from sense to imagination to reason clouded by passion, drawing examples from Othello and rhetoric. He closes by previewing chapter four’s turn to reason and understanding.

36. Roads of Reasoned-Out Knowledge, the Unmoved Mover as Good Itself, and Q&A on God's Operations

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through Physics VIII, guided by Aquinas’s commentary, on whether the “downward” series of causes—prime matter through the elements to composite bodies—could proceed to infinity. He distinguishes two senses of “coming to be from”: imperfect developing into perfect, and reversible change like hardening and softening, showing neither allows an infinite regress. Student questions then push the discussion toward the unmoved mover of Physics VIII and Metaphysics XII, the difference between an immaterial first mover and God as Good and final cause, and how Aristotle and Plato grasped divine substance versus operation—with a tangent on Pseudo-Dionysius and Orthodox “energies” theology against divine simplicity.

37. Compound Statements, the Definition of Syllogism, and the Kinds of Argument: Syllogism, Induction, Enthymeme, and Example

Thu, 23 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through the logical theory of statements, showing how truth functions differently in disjunctive, conjunctive, and hypothetical (“if-then”) compounds, illustrated with conjunctive examples from John’s Gospel, the Apocalypse, and Augustine’s Confessions, plus a look at how Aquinas structures the Summa Contra Gentiles. He then takes up Aristotle’s definition of syllogism as speech in which a conclusion follows of necessity from premises, setting it and induction against the rhetorical forms of enthymeme and example, with Boethius invoked on whether these arguments proceed from the singular or the universal. Scripture, Shakespeare, and contemporary anecdotes serve as running illustrations throughout.

37. Aquinas, Summa I-II Q.10, Articles 3–4: Is the Will Moved by Necessity by the Passions or by God?

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up two linked questions from the Prima Secundae: does passion ever force the will by strict necessity, and can God move the will of necessity as an outside cause? He works through Article 3’s distinction between reason wholly overcome by passion and reason retaining some freedom, then Article 4’s contrast between necessity simply speaking and necessity by supposition. Along the way he pulls in Aristotle’s Ethics, Romans 7 and 9, Genesis 4, Sirach, and Dionysius’s Divine Names to test Aquinas’s objections and replies, alongside a passage from the Summa Contra Gentiles on divine motion of the will.

37. Christ's Power over His Body and His Will (ST III q.13 a.3–4), with Digressions on 'the Way, the Truth, and the Life' and God as the End of Understanding Creatures

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether Christ’s soul had power over his own body and whether his human will always executed what it willed, reading closely through the objections and replies of articles three and four before turning toward the defects Christ assumed in question fourteen. Along the way he follows Christ’s saying “I am the way, the truth, and the life” through the Catena Aurea’s patristic voices—Damascene, Augustine—and the Catechism’s structure, then draws on Summa Contra Gentiles I, chapter 60, on the intellectual creature’s end in knowing God. Anecdotes and tangents thread through the textual commentary throughout.

37. Summa I, Q.11, Arts. 1–2: The One Convertible with Being, and How One and Many Are Opposed

Tue, 23 May 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the first two articles of Question 11 of the Summa, on the divine unity. He asks whether “one” names something real added to being, distinguishing the transcendental one—convertible with being itself—from the numerical one, the principle of quantity and counting. Working closely through Aquinas’s objections and replies, he traces how one is opposed to the many not as its contrary but as its measure, drawing on Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics and on Pythagoras, Plato, Avicenna, and Dionysius to show how the mind ascends from being to division to unity to multitude.

37. Is Moral Effect Accidental to the Poet? Accidental Causes, No Science of the Accidental, and Modern Determinism

Thu, 22 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Starting from Thomas’s remarks on poetry and Aristotle’s Poetics on tragedy and catharsis, Berquist asks whether moving an audience morally is something the poet does per se or only incidentally. That question sends him into Aristotle’s Metaphysics on accidental being: the housebuilder who happens also to be a cook illustrates a cause that produces an effect outside its proper account, and Aristotle argues there can be no science of such accidents, since science concerns what happens always or for the most part. Berquist demonstrates dichotomous and trichotomous division as a method along the way, and closes by pointing toward the next reading’s challenge to modern determinism—Claude Bernard, Heisenberg, and quantum indeterminacy—against this Aristotelian backdrop of chance and matter.

37. Dialectic and Sophistical Refutations: Fallacies of Language

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist picks up dialectic where he left off, first recalling its threefold usefulness from the Topics—as mental exercise, as a way of meeting others on their own ground, and as an aid to philosophy—before asking what makes a sophistical refutation false rather than a genuine exposure of self-contradiction. He then works through Aristotle’s division of the thirteen fallacies into those arising from language and those from things, dwelling especially on equivocation and on composition and division. Examples come from Feuerbach, Scripture, everyday speech, Plato’s Phaedo and Republic, St. Paul as glossed by Aquinas, and Shakespeare, all used to show why distinguishing the senses of key terms matters.

37. Aristotle, Plato and the Good Student: Preparing for Matter and Lack of Form

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist sets up the fifteenth reading in Book I of the Physics, where Aristotle takes up the natural philosophers’ account of change and Plato’s failure to distinguish matter from privation—treating lack of form as if it were the same principle as matter itself. He shows why this distinction matters later, for understanding good and evil in Metaphysics IX, and links Plato’s error to the “fallacy of the accident” from the Sophistical Refutations. Along the way he digresses into what makes a good student, drawing on Aquinas’s scriptural commentary on humility, discretion, and fruitfulness, arguing that Aristotle’s corrective reading of Plato makes him Plato’s best student, just as Aquinas was Aristotle’s.

37. Part 1: Put Together, Whole and Part: Number, Matter and Form, Composed and Universal Wholes

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

How many ways can something be called a “part” or a “whole”? Berquist walks through Aristotle’s answer in Metaphysics V, testing it against semicircles making up a circle, numbers, genus-difference definitions, and the relation of a universal to its particulars. He brings in matter-form composition through the examples of a rubber ball and the union of body and soul, and draws an analogy between number and definition from Metaphysics VIII, echoed in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 12. These distinctions then do real work: they let him trace how Aquinas argues, in Summa Theologiae q. 3, that God is free of composition, and they expose sophistical arguments that trade on equivocations over “part,” “whole,” and “before.”

37. Metaphysics II, Reading 4: Why There Must Be a First End and a First Form

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the fourth reading of Metaphysics II, tracing Aquinas’s exposition of Aristotle’s case that neither the end (final cause) nor the form (formal cause) can proceed to infinity. He walks through Thomas’s four arguments showing that denying a first end abolishes the good and purposive action itself, then follows the parallel argument that definitions cannot regress infinitely either, drawing on Porphyry’s Isagoge and the genus-species-definition scheme to show a highest, undefined genus must exist. Digressions on wisdom as architectonic knowledge, geometric illustrations, and connections to Euclid, Boethius, and the Nicomachean Ethics fill out why end and form are the causes proper to the wise man’s inquiry into being.

38. Two Senses of Induction (God's Simplicity), the Senses of 'Body' and Touch, and the Three Figures of the Syllogism

Thu, 23 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens by separating two senses of induction: arguing from many singular cases to a universal, and arguing from less universal truths up to a most universal one. He traces the second sense through Aquinas’s treatment of divine simplicity in Question 3 of the Summa, where the seventh article runs through six kinds of composition found in creatures before concluding, by induction and syllogism together, that God admits no composition at all. Along the way he takes up the equivocal uses of words like “body” and “seeing,” touches Aristotle’s dialectic in the Metaphysics, and asks how self-evident axioms such as “the whole is greater than the part” are first grasped through induction yet confirmed by understanding their terms. He closes by working through the handout on the simple syllogism, testing which figures and moods yield valid universal conclusions.

38. Aquinas, Summa I-II Q.11: Fruition (Enjoyment) and the Last End

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Question 11 of the Prima Secundae, where Aquinas examines fruitio, the act of enjoying an end. Moving article by article, he asks whether fruition belongs to the appetitive power rather than the intellect, whether it belongs to rational creatures alone or also, imperfectly, to animals, whether it regards only the last end, and whether it requires actual possession of that end. He draws on Augustine’s De Trinitate and De Doctrina Christiana alongside asides from Cicero, Aristotle, and Bernard of Clairvaux, using personal anecdotes about gratitude and delight to bring out Thomas’s distinction between perfect and imperfect enjoyment.

38. The Bodily Defects Christ Took On (ST III q.14 a.1–4)

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist reads Aquinas on why Christ assumed bodily defects such as hunger, fatigue, and death: to satisfy for sin, to confirm the reality of his humanity against those who denied it, and to give an example of patience. He traces the distinction between natural and coercive necessity, and between defects common to fallen human nature and those tied to particular causes or incompatible with Christ’s perfect grace and knowledge — so Christ could hunger but not, say, suffer disease. Along the way he takes up whether Christ “contracted” these defects in the technical sense of inheriting them through original sin, with digressions on Mary’s Immaculate Conception, the Transfiguration, and modern hermeneutical disputes, before returning to the text.

38. Summa I, Q.11, Arts. 3–4: God Is One and Most of All One; Review of the Treatise on God's Substance

Tue, 23 May 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up two questions: whether God is one, and whether God is most one. He follows Aquinas’s arguments from divine simplicity, infinite perfection, and the unity of world-order, and works through the replies to objections concerning number, privation, and the difference between mathematical and metaphysical unity. Along the way he brings in Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics, contrasts Aquinas’s position with Plato’s forms, and explains how language of privation can be said of God without implying any imperfection in him. He ends by placing these articles within the Summa’s larger plan—existence, substance, operations—and looks ahead to the questions on divine knowledge and naming, using wave-particle complementarity as an image for why no single human concept can capture God’s perfection.

38. Metaphysics VI: The Whole Truth, Contradiction, and Truth in the Mind, Good in Things; Predicates and Definition in Logic

Thu, 29 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through lectio 4 of Aquinas’s commentary on Metaphysics VI, asking where truth and falsity actually reside: not in things, he argues with Aristotle, but in the mind’s act of combining and dividing, where good and bad, by contrast, belong to things themselves. He draws out consequences for contradiction, for the theological question of God’s truth versus God’s goodness, and for why knowledge can hold opposites together while love cannot. He also turns to the handouts on statement and on the aim of Aristotle’s Categories, tracing predication and definition back to the mind’s “first act,” with Cajetan and Albert the Great brought in alongside Aquinas.

38. Fallacies Outside Language: Accident, Secundum Quid and the Meno

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up two fallacies from Aristotle that don’t depend on tricks of language: mistaking what belongs to a thing through itself for what merely happens to accompany it, and confusing what is true without qualification with what is only true in some respect. He works the distinctions through examples ranging from malaria’s supposed cause in marsh air to Berkeley’s idealism and Shakespeare’s sonnets, showing how the same confusion corrupts moral reasoning. He then turns to Plato’s Meno, examining Meno’s paradox about the possibility of inquiry and Socrates’ slave-boy demonstration, and flags that Plato himself will later be caught committing the fallacy of accident.

38. Matter vs. Lack of Form: Heisenberg, Plato's Confusion, and Augustine against the Manichaeans

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins with a digression on Heisenberg’s quantum field theory and its talk of a “unity of matter,” asking how energy-as-potentiality compares to Aristotelian matter and form. He then works through Physics I, lectio 15, where Aristotle corrects Parmenides and Plato on coming-to-be by distinguishing matter from privation: privation is non-being as such, but matter stands in potency toward form as something good and godlike. Tracing this confusion historically, Berquist shows how Plato’s failure to separate the two fed Manichaean and Plotinian claims that matter is evil, and how Augustine’s and Aquinas’s arguments answer that error in parallel.

38. Part 2: God Without Parts, the Trinity and Number, Debate on Number, and History as Incomplete Inquiry

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks how the three Persons of the Trinity can be really distinct without dividing God into parts, and answers that their distinction is relational rather than absolute—Father, Son, and Spirit are not pieces of a whole but terms of a relation. He then works through Aristotle’s account of whole and part more generally: how units combine to make a number like five or eight, how genus and difference compose a definition, and how matter and form compose a substance, comparing these to the parts of a continuous quantity. He closes by distinguishing the interior senses—common sense, imagination, memory, and estimation—and, in a brief tangent, explaining why history counts as an inquiry that can never be completed.

38. Metaphysics II, Reading 5: The Roads in Our Knowledge and the Natural Road

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist closes out Aristotle’s argument that causes cannot regress infinitely—showing how form limits matter’s “unlimited” character and dismissing the idea of endlessly many kinds of cause—while using Aquinas’s commentary to explain why there are exactly four causes. He then opens the next stretch of Book II, on the “road” or modus procedendi proper to reasoned knowledge, distinguishing the natural order running from sense through memory and experience to understanding and wisdom from the private paths of particular sciences and the common path of logic. Examples range from Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well to Heisenberg and Einstein.

39. Richard Nixon's Memoirs; How We Know a Statement Is True; Dividing Logic in Two or Three

Thu, 30 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins with a personal, almost meditative reading of Richard Nixon’s memoirs: the family’s hard early years in California, the death of his brother Arthur, and a note from his mother at the 1953 inauguration, drawn out as instances of faith and humility. He then turns to logic, following Aquinas and Albert the Great in dividing it according to the three acts of reason, distinguishing definition from statement and asking how we actually come to know a statement is true—through sense, grasp of terms, or reasoning. He works through the classification of names as univocal, equivocal, or analogous, and of compound statements as conditional, disjunctive, or conjunctive, with asides on Aristotle, Plato, and Pythagoras tying the logic back to the opening theme of intellectual humility.

39. Summa I-II Q.12, Arts. 1-2: Intention as an Act of the Will, and Intending the Last End and Intermediate Ends

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist continues his reading of Thomas Aquinas’s treatise on intention, taking up Article 1’s question of whether intending is properly an act of the will or of reason, and Article 2’s question of whether intention bears only on the last end or on intermediate ends as well. He places intention among the will’s other acts — simple willing and fruition — showing how it presupposes reason’s ordering of means to end. Along the way he draws on Aristotle’s Physics I, lectio 11, on Summa Contra Gentiles IV, ch. 15, and on Homer’s image of “looking before and after” to make the ordering concrete.

39. Summa III q.15 a.1–3: Whether Christ Had Sin, the Fomes of Sin, or Ignorance (with music, moral virtue and reason's rule over the emotions)

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Question 15 of the Tertia Pars, where Aquinas asks whether Christ’s soul bore three defects: sin (article 1), the fomes peccati—the tinder of concupiscence left by original sin (article 2)—and ignorance (article 3). Moving through each article’s objections, sed contra, and replies, he brings in Augustine on the will and Aristotle’s account of reason’s rule over the passions, using literary examples to sharpen the distinctions. He also criticizes Roger Haight’s contemporary account of Christ’s humanity. The session opens with brief talk of Shakespeare’s birthday and closes as article 3, on ignorance, is still under way.

39. Summa I q.12 intro and a.1: we name things as we know them; can a created mind see God's essence?

Thu, 14 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Having laid out God’s simplicity, perfection, and infinity, Berquist turns to how a creature comes to know and name Him at all, tracing the principle that our names follow our knowledge, and our knowledge follows the order of things—a pattern he ties back to Aristotle’s Categories. He then maps the structure of question 12, which asks whether a created intellect can see God’s essence, taking up natural reason’s grasp of God and the “light of glory” needed for the beatific vision. Article 1 gets close attention: Thomas argues, with support from Aristotle’s act/potency distinction and citations of Chrysostom and Dionysius, that God is supremely knowable in Himself yet elusive to us, like Dionysius’s bat blinded by staring at the sun. Berquist also draws on Summa Contra Gentiles IV, ch. 15 to fill out the point.

39. Isagoge vs. Categories, What a Thing Is, and Metaphysics VII: Defining Substance, Accident and Motion

Thu, 29 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks why Porphyry’s Isagoge, with its five predicables—genus, species, difference, property, accident—differs from Aristotle’s ten categories. His answer: the Isagoge treats names said univocally of many things, while the Categories distinguishes what a substance is from what inheres in it and what is merely extrinsic to it. Turning to Metaphysics VII, he asks why substance alone admits strict definition, while accidents, privations, and motion can only be defined by reference to something beyond themselves. He closes by connecting this to immaterial substances and to why motion’s definition matters for proving God’s existence.

39. Syllogism Figures, Wisely and Slow, and the Eight Recurring Forms of Argument

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the third figure of the syllogism, showing which valid moods follow from universal premises and how conversion proves validity in the second and third figures. He then turns to eight recurring forms of argument—categorical, hypothetical, and disjunctive—tracing how a chief syllogism is propped up by subordinate “backup” syllogisms defending its major and minor premises, worked out through Euclid’s first proposition and Aquinas’s question on the causes of love. Along the way he digresses through Shakespeare and Plato’s Phaedo, dwelling on what it means for reasoning to be wise and slow rather than quick.

39. Ability and Lack: Sartre's Freedom, the Meaning of Bad, Fallacies, and the Perfection of Man

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Starting from Aquinas’s lectio 15 on Physics I and a handout distinguishing matter from privation, Berquist asks why matter must be ungenerated and incorruptible even though it is always found with some privation attached. He then extends the matter/privation distinction to a broader philosophical error: mistaking a capacity or subject for the lack that happens to accompany it, as when Sartre identifies human freedom with nothingness. Berquist names this the fallacy of accident, and traces the same confusion in accounts of evil as sheer indetermination. The class closes by applying the privation analysis to moral badness as disordered action.

39. De Anima III.4: Grasping and Judging, and Why the Mind Is Not a Body

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins Aristotle’s fourth chapter on the soul’s knowing and judging part, working through Aquinas’s commentary and lesson divisions. He separates apprehension, the mind’s grasping of an object, from judgment, and shows how different sciences settle truth by returning to different starting points—sense, imagination, or reason itself. Turning to Aristotle’s argument against Anaxagoras, he traces the analogy with the senses to conclude that the intellect must be unmixed with any bodily nature if it is to receive and know all material things. Examples from geometry and logic illustrate the difference between undergoing as mere material alteration and undergoing as the receptive perfection proper to sensing and understanding.

39. The Three Roads of Knowledge: Natural, Common and Private Ways of Proceeding

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks how a science advances in knowledge, distinguishing three “roads”: the natural way, the common way of reason as reason, and the private way proper to each discipline. He anchors the second road in Thomas’s division of the three acts of reason, using Euclid’s Elements to show how geometry moves from simple to composite. Reading closely from his handout on Book One of the Physics and from Aquinas’s commentary, he then opens the third, private road, showing how a science’s own way of defining terms, establishing principles, and ordering its subject—natural philosophy toward matter, metaphysics toward the immaterial—differs from one discipline to the next, a comparison he promises to continue next time.

40. If-Then and Either-Or Syllogisms; the Three Figures; Prior vs. Posterior Analytics

Thu, 30 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks what makes an if-then argument valid, showing that affirming the antecedent or denying the consequent secures the conclusion, while denying the antecedent or affirming the consequent does not—formal validity apart from whether the premises happen to be true. Examples drawn from students in the room, a man named Perkis dropping dead, and mistaken identity between twins fix the point. He then turns to Aristotle’s Prior Analytics, arguing that formal logic must come before the material logic of the Posterior Analytics, and works out why the position of the middle term yields exactly three figures of the categorical syllogism, not four.

40. Summa I-II Q.12, Arts. 3-5: Intending Several Things at Once, One Act Toward End and Means, and Whether Animals Intend

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up three articles of question 12 on intention. Article 3 asks whether one can intend several things simultaneously, distinguishing what is willed absolutely from what is willed as ordered to something else. Article 4 asks whether intending the end and willing the means to it are one motion or two. Article 5 asks whether brute animals intend an end, which turns on the difference between nature’s built-in “intending”—Berquist illustrates with Fabre’s observations of insect behavior—and the rational ordering of means to ends proper to will. Throughout he draws on Aristotle’s Categories, Physics, and De Anima, and on Augustine, to sharpen Aquinas’s distinctions, and digresses on modern science’s resistance to final causality.

40. Summa III q.15 a.4–5: The Passions of Christ's Soul and His True Bodily Pain (with notes on 'undergoing', Logos and Hilary's hard text)

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up two connected questions: could Christ’s soul undergo passion, and did he feel true sensible pain in the body? He distinguishes bodily undergoing from the soul’s own undergoing, propassion from full passion, and pain from sorrow, showing how Christ’s emotions matched ours in kind but differed in their object, origin, and effect. Along the way he stops repeatedly on words themselves—“passion,” “undergo,” logos and verbum, discursus as “running through”—tracing how their Latin and Greek senses have shifted before returning to Hilary’s difficult text and Thomas’s answer to it.

40. Summa I q.12 a.1 replies and a.2: God infinite and knowable, ratio in two senses, the light of glory and seeing God without a created likeness

Thu, 14 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up objections in Summa I, q. 12, a. 1 drawn from Chrysostom, Dionysius, and Scripture, which press on whether a finite creature can be “proportioned” to see an infinite God. He traces Aquinas’s replies through a distinction between comprehending God and merely seeing him, and through two different senses of “infinite” and of “proportion” itself. He then moves into a. 2, explaining why no created likeness can stand in for the divine essence and why the intellect instead needs the “light of glory” to unite it immediately to God’s own substance. Along the way he draws on Aristotle’s Physics and De Anima and on Euclid to sharpen the key terms.

40. Metaphysics VIII, Reading 1: Summing Up Book VII, Change, and Knowing First Matter by Proportion

Thu, 06 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins by recapping the terminology of cause, beginning, element, and substance carried over from Book VII, then lays out Aristotle’s plan in Book VIII for treating sensible substances through matter, form, and their composite. The core of the class asks how matter, especially prime matter, can be known at all, since it never appears by itself. Working through examples like health and sickness, hardness and softness, and finally substantial change such as a man becoming a lion, he shows how the dispute between Parmenides and Heraclitus over contraries and becoming forces us to posit an underlying subject, one grasped only analogically, by proportion, never directly. He draws throughout on Aquinas’s commentary to clarify Aristotle’s reasoning.

40. Analyzing Arguments in Euclid and Aquinas: Main Syllogisms, Continuous Syllogisms, and the Matter of Syllogism

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks what kind of reasoning actually underlies a geometric proof, and finds in Euclid’s Elements, Book VII, Propositions 6 and 29, arguments that are not simple categorical syllogisms but continuous chains combining categorical, hypothetical, and disjunctive forms. He traces the same nested pattern in Plato’s Meno and in Aquinas’s Summa Contra Gentiles, arguing that mathematics, philosophy, and theology share one underlying logical structure. He closes by distinguishing the “matter” of a syllogism—whether its premises are necessary, merely probable, or false—and previews coming treatment of equivocal terms and fallacies.

40. First Matter, the Five Attributes of God, and the Four Kinds of Cause (Reading Five)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist finishes the last passage of Physics I, where Aristotle argues prime matter is ungenerated and incorruptible even though everything made of it comes to be and passes away — a puzzle he traces back to Thales and Anaximander and forward to modern conservation laws. He links this to four of the five attributes Aquinas gives God in the Summa Theologiae and Summa Contra Gentiles: simplicity, unity, infinity, and immutability. He then turns to Book II, previewing the four causes not just as four kinds of cause but as four distinct senses of the word “cause,” using analogies from parts and things to show the term isn’t used univocally, before assigning the next reading.

40. The Mind as the Place of Species: Universals, Truth and Understanding vs. Reason

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through the section of De Anima Book III where Aristotle calls the intellect “the place of species,” asking what it means for forms to exist in the mind rather than, as Plato held, in a separated world of their own. Tracking the Greek terms eidos and nous against their Latin equivalents species and intellectus, he shows why reception of a universal differs from a body’s reception in continuous quantity, and how that difference proves reason cannot itself be corporeal. He closes by examining how “understanding” and “reason” get applied analogically across angels, God, and human beings—one more instance of the pattern of naming that runs through Aristotelian philosophy.

40. Custom and Method: Aristotle on Fitting the Way of Proceeding to the Matter, and Modern Certitude

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Working through the final reading of Book II, Part III of the Physics with Aquinas’s commentary, Berquist asks why thinkers as different as the Pythagoreans, Descartes, and the Romantic poets each insist their own preferred way of presenting knowledge—mathematical, sensible, or poetic—is the only legitimate one. He traces this back to Aristotle’s claim that habit, not nature, fixes such expectations, and that a sound methodos must instead be fitted to the degree of certitude proper to its subject, descending from mathematics through natural philosophy to politics. He ends by suggesting that modern philosophy’s rejection of revealed theology left an emptiness some thinkers unknowingly tried to fill by demanding theology’s certainty from philosophy itself.

Fathers and councils

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Fathers and councils #

821 passages mentioned in passing

All works

Mentioned in passing #

Augustine, ’s Confessions #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Augustine, ’s commentary on Genesis #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 159

Augustine, ’s definition of to believe (cum assensione cogitare) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Secunda Secundae 7

Augustine, ’s definition of virtue #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 161

Gregory, ’s division of the species of pride #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 20

Cyril, ’s epistle #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 77

Augustine, ’s homilies on John #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 151

John Chrysostom, ’s homilies on Matthew and John #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 151

Jerome, ’s prologue to Isaiah #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 46

Augustine, ’s text (De Trinitate) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 46

Athanasius, (Athanasian Creed) #

Mentioned in 2 classes

John Damascene, (Basil quotation) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 60

Pseudo-Dionysius, (De Divinis Nominibus) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 170

Augustine, (De Trinitate) #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 155

Augustine, (Fulgentius), De Fide ad Petrum #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Augustine, (Fulgentius), On Faith to Peter #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 138

Augustine, (Fulgentius), To Peter on the Faith #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 114

Augustine, (God became man so that man might become God) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 98

John Damascene, (Latin translation) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 9

Gregory, (Moralia) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 175

Gregory of Nyssa, (Nemesius) #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Augustine, (book on Leviticus, as heard) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 175

Pseudo-Dionysius, (commented on by Thomas) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 143

Gregory, (description of the angry man) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 115

John Damascene, (list of acts of the intellect) #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 115

Gregory, (on Ezekiel) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 263

John Damascene, (on anger and bile) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 115

Gregory, (on the gifts of the Magi) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 81

Augustine, (on the soul without the body not equal to the angels) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 22

Augustine, (quoted in the article on deception of the senses) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 71

Augustine, (quoted on love making hard things light) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 263

Augustine, (quoted) #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, (quoted: nothing is loved but the good) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Love & Friendship 8

Augustine, (soul is more where it loves than where it animates) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 54

Gregory, (spiritual sin) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 171

Gregory of Nyssa, / Nemesius #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 31

Augustine, : anima plus est ubi amat quam ubi animat #

Mentioned in 1 class

Love & Friendship 2

Augustine, : every sin is in the will #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 231

Acts of the Council of Chalcedon #

Mentioned in 1 class

Secunda Secundae 6

Acts of the Council of Ephesus #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, Ad Seleucianum #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 84

Aeterni Patris (encyclical of Leo XIII) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 16

Augustine, Against Faustus #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Augustine, Against Felicianus #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 110

Jerome, Against Helvidius #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Jerome, Against Jovinian () #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 65

Augustine, Against Julian #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 4

Augustine, Against Lying #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, Against Maximinus #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 142

Augustine, Against Maximus #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 95

Jerome, Against Vigilantius #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 89

Augustine, Against the Pelagians #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 267

Ambrose #

Mentioned in 9 classes

Anselm #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 70

Apostles’ Creed #

Mentioned in 15 classes

Pseudo-Dionysius, Aquinas, Commentary on ’s Divine Names #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 10

Pseudo-Dionysius, Aquinas, Commentary on the Divine Names of #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 84

Athanasius #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 95

Augustine #

Mentioned in 56 classes

Baltimore Catechism #

Mentioned in 12 classes

Bede #

Mentioned in 6 classes

Bellarmine’s Catechism #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 163

Benedict XV encyclical on St Dominic (Fausto appetente die) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 31

Benedict XV encyclical on St Ephrem (Principi apostolorum Petro) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 31

Bonaventure #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 19

Augustine, Care for the Dead #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 159

Catechism of the Catholic Church #

Mentioned in 27 classes

Catechism of the Catholic Church (on hope) #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 82

Catechism of the Catholic Church on hope #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Catechism of the Catholic Church, part two #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 21

Catechism of the Council of Trent #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 115

John Chrysostom, Catena Aurea ( on Matthew) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 242

John Chrysostom, Catena Aurea () #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 227

Augustine, Catena Aurea (Golden Chain) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 42

Pseudo-Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy #

Mentioned in 12 classes

Pseudo-Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy I #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 242

Pseudo-Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy IV #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Pseudo-Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy IV () #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 123

Pseudo-Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy IV and VII #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Pseudo-Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy VII #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Pseudo-Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy XI #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 87

Cyril, Chapters of (Council of Ephesus) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 60

Augustine, Christian Combat (De agone christiano) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 20

Augustine, Christian Doctrine #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 13

Augustine, Christian Doctrine I #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Augustine, City of God #

Mentioned in 15 classes

Augustine, City of God (Varro) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Wisdom (2006, Colorado) 34

Augustine, City of God (necessity) #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 127

Augustine, City of God II (quoting Cicero) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 258

Augustine, City of God IX #

Mentioned in 6 classes

Augustine, City of God IX and XIV #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, City of God V #

Mentioned in 2 classes

De Anima 127 (2×)
Prima Secundae 28

Augustine, City of God VII #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 20

Augustine, City of God X #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Tertia Pars 56 (2×)
Tertia Pars 106

Augustine, City of God XI #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 2

Augustine, City of God XII #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Augustine, City of God XIII #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, City of God XIV #

Mentioned in 31 classes

Augustine, City of God XIX #

Mentioned in 8 classes

Augustine, City of God XX #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Augustine, City of God XXI #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Augustine, City of God XXII #

Mentioned in 7 classes

Bernard of Clairvaux, Claude , An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Bernard of Clairvaux, Claude , Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Augustine, Commentary on Galatians #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 167

Origen, Commentary on John #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Ambrose, Commentary on Luke #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 67

Jerome, Commentary on Matthew #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Augustine, Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 167

Origen, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 58

John Chrysostom, Commentary on the Gospel of John #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 26

Augustine, Commentary on the Psalms #

Mentioned in 1 class

Wisdom (2005) 8

Bonaventure, Commentary on the Sentences II #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 210

Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 6

Anselm, Communium Rerum (Pius X encyclical on St. ) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 25

Augustine, Confessions #

Mentioned in 51 classes

Augustine, Confessions () #

Mentioned in 6 classes

Augustine, Confessions (Book X, ‘Late have I loved thee’) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 10

Augustine, Confessions (restless hearts) #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, Confessions I #

Mentioned in 6 classes

Augustine, Confessions I (restless hearts) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 38

Augustine, Confessions II #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Augustine, Confessions III #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, Confessions IV #

Mentioned in 10 classes

Augustine, Confessions IX #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, Confessions V #

Mentioned in 5 classes

Augustine, Confessions VII #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 116

Augustine, Confessions VIII #

Mentioned in 5 classes

Augustine, Confessions X #

Mentioned in 6 classes

Augustine, Confessions XII #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Augustine, Confessions XII (De Genesi ad litteram) #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 150

Augustine, Contra Academicos #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, Contra Adamantium #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 262

Augustine, Contra Celsum #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 27

Augustine, Contra Faustum #

Mentioned in 12 classes

Augustine, Contra Faustum IV #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, Contra Faustum Manichaeum #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, Contra Faustum XIV #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 100

Augustine, Contra Faustum XVI #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 23

Augustine, Contra Faustum XXII #

Mentioned in 5 classes

Augustine, Contra Faustum XXIII #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Tertia Pars 70 (2×)
Tertia Pars 71

Augustine, Contra Faustum XXVI #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 95

Augustine, Contra Felicianum #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Jerome, Contra Helvidium #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, Contra Maximinum #

Mentioned in 7 classes

Augustine, Contra Maximinum II #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 129

Augustine, Contra Mendacium #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 208

Augustine, Contra quinque haereses #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Bellarmine, Controversies #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 58

Augustine, Corruption and Grace #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Council of Chalcedon #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Council of Ephesus #

Mentioned in 6 classes

Council of Ephesus (sermon cited) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 44

Council of Ephesus sermon #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 64

Cyril, Council of Ephesus, twelfth anathema of #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 44

Council of Orange (Arausicanum), Denzinger #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 285

Council of Trent #

Mentioned in 5 classes

Council of Trent (Denzinger) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 284

Council of Vienna #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Council of Vienne #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 20

Athanasius, Creed #

Mentioned in 40 classes

Athanasius, Creed (Quicumque) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Secunda Secundae 6

Athanasius, Creed of Saint (Quicumque) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 61

Creed of the Fourth Lateran Council #

Mentioned in 1 class

Introduction to Philosophy & Logic (1999) 12

Anselm, Cur Deus Homo #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Cyril #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 117

Cyril of Alexandria #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 7

Augustine, De Agone Christiano #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Augustine, De Bono Coniugali #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 119

Anselm, De Casu Diaboli #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 277

Augustine, De Catechizandis Rudibus #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Augustine, De Catechizandis Rudibus () #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 222

Augustine, De Civitate Dei / third book #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 112

Augustine, De Civitate Dei XIV #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Augustine, De Civitate Dei XIX #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Anselm, De Conceptu Virginali #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Augustine, De Consensu Evangelistarum #

Mentioned in 13 classes

Augustine, De Consensu Evangelistarum I #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 93 (2×)

Augustine, De Consensu Evangelistarum II #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Augustine, De Correptione et Gratia #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Augustine, De Diversis Quaestionibus / Questions on the Gospels #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, De Diversis Quaestionibus LXXXIII #

Mentioned in 7 classes

Augustine, De Diversis Quaestionibus Octoginta Tribus #

Mentioned in 9 classes

Pseudo-Dionysius, De Divinis Nominibus #

Mentioned in 11 classes

Pseudo-Dionysius, De Divinis Nominibus (via Thomas’s commentary) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 16

Pseudo-Dionysius, De Divinis Nominibus IV #

Mentioned in 9 classes

Pseudo-Dionysius, De Divinis Nominibus VI #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 73

Pseudo-Dionysius, De Divinis Nominibus VII #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Pseudo-Dionysius, De Divinis Nominibus VIII #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 83

Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana #

Mentioned in 7 classes

Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana / Enchiridion (faith, hope, love) #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana I #

Mentioned in 5 classes

Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana II #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana III #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 39

Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana IV #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 242

Augustine, De Duabus Animabus #

Mentioned in 3 classes

De Ecclesiasticis Dogmatibus (Gennadius) #

Mentioned in 6 classes

Ambrose, De Fide I #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 52

John Damascene, De Fide Orthodoxa #

Mentioned in 8 classes

John Damascene, De Fide Orthodoxa I #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 52

John Damascene, De Fide Orthodoxa II #

Mentioned in 12 classes

John Damascene, De Fide Orthodoxa II and III #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 103

John Damascene, De Fide Orthodoxa III #

Mentioned in 39 classes

John Damascene, De Fide Orthodoxa III and IV #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 19

John Damascene, De Fide Orthodoxa IV #

Mentioned in 5 classes

Ambrose, De Fide ad Gratianum #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, De Fide ad Petrum #

Mentioned in 8 classes

Augustine, De Genesi ad Litteram #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 100

Augustine, De Genesi ad Litteram IV #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 33

Augustine, De Genesi ad Litteram X #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, De Genesi ad Litteram XII #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 160

Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram #

Mentioned in 10 classes

Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram II #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram III #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 111

Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram IV #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram V #

Mentioned in 1 class

Secunda Secundae 10

Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram VII #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram VIII #

Mentioned in 12 classes

Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram X #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Prima Secundae 192
Tertia Pars 72 (2×)

Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram XI #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 210

Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram XII #

Mentioned in 24 classes

Augustine, De Genesi contra Manichaeos I #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 42

Augustine, De Gratia Novi Testamenti #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 110

Augustine, De Gratia et Libero Arbitrio #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 188

Augustine, De Haeresibus #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Tertia Pars 17
Tertia Pars 18 (2×)

Augustine, De Libero Arbitrio #

Mentioned in 12 classes

Augustine, De Libero Arbitrio I #

Mentioned in 7 classes

Augustine, De Libero Arbitrio I and III #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 190

Augustine, De Libero Arbitrio II #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Augustine, De Libero Arbitrio III #

Mentioned in 6 classes

Augustine, De Magistro (The Teacher) by #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 69

Augustine, De Moribus Ecclesiae #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 131

Augustine, De Natura Boni #

Mentioned in 5 classes

Augustine, De Natura Boni contra Manichaeos #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Gregory of Nyssa, De Natura Hominis #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Augustine, De Natura et Gratia #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Augustine, De Nuptiis et Concupiscentia #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Augustine, De Octoginta Tribus Quaestionibus #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Augustine, De Octoginta Trium Quaestionibus #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 106

Ambrose, De Officiis #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 26

Ambrose, De Officiis I #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Cyprian, De Oratione Dominica #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 55

Augustine, De Ordine #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 106

Augustine, De Ordine (Cassiciacum dialogues) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 59

Augustine, De Perfectione Iustitiae #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, De Perfectione Justitiae #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 168

Augustine, De Poenitentia #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 209

Augustine, De Potentia #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, De Praedestinatione Sanctorum #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, De Sermone Domini in Monte #

Mentioned in 6 classes

Anselm, De Similitudinibus #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 130

Ambrose, De Spiritu Sancto #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 32

De Spiritu et Anima #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Augustine, De Spiritu et Anima (pseudo-) #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 97

Augustine, De Spiritu et Littera #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Prima Secundae 260
Prima Secundae 261 (2×)

Isidore of Seville, De Summo Bono #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 190

Isidore of Seville, De Summo Bono II #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 177

Augustine, De Symbolo #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 121

Hilary, De Synodis #

Mentioned in 5 classes

De Trinitate #

Mentioned in 56 classes

Augustine, De Trinitate (intellectum valde ama) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 19

Augustine, De Trinitate I #

Mentioned in 14 classes

Augustine, De Trinitate I and IV #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Hilary, De Trinitate II #

Mentioned in 9 classes

Augustine, De Trinitate III #

Mentioned in 9 classes

Augustine, De Trinitate IV #

Mentioned in 21 classes

Augustine, De Trinitate IX #

Mentioned in 13 classes

Augustine, De Trinitate IX and X #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Augustine, De Trinitate V #

Mentioned in 11 classes

Augustine, De Trinitate VI #

Mentioned in 21 classes

Augustine, De Trinitate VI and X #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 134

Hilary, De Trinitate VII #

Mentioned in 18 classes

Augustine, De Trinitate VIII #

Mentioned in 8 classes

Augustine, De Trinitate X #

Mentioned in 26 classes

Augustine, De Trinitate XI #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, De Trinitate XII #

Mentioned in 23 classes

Augustine, De Trinitate XIII #

Mentioned in 16 classes

Augustine, De Trinitate XIII and XV #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 2

Augustine, De Trinitate XIV #

Mentioned in 10 classes

Augustine, De Trinitate XV #

Mentioned in 19 classes

Augustine, De Utilitate Credendi #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 11

Augustine, De Vera Religione #

Mentioned in 21 classes

Augustine, De Verbo #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 141

Augustine, De Veritate #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, De Videndo Deum #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 56

Augustine, De Virginitate #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 67

Augustine, De agone christiano #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Augustine, De baptismo parvulorum #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 193

Augustine, De catechizandis rudibus #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Augustine, De civitate Dei XIV #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 89

Augustine, De consensu evangelistarum (Harmony of the Gospels) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 80

Augustine, De correptione et gratia #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Augustine, De cura pro mortuis gerenda #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 159 (2×)

Augustine, De diversis quaestionibus octoginta tribus #

Mentioned in 16 classes

Augustine, De diversis quaestionibus octoginta trium #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 75

Augustine, De doctrina Christiana #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 5

Augustine, De dono perseverantiae (On Perseverance) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 268

Augustine, De duabus animabus #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 178

Augustine, De fide ad Petrum #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 12

John Damascene, De fide orthodoxa III #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 19

Augustine, De libero arbitrio #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 178

Anselm, De libero arbitrio / On grace and free will #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 211

Augustine, De libero arbitrio III #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 168

Augustine, De moribus Ecclesiae #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 134

Augustine, De moribus ecclesiae #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Augustine, De natura boni #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 89

Nemesius, De natura hominis #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, De nuptiis et concupiscentia #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 67 (2×)

Augustine, De praedestinatione sanctorum #

Mentioned in 4 classes

De spiritu et anima #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 115

Augustine, De vera religione #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Decree on Priestly Training (Optatam Totius), Second Vatican Council #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 27

Dei Filius (Vatican I) #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Dei Filius (Vatican I) proemium #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 1

Dei Verbum #

Mentioned in 12 classes

Dei Verbum (Second Vatican Council) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 116

Dei Verbum (Vatican II) #

Mentioned in 13 classes

Dei Verbum (Vatican II) proemium #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Dei Verbum proemium #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Denzinger #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Denzinger, Enchiridion Symbolorum #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 8

Desert Fathers #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 67

Catherine of Siena, Dialogue #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 114

Catherine of Siena, Dialogue on Divine Providence #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 75

Gregory, Dialogues IV #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Hugo of Saint Victor, Didascalicon #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 97

Bonaventure, Disputed Question on Evangelical Perfection #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 222

Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names #

Mentioned in 26 classes

Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names () #

Mentioned in 6 classes

Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names (), last chapter #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names (Hierotheus) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 69

Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names I #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 54

Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names IV #

Mentioned in 16 classes

Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names VII #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 276

Pius XII, Divino Afflante Spiritu #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 109

Dogmatic constitution on the Catholic faith #

Mentioned in 1 class

Wisdom (2005) 55

Gregory, Easter homily #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 111

Ecclesiastical Dogmas (Gennadius) #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 97

Pseudo-Dionysius, Ecclesiastical Hierarchy #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 70

Augustine, Eighty-Three Different Questions #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 56

Augustine, Eighty-Three Questions #

Mentioned in 18 classes

Augustine, Eighty-three Questions #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 139

Augustine, Enchiridion #

Mentioned in 35 classes

Augustine, Enchiridion () #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 230

Augustine, Enchiridion (On Faith, Hope and Charity) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 95

Enchiridion Symbolorum #

Mentioned in 6 classes

Augustine, Enchiridion of Faith, Hope and Charity #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, Enchiridion on Faith, Hope and Charity #

Mentioned in 5 classes

Encyclical of Leo XIII on Saint Joseph #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 94

Augustine, Epistle against Vincentius the Donatist #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 11

Cyril, Epistle of (synodal) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 111

Jerome, Epistle to Apollinaris #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, Epistle to Avitus #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Pseudo-Dionysius, Epistle to Caius #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Augustine, Epistle to Casulanus #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 229

Gregory Nazianzen, Epistle to Cledonius #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Augustine, Epistle to Dardanus #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Augustine, Epistle to Dioscorus #

Mentioned in 6 classes

Athanasius, Epistle to Epictetus #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Augustine, Epistle to Evodius #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Leo the Great, Epistle to Flavian #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 7

Epistle to Flavian (Leo) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 52

Leo, Epistle to Flavian #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 94

Pseudo-Dionysius, Epistle to Gaius #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 64

Augustine, Epistle to Hesychius #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 261

Augustine, Epistle to Jerome #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Pseudo-Dionysius, Epistle to John the Evangelist #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 102

Leo the Great, Epistle to Julian #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Basil the Great, Epistle to Optimus #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 63

Pseudo-Dionysius, Epistle to Polycarp #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Tertia Pars 36
Tertia Pars 95 (2×)

Augustine, Epistle to Volusian #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 18

Augustine, Epistle to Volusianum #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, Epistle to Volusianus #

Mentioned in 9 classes

Cyril, Epistle to the Monks of Egypt #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 8

Isidore of Seville, Etymologies #

Mentioned in 7 classes

Isidore of Seville, Etymologies II #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 214

Isidore of Seville, Etymologies V #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Eusebius #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 117

Augustine, Exodus #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 76

Jerome, Exposition of the Catholic Faith #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Jerome, Ezekiel #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Ambrose, Faith #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Augustine, Faith and Works #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 210

Augustine, Faith to Peter #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 15

Fides et Ratio #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Fifth Ecumenical Council (chapters of the fifth synod) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 60

First Vatican Council #

Mentioned in 8 classes

First Vatican Council (Dei Filius) on motives of credibility #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 60

Fourth Lateran Council #

Mentioned in 22 classes

Fourth Lateran Council, first decretal #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 174

Francis de Sales #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, Free Choice (De Libero Arbitrio) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 136

Augustine, Free Choice (De libero arbitrio) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 215

Augustine, Free Choice of the Will #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Augustine, Free Choice of the Will I #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, Free Will II #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 154

Fulgentius #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 189

Gaudium et Spes #

Mentioned in 5 classes

Gaudium et Spes (the Church in the Modern World) #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 125

Augustine, Genesis Literally X #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 72

Augustine, Genesis Literally XII #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, Genesis to the Letter #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Gloss on spiritual man #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 29

Glossa ordinaria / Peter Lombard gloss #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, Grace and Free Will #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 274

Gregory #

Mentioned in 11 classes

Gregory Nazianzen #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Gregory of Nyssa #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Gregory the Great #

Mentioned in 6 classes

Hardon’s Catholic Catechism #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 114

Augustine, Harmony of the Gospels #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 11

Augustine, Heresies #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Basil the Great, Hexaemeron #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 114

Ambrose, Hexameron #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Hilary #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Augustine, Holy Virginity #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Gregory, Homilies #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Bernard of Clairvaux, Homilies in Praise of the Blessed Virgin Mary #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 80

Gregory the Great, Homilies on Ezekiel #

Mentioned in 6 classes

Gregory, Homilies on Ezekiel I #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 162

Augustine, Homilies on John #

Mentioned in 4 classes

John Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Gregory the Great, Homilies on the Gospels #

Mentioned in 1 class

Secunda Secundae 11

Gregory the Great, Homily #

Mentioned in 4 classes

John Chrysostom, Homily on Matthew #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 87

Gregory the Great, Homily on Pentecost #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 126

Gregory the Great, Homily on the Ascension #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Gregory, Homily on the hundred sheep #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 15

Jerome, Hosea #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 243

Humanae Vitae #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 208

Humani Generis #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 107

Humani Generis / Catechism (Pius XII quotation) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 219

Augustine, Hypognosticon #

Mentioned in 3 classes

John Damascene, II #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 222

Ignatius #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 66

Paul VI, Illustrissimi #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 107

Augustine, In Ioannem #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 84

Ineffabilis Deus (Pius IX) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 62 (3×)

Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 31

Bernard of Clairvaux, Introduction to Experimental Medicine (Claude ) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 71

Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 69

Isidore of Seville #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Bonaventure, Itinerarium #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 49

Bonaventure, Itinerarium () #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 53

Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis in Deum #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis in Deum (Journey of the Mind to God) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 10

Jerome #

Mentioned in 8 classes

Jesus of Nazareth (Benedict XVI) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 112

Augustine, John #

Mentioned in 19 classes

John Chrysostom, John (wedding at Cana) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 63

John Cassian, John , Conferences #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 275

John Cassian #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 91

John Chrysostom #

Mentioned in 10 classes

John Damascene #

Mentioned in 33 classes

Augustine, John Paul II letter on #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 105

Augustine, John Paul II, encyclical on #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, John Paul II, letter on #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 80

Lateran Council #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 56

Lateran II #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 68

Leo XIII #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Leo the Great #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Letter of Pope Agatho, Sixth Council (Constantinople III) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 37

Augustine, Letter of Volusianus to #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, Letter to Dioscorus #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Augustine, Letter to Evodius #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 17

Augustine, Letter to Orosius #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 118

Augustine, Letter to Paulina (De videndo Deum) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 43

Augustine, Letter to Paulina (On Seeing God) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 41

Augustine, Letter to Paulina on seeing God #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 43

Augustine, Letter to Volusian #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 2

Liber Ecclesiasticorum Dogmatum #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 77

Liber de ecclesiasticis dogmatibus (Gennadius) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 191

Life of Anthony #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 68

Life of Saint Anthony #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 88

Athanasius, Life of St Anthony #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 150

Bernard of Clairvaux, Lonergan, Insight #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 34

Bernard of Clairvaux, Loving God #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Ambrose, Luke #

Mentioned in 24 classes

Lumen Ecclesiae (Paul VI) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Wisdom (2005) 34

Bede, Mark #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Augustine, Marriage and Concupiscence #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Augustine, Mary conceiving Christ in her soul #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 79

Mater et Magistra #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 1

Jerome, Matthew #

Mentioned in 26 classes

John Chrysostom, Matthew ( commentary) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 86

Hilary, Matthew (’s commentary) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 55

John Chrysostom, Matthew commentary () #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 85

Maximus #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 67

Anselm, Monologium #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 120

Gregory the Great, Moralia #

Mentioned in 10 classes

Gregory, Moralia I #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Gregory, Moralia I and II #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 164

Gregory, Moralia II #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Gregory, Moralia IV #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 173

Gregory, Moralia V #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Prima Secundae 115 (3×)
Tertia Pars 42

Gregory, Moralia VI #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Gregory the Great, Moralia XII #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 159

Gregory, Moralia XIII #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 114

Gregory, Moralia XIV #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Tertia Pars 116 (2×)
Tertia Pars 119

Gregory, Moralia XIX #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 37

Gregory, Moralia XVIII #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Gregory, Moralia XXI #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 113

Gregory, Moralia XXII #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Gregory, Moralia XXXI #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Gregory, Moralia XXXII #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 96

Gregory, Moralia XXXIII #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 175

Gregory, Moralia XXXIV #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 204

Gregory, Moralia in Job #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Gregory, Moralia on Job #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 28

Mysterium Fidei (Paul VI) #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Pseudo-Dionysius, Mystical Theology #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Naples Catechism (Catechetical Instructions) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 164

Augustine, Nature and Grace #

Mentioned in 7 classes

Gregory, Nazianzus #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 70

Nicene Creed #

Mentioned in 11 classes

Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed #

Mentioned in 8 classes

Augustine, Nuptials and Concupiscence #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 62

Cyprian, On the Lord’s Prayer #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 268

Decree on priestly training (Optatam Totius) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Wisdom (2005) 22

Decree on priestly training #

Mentioned in 1 class

Wisdom (2005) 22

John Chrysostom, Opus imperfectum in Matthaeum (pseudo-) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 80

Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Gregory, Pastoralia #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 177

Paul VI encyclical on the Eucharist (Mysterium Fidei) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 12

Augustine, Penance #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Origen, Peri Archon I #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Pius X encyclical (Pascendi) #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 6

Pius X encyclical on the modernists #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 45

Pius XII on reading modern philosophers #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 39

Canon of Clement V #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 17

Pope John Paul II catechetical lectures on angels #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 81

Leo the Pope #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Prayer of St Francis #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 54

Jerome, Prologue to John #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 83

Propositions condemned by Innocent XI #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 180

Leo XIII, Providentissimus Deus #

Mentioned in 6 classes

Augustine, Pseudo-, De Spiritu et Anima #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 111

Augustine, Pseudo-, De mirabilibus sacrae scripturae #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 80

Augustine, Pseudo-, On the Spirit and the Soul #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 131

Pseudo-Dionysius #

Mentioned in 18 classes

Augustine, Questions of the Old and New Testament #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 37

Augustine, Questions on the Gospel #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, Questions on the Gospels #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 161

Augustine, Questions on the Gospels III #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 190

Augustine, Questions on the Old and New Testament #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Augustine, Questions on the Old and New Testament () #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 5

Augustine, Rebuke and Grace #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 267

Augustine, Retractationes #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, Retractations #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Augustine, Retractions #

Mentioned in 12 classes

Augustine, Retractions I #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 265

Richard of Saint Victor #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Origen, Romans #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, Rule #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Rule of St. Benedict #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Jerome, Saint , Epistle to Magnus #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 8

Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint , On Loving God #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Second Council of Constantinople #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 7

Second Council of Constantinople (fifth ecumenical council) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 7

Second Vatican Council #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Second Vatican Council on reading St Thomas #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 9

Second Vatican Council on the four Gospels #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 204

Second Vatican Council, decree on priestly formation (Optatam Totius) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 27

Second Vatican Council, on Thomas #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 130

Augustine, Sermon on Purgatory #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 208

Augustine, Sermon on the Ascension #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 119

Augustine, Sermon on the Creed #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, Sermon on the Epiphany #

Mentioned in 7 classes

Augustine, Sermon on the Innocents #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 80

Augustine, Sermon on the Mount #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 164

Leo the Great, Sermon on the Nativity #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Augustine, Sermon on the Passion #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of Songs #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of Songs (little foxes) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 39

Sixth Council (Constantinople III) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 52

Augustine, Soliloquies #

Mentioned in 9 classes

Augustine, Soliloquies I #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Augustine, Soliloquies II #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 135

Spe Salvi #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 24

Bonaventure, St #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 204

Bernard of Clairvaux, St. , On Loving God #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 155

Saint Robert Bellarmine, tract on hell #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 91

John Damascene, Summa Theologiae I-II ( on the passions) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 77

Pseudo-Dionysius, Summa Theologiae I-II (love unites, ) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 126

Augustine, Summa Theologiae I-II (on goodness and greatness, quote) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 125

Augustine, Super Canonicam Joannis #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 106

Pseudo-Dionysius, Symbolic Theology #

Mentioned in 6 classes

Pseudo-Dionysius, Symbolic Theology () #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 48

Synod of Ephesus #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Isidore of Seville, Synonyms #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 229

Glories of Mary (Alphonsus Liguori) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 72

Bellarmine, Ascent of the Mind to God #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 171

Augustine, Thomas’s Commentary on the Sentences (’s definition of virtue) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 233

Augustine, To Consentius on the resurrection of the flesh #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 116

Ambrose, To Emperor Gratian #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 49

Augustine, Tractates on John #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Augustine, Tractates on the First Epistle of John #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 285

Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Bonaventure, Treatise on the Preparation for Mass #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 89

Augustine, True Religion #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Vatican Council #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 141

Vatican I #

Mentioned in 15 classes

Vatican I Dei Filius canons #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 2

Vatican I and Trent (Councils) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Secunda Secundae 1

Vatican I canons on creation #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 2

Vatican I dogmatic constitution #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 127

Vatican I dogmatic constitution (Dei Filius) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 215

Vatican I on motives of credibility #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 8

Vatican I, Dei Filius #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Vatican I, Dei Filius (canons on faith and reason) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 6

Vatican I, Dei Filius / canon of the New Testament #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Vatican I, Dei Filius canons on faith #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 5

Vatican II #

Mentioned in 9 classes

Vatican II (Dei Verbum) #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Vatican II Dei Verbum #

Mentioned in 5 classes

Vatican II decree on priestly formation #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Vatican II decree on priestly training #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 1

Vatican II documents on bishops and priests #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Vatican II on the study of Thomas #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 111

Vatican II, Dei Verbum #

Mentioned in 8 classes

Vatican II, Dei Verbum (proemium) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Sacred Scripture 1

Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes #

Mentioned in 1 class

Introduction to Philosophy & Logic (1999) 43

Vatican II, Optatam Totius (decree on priestly formation) #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Vincent of Lérins #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 47

Vita Consecrata #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 50

Bonaventure, bodily penance #

Mentioned in 2 classes

John Damascene, book III #

Mentioned in 2 classes

John Damascene, book III (De Fide Orthodoxa) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 53

Augustine, commentary on John #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 127

Ambrose, commentary on Luke #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 65

Jerome, commentary on Matthew #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 103

Gregory the Great, commentary on the Song of Songs #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, dialogue on order (De Ordine) #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 106

Leo the Great, epistle #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 19

Jerome, epistle to Minervius #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 192

Pseudo-Dionysius, eros applied to God #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 61

Basil the Great, exhortation on reading the Greeks #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 154

Augustine, faith #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 88

Augustine, faith, hope and charity #

Mentioned in 1 class

Sacred Scripture 1

Jerome, gloss #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 39

Jerome, gloss on Ezekiel #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 120

Gregory, homily #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Basil the Great, homily ‘Take heed to thyself’ #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Gregory, homily (idle word) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 52

Gregory, homily on the Ascension #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 103

Gregory, homily on the Epiphany #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 79

Gregory, homily on the hundred sheep #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Gregory, homily on the octave of Easter #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 64

Jerome, homily on the prodigal son #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 80

Ambrose, hymn Deus Creator Omnium #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 98

Augustine, letter to Paulina (On Seeing God) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 43

Bernard of Clairvaux, letters #

Mentioned in 1 class

Love & Friendship 8

Bernard of Clairvaux, love #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 102

Augustine, memory #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 120

Augustine, morning and evening knowledge #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 109

Augustine, numbers #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 71

Augustine, order in the Trinity #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Gregory the Great, pride #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 115

Bonaventure, prologue on the gifts of the Holy Spirit #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 102

Augustine, pseudo-, De Spiritu et Anima #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 131

Augustine, sermon #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, sermon on purgatory #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 207

Jerome, sermon on the Assumption #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Leo the Great, sermon on the Epiphany #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Tertia Pars 66
Tertia Pars 79 (5×)

Augustine, sermon on the Paschal #

Mentioned in 2 classes

John Chrysostom, sermon on the passion #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, sin as nothing #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 74

Cyril, synodal epistle #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 104

Cyril of Alexandria, synodal letter (Council of Ephesus) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 12

Cyril, synodic epistle #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 54

Augustine, the Agreement of the Evangelists #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 117

Pseudo-Dionysius, the Areopagite #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 95

Augustine, the Canonical Epistle of John #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 105

Ambrose, the Catholic Faith #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 10

John Chrysostom, the Compunction of the Heart #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 4

Augustine, the Creed #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, the Divination of Demons #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 159 (2×)

Pseudo-Dionysius, the Divine Names #

Mentioned in 8 classes

Pseudo-Dionysius, the Divine Names IV #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, the Epistle of John #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 285

Origen, the Epistle to the Romans #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 59

Ambrose, the Faith II #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 48

Augustine, the Good of Marriage #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Jerome, the Gospel of Matthew #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 64

Augustine, the Gospels #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, the Grace of the Old and New Testament #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 100

Isidore of Seville, the Highest Good #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 172

Ambrose, the Holy Spirit #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Ambrose, the Incarnation #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Augustine, the Lord’s Prayer #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 285

Augustine, the Morals of the Catholic Church #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Augustine, the Morals of the Catholic Church and of the Manichaeans #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 6

Augustine, the Morals of the Church #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, the Morals of the Church II #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 131

Gregory of Nyssa, the Nature of Man #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 29

Augustine, the Nature of the Good #

Mentioned in 2 classes

John Damascene, the Orthodox Faith #

Mentioned in 3 classes

John Damascene, the Orthodox Faith II #

Mentioned in 3 classes

John Damascene, the Orthodox Faith II and III #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 134

John Damascene, the Orthodox Faith III #

Mentioned in 6 classes

John Damascene, the Orthodox Faith IV #

Mentioned in 1 class

Secunda Secundae 7

Augustine, the Our Father #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 57

Augustine, the Perfection of Justice #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, the Predestination of the Saints #

Mentioned in 9 classes

Augustine, the Predestination/Perseverance of the Saints #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 4

Anselm, the Procession of the Holy Spirit #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 124

Augustine, the Psalms #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Augustine, the Quantity of the Soul #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 75

Augustine, the Sermon on the Mount #

Mentioned in 5 classes

Augustine, the Spirit and the Letter #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Augustine, the Trinity #

Mentioned in 9 classes

Augustine, the Trinity VI #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Prima Pars 120
Prima Pars 121 (2×)

Augustine, the Trinity VII #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, the Trinity X #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Augustine, the Trinity XII #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 179

Augustine, the Trinity XIII #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, the Trinity XV #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 35

Augustine, the Trinity in the mind #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 111

Augustine, the Utility of Believing #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Anselm, the Virginal Conception and Original Sin #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 193

Augustine, the Words of the Lord #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Pseudo-Dionysius, the angels #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, the beautiful #

Mentioned in 1 class

Ethics 1

Augustine, the blessed who know God #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 96

John Chrysostom, the centurion at the crucifixion #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 79

Augustine, the definition of belief #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 16

Pseudo-Dionysius, the divine names #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 43

Augustine, the image of God #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, the image of the Trinity #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, the invisible sacrifice #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 57

Bernard of Clairvaux, the stages of love #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 61

Augustine, the three raised from the dead #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 281

Augustine, truth as likeness to the beginning #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 68

Augustine, virtue as good use of free will #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 131

Augustine, works of #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 241

Pseudo-Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy ch. 1 #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Pseudo-Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy ch.1 #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Pseudo-Dionysius, De Divinis Nominibus ch.1 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 47

Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 1 #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names ch.1 #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Jerome, Gloss on Ezekiel 1 #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Pseudo-Dionysius, Mystical Theology ch. 1 #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Pseudo-Dionysius, the Divine Names ch. 1 #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Pseudo-Dionysius, the Divine Names ch. 1 and ch. 4 #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Pseudo-Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy ch. 2 #

Mentioned in 3 classes

John Damascene, De Fide Orthodoxa book 2 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 69

Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 2 #

Mentioned in 10 classes

John Damascene, book 2 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 105

Vatican I, Dei Filius ch. 2 and 3 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 4

Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 3 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 53

Augustine, John 3 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 38

Vatican I, Dei Filius ch. 3 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 5

John Damascene, book 3 #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 3 and 5 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 23

John Chrysostom, John 3:17 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 5

Augustine, John 3:36 #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Pseudo-Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy ch. 4 #

Mentioned in 5 classes

Pseudo-Dionysius, De Divinis Nominibus ch. 4 #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4 #

Mentioned in 34 classes

Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4 () #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 169

Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names ch.4 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 187

Vatican I, Dei Filius ch. 4 (Faith and Reason) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 5

Pseudo-Dionysius, the Divine Names ch. 4 #

Mentioned in 7 classes

Pseudo-Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy ch. 4 and ch. 7 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 67

Pseudo-Dionysius, De Divinis Nominibus ch. 5 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 12

Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 5 #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Pseudo-Dionysius, the Divine Names ch. 5 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 21

Pseudo-Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy 7 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 122

Pseudo-Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy ch. 7 #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Pseudo-Dionysius, De Divinis Nominibus ch. 7 #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 83

Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 7 #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Augustine, Psalm 7 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 89

Pseudo-Dionysius, the Divine Names ch. 7 #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, the Gospel of John, chapter 7 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Introduction to Philosophy & Logic (1999) 3

Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 8 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 205

Fifth Lateran Council, session 8 (1513) #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 17

Pseudo-Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy ch. 9 #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 9 #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Pseudo-Dionysius, the Divine Names ch. 9 #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, De Trinitate VI c.10 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 134 (2×)

Augustine, De Trinitate VI.10 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 134

Eighth Council of Constantinople, Session 10 #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 79

Pseudo-Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy c.11 #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 134

Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 11 #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 138

Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 12 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 62

Pseudo-Dionysius, the Divine Names ch. 12 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 52

John Damascene, De Fide Orthodoxa I ch.13 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 120

Augustine, John 14:12 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 94

Gregory Nazianzen, Summa Theologiae III q.16 a.? (reply to objections on ‘God was made man’, citing ) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 46

Vatican II (Dei Verbum) 18-20 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Sacred Scripture 1

Gregory, Moralia (Book 20) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 11

Augustine, City of God XXII c.29 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 41

Gregory, Moralia 31 #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Gregory, Moralia book 32 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 97

Augustine, Sermon on the Psalms (Psalm 32) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 237

Augustine, Homilies on the Gospel of John 41 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 206

Lumen Gentium 53 and 55 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 67

Augustine, Tractates on John 72 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 281

Augustine, Summa Theologiae I q.75 a.2 (reply to /Plato on sensing) #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 93

Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos (Psalm 79) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 185

Augustine, Psalm 79 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 172

Augustine, Summa Theologiae I-II q.79 ( on virgins) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 203

Augustine, 83 Questions #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 117

Augustine, Against Apollinaris / Book of 83 Questions #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 18

Augustine, De Diversis Quaestionibus 83 #

Mentioned in 14 classes

Augustine, Summa Theologiae I q.87 ( on knowledge and love in the soul) #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 87

Augustine, Book of Eighty-Three/Six Questions against the Pagans (Letter 102) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 4

Augustine, Letter 118 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 76

Augustine, Letter 120 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 76 (2×)

Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos 134 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 24

Augustine, sermon on Psalm 150 #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 59

Augustine, the 153 fish #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Augustine, Letter 169 to Evodius #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 124

Augustine, Epistle 186 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 284

Catechism of the Catholic Church 365-366 #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 20

Council of Trent, Denzinger 826 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 285

Fourth Lateran Council (1215) #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Council of Vienne (1312) #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 17

Gregory, XVI, Singulari Nos (1834) #

Mentioned in 2 classes

41. Aquinas's Order of God's Attributes in the Two Summas; Testing Syllogisms in the First and Second Figures

Thu, 30 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks why Aquinas always pairs simplicity with perfection yet orders the remaining divine attributes differently in the Summa Theologiae and the Summa Contra Gentiles, tying the question to the fivefold proof of God’s existence and to Trinitarian concerns in the Prima Pars. He then turns to the handout on the simple syllogism, working through the dictum de omni and dictum de nullo to determine which universal premise-combinations in the first and second figures necessarily conclude, using examples like animals, dogs, cats, stones, and trees, plus conversion rules. He closes by asking how these logical principles bear on singular and divine predications.

41. Summa I-II Q.13 Art. 1-2: Is Choice an Act of Will or Reason, and Do Animals Choose?

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s account of choice (electio) in Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 13. He asks first whether choosing is an act of will or of reason, arguing that it is substantively willing but formally shaped by reason’s ordering of means to end. He then turns to whether brute animals choose, concluding they cannot, since their desires follow a fixed natural determination rather than deliberation among alternatives. Along the way he draws on examples from cats, medicine, and food preference, plus material from Aristotle’s Ethics and Physics, to sharpen the distinction between deliberated and merely instinctive appetite.

41. Aquinas on Christ's Emotions: Sadness and Fear (Summa III, Q.15, Arts. 6–7)

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Could Christ, being sinless and perfect, actually feel sadness and fear? Berquist walks through the objections and responses of III, q. 15, articles 6 and 7, introducing Aquinas’s distinction between a full passion and a “propassion”—an emotion that begins in the sensitive appetite but never overturns reason’s rule. Drawing on Augustine, Jerome, Hilary, and Damascene, he shows how Christ genuinely suffered sorrow and fear in his human nature. He also sets this against the Stoic ideal of the wise man untouched by sadness, using the threefold division of goods—of soul, body, and external things—to explain why sorrow and fear can befit even a perfectly virtuous man, with reference to Summa Contra Gentiles III, ch. 33.

41. Summa I q.12 a.3–4: Can the Bodily Eye See God? The Meanings of 'to See' and 'Eye', and Why No Creature Sees God by Nature

Thu, 28 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether God’s essence could be seen by bodily or imaginative sight, and whether a created intellect can attain that vision by nature rather than grace. He works through the objections and answers—drawing on Job, Isaiah, Augustine’s City of God, Dionysius, and Aristotle, along with Summa Contra Gentiles IV, ch. 15—to separate sensation, imagination, and understanding as distinct powers. Analogies like perceiving life in a living body and Hamlet’s “mind’s eye” clarify why Scripture’s talk of “seeing” God is metaphorical, not literal. He concludes that vision of the divine essence belongs to intellect alone, and only by grace.

41. Metaphysics VIII, Reading 2: Substantial Form Compared with Accidental Form, and Why Proportions Matter

Thu, 06 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s account of sensible substance, starting from Democritus’s list of accidental differences—shape, position, order—and other modes like mixture, binding, and quality by which a thing is said to be what it is. He builds out the central comparison: accidental form presupposes an already-actual substance and gives being only in a qualified sense, while substantial form actualizes prime matter, which is purely potential, and gives being simply. Along the way he argues that grasping such analogical realities requires proportional reasoning, drawing examples from Euclid, Scripture, and Plato. He closes by pointing ahead to the next lesson’s direct treatment of substantial form.

41. Demonstration versus Dialectic: Necessity, Per Se Properties, and Opinion in the Posterior Analytics and Topics

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks what separates a proof from a mere argument. Turning to the Posterior Analytics and the Topics, he distinguishes demonstration, which proceeds from necessarily true premises as in Euclid’s geometric proofs, from dialectic, which reasons from probable opinions held by everyone, by most, or by the wisest, toward conclusions that could go either way. He explains the “per se” (through itself) relation—properties like a triangle’s angles or a number’s oddness following necessarily from a thing’s definition—as the key to necessity. Plato’s Theaetetus and Meno illustrate dialectical inquiry into knowledge and contrary conclusions.

41. The Four Kinds of Causes: Matter, Form, Mover, End

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Reading 5 of Aristotle’s Physics, Book II, where the four causes—matter, form, mover, and end—get their definitions and their examples. He dwells on why Aristotle reaches for artificial things to illustrate matter, Pythagoras’s musical ratio to illustrate form, the father rather than the mother for the moving cause, and chains of subordinate ends for the final cause. He then traces how each cause surfaces historically, from the early material monists through Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Socrates and Plato, arguing this sequence tracks how reason itself comes to recognize all four. He fixes the point with homely cases: the word “cat” and a wooden chair.

41. How the Senses and Reason Are Acted On Differently, Two Kinds of Ability, and What Reason Knows

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through Aristotle’s De Anima, Book III, Chapter 4, with Aquinas’s commentary as guide. He asks why the analogy between sense and intellect breaks down: a violently bright light or loud sound can injure the eye or ear, yet grasping a highly intelligible object never damages the mind—instead it sharpens its grasp of lesser, easier intelligibles, because intellect, unlike a sense organ, is immaterial. He then turns to the next lection, Aristotle’s distinction between first and second potency and act—the difference between the raw capacity to learn and the trained ability to use knowledge already acquired—before introducing the intellect’s proper object, the quiddity of sensible things, and what that implies for how the mind can speak of God only negatively and by analogy.

41. Likenesses for Method: Tools, Senses, Food and Fiction; Learning One Word at a Time

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, book I, arguing that certitude and enjoyment belong to their matter, as a craftsman’s tool suits his work, the senses suit their objects, and a cultivated taste in wine, food, or fiction suits what it savors—with asides on the Poetics, C.S. Lewis, and Fielding. He then traces how the Metaphysics first fixes its subject, being as being, before Book VI can treat the proper method of defining it, drawing on Boethius’s De Trinitate and the “before and after” of the Physics and Metaphysics Book V. He closes with Gregory of Nyssa on the “order” and “way” of providence.

42. Demonstration and Dialectic: Form and Matter of the Syllogism, Probable Opinions, Propter Quid and Quia, the Four Questions, and Why Definition Needs Genus and Difference

Thu, 06 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks what actually separates a demonstrative syllogism from a dialectical one, and argues it’s not form but matter: demonstration proceeds from necessarily true premises, dialectic from premises that are merely probable, graded by how many or how authoritative their holders are. He then distinguishes propter quid demonstration, reasoning from cause to effect, from quia demonstration, reasoning from effect to cause, using Aquinas’s five ways as the working example, and lays out the “four questions”—does it exist, what is it, is this that, why is this that. He contrasts Albert the Great’s twofold division of logic with Aquinas’s threefold one, touching along the way on Summa Theologiae q. 23 and on modern examples like Einstein and wave-particle debates.

42. Summa I-II Q.13 Art. 3-6: Choice Is of Means, of Human Acts, of Possible Things, and Is Free

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up four articles of Aquinas’s treatise on choice, asking whether choice is of the end or only of means to it, whether choice belongs only to human acts, and whether it concerns only possible things rather than being exercised of necessity. Working through the objections and Thomas’s replies article by article, he draws on Aristotle’s Ethics and Physics and reaches for everyday cases—grocery shopping, choosing a career, a doctor treating a patient—to make the willing/choosing distinction concrete. The upshot: only beatitude, the last end, is willed of necessity, while every particular good ordered toward it is genuinely chosen, and freely.

42. Christ's Wonder and Anger, Christ as Both Wayfarer and Comprehensor, and a Look Ahead to Q.16 (Summa III, Q.15, Arts. 8–10)

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through articles 8 through 10 of Summa III, q. 15, taking up whether wonder and anger could truly belong to Christ and how Christ could be at once a wayfarer, still journeying toward God, and a comprehensor, already possessing the vision of God. Along the way he brings in Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Ethics, Euclid, Shakespeare, and Augustine’s commentary on John to sharpen the distinctions Aquinas is drawing. He closes by looking ahead to question 16, sketching Aquinas’s plan for treating the union of Christ’s two natures and the twelve articles on how divine and human predicates can be said of Christ.

42. Summa I q.12 a.4–5: The Knower's Way of Being, Why Reason Is Immaterial, and the Light of Glory That Makes Us Godlike

Thu, 28 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Summa Theologiae I, q. 12, articles four and five, where Aquinas asks whether any created intellect can see the divine essence by natural power alone, and answers no—an elevating “light of glory” is needed instead. Drawing on Aristotle’s De Anima to explain how knowing requires the known to become immaterially present in the knower, Berquist shows why God’s essence, as pure act, exceeds every created intellect’s natural capacity. He works through the objection that this light might function as a medium standing between intellect and object, using comparisons to sense cognition and angelic knowledge to clarify how it instead elevates the knower’s own power.

42. Metaphysics VIII, Reading 3 (Part 1): Form Compared with Plato's Separate Species

Thu, 13 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the third reading of Metaphysics VIII, where Aristotle sets form against Plato’s separated species. He traces a fourfold comparison: whether essence belongs to the composite or to form alone, why form is not itself made of matter, why form as such is neither generated nor corrupted, and whether wholly separated substances—Aristotle’s God, the angels—actually exist. Concrete cases carry the argument: a Manhattan cocktail, the word “cat,” a carpenter’s chair. He extends the discussion to the immateriality of the human soul and why no two angels can share a species.

42. The Dialectician's Tools: Probable Premises, Senses of Words, and Differences

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist continues his study of Aristotle’s Topics, asking what distinguishes the dialectician’s arguments—dialectical syllogism and induction—from rhetoric’s enthymeme and example. He then turns to the four tools of dialectic laid out in Topics I, spending most of the class on the first two: selecting and ordering probable opinions by subject matter, from general to particular, using examples from ethics and politics; and distinguishing the several senses of equivocal words, worked through with terms like “dry,” “liberal,” “number,” and “healthy.” The class ends with an exercise applying this second tool to a list of paired terms, judging in each case whether the use is univocal or equivocal and why.

42. Aristotle's Three Corollaries on Causes and Nature as Form

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Having just distinguished the four causes—material, formal, efficient, and final—Aristotle draws three further conclusions: a single thing can have several causes at once, two things can cause each other though in different senses, and one cause can produce contrary effects. Berquist works through each with examples such as the house-builder and pianist, exercise and health, and the ship’s steersman, then turns to Aristotle’s concluding paragraph, where each causal sense is broadened and illustrated across nature, art, and logic, including the syllogism, and end is linked to good. He closes by laying out the ways the four causes can be paired two by two and what each pairing shows about how they relate.

42. The Object of Reason: What a Thing Is, Universals and Immaterial Understanding

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins with a handout on Shakespeare, asking how angels and demons can move the imagination and color the light of reason differently depending on whether their intent is good or malicious, with Macbeth as the test case. He then turns to Aristotle’s De Anima, Book III, reading the intellect as a receptive power and working through Aristotle’s distinction between a thing and “what it was to be” that thing. Examples of circles, water, and flesh show why understanding takes hold of the universal immaterially, while sense and imagination remain tied to material singulars. He ties the discussion to Aquinas’s commentary and to the simplicity of God and the angels.

42. Custom, the Modern World, and the Mercantile City, Mathematical Science and Democracy as Its Sources

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins with how custom shapes what we can even think, invoking Aquinas’s Summa Contra Gentiles and Socratic irony, before turning to his own account of what made the modern world modern. He traces three sources: the mercantile city, contrasted with the aristocratic Greek polis through William McNeill’s world history; the mathematical fusion of natural philosophy and mechanical art into “technical science,” via Aristotle’s Physics, Thomas’s proemium to the Nicomachean Ethics, and Heisenberg’s Gifford Lectures; and the democratic revolutions Tocqueville analyzes in Democracy in America. He argues philosophy should be divided into Greek and modern, not ancient-medieval-modern, based on its relation to revealed theology, then turns toward Tocqueville as the class closes.

43. Definition as Demonstration, the Rule of Two or Three, God's Ordered Likeness in Creatures, and the Four Tools of the Dialectician

Thu, 06 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with the Posterior Analytics, showing how a perfect definition by genus and difference mirrors a demonstration argued “propter quid” from causes, working the example of a knife against the nature of definition itself. He reads ten minutes from his handout, “Note for Book One, Reading Thirteen,” tied to Aquinas’s commentary on Physics I, tracing Aristotle’s habit of dividing things into twos and threes—categories, senses of “in,” causes, opposites. Turning to the Topics, he sets out the dialectician’s four tools: selecting probable opinions, distinguishing senses of words, discerning differences, and weighing likenesses, the last drawn out through mathematical proportion and prime matter’s likeness to substance.

43. Serving the Lord and Learning from the Teacher; Counsel as Inquiry and Counsel About the End (Summa I-II, Q.14, Articles 1–2)

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins with Psalm 100’s movement from service through thanksgiving to praise, linking it to John 13, where Christ is named both kurios and didaskalos, and teaching is treated as a kind of enlightenment. He then works through Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 14, articles 1 and 2, asking whether counsel is a form of inquiry and whether it bears on the end sought or only on the means to it. Along the way he draws on Aristotle’s Ethics and the Summa Contra Gentiles to test how “counsel” and “science” apply, by analogy, even to God, illustrating the arguments with examples ranging from MacArthur at Inchon to political decision-making.

43. Summa III q.16 a.1: Is It True That 'God Is a Man'? Predication, Supposition and the Incarnation

Thu, 07 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the first article of question 16 in the Tertia Pars, where Thomas asks whether the proposition “God is man” is true. He situates the question among the twelve the proemium raises about predication concerning Christ, then works through the objections and Thomas’s answer, distinguishing abstract from concrete signification and explaining how “God” and “man” can properly stand (supponere) for the one divine person possessing both natures. He contrasts this with the errors of the Manichaeans, Photinus, and Nestorius, touching along the way on Greek grammar in John 13, the order of faith and charity, and Anaxagoras’s cosmology, before replying to the four objections and turning toward the next article.

43. Summa I q.12 a.6–7: Why Some See God More Perfectly, and Why No Creature Comprehends God

Thu, 05 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of the beatific vision, asking first why one soul sees God’s essence more perfectly than another—answered through charity and the light of glory—and then why no created intellect, though it sees God’s whole essence, can be said to comprehend Him. He moves through the article’s objections and replies, drawing the key distinction between knowing a thing according to its mode and knowing it as fully as it is knowable, and between seeing and comprehending, using analogies from geometry, music, and human relationships. Along the way he digresses into eternity versus time in heaven, spiritual marriage as an image of the soul’s union with God, and a comparison of the four major prophets to the four evangelists.

43. Metaphysics VIII, Reading 3 (Part 2): Definitions and Forms Are Like Numbers

Thu, 13 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s claim, read with Aquinas’s commentary, that a definition is more like a number than a line: change one element and you get a different definition, just as adding or subtracting a unit gives a different number, whereas a line can be divided endlessly without losing its nature. He traces how form actualizes the potency of a genus to make a real unity rather than a mere heap, using the geometry of squares and the genus-species hierarchy as illustrations, and noting where Locke and Berkeley go wrong on general ideas. The class closes on the ordered scale of natures from stone through plant and animal to man, and on the equality of human beings despite unequal accidental perfections.

43. Seeing Likeness and Proportion, Then Q&A on Places and Comedy

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

How do you argue from things that seem to have nothing in common? Berquist takes up the fourth dialectical tool, proportional likeness across wide distances, setting it against the third tool’s search for differences among near things. He tests it on Plato’s Meno, Euclid’s definitions, Aristotle on reason governing emotion, the inverse square law, Homer, Shakespeare, and biblical images of God as father and shepherd. The class then moves to the “places” of argument, focusing on a fortiori reasoning as Socrates uses it in the Phaedo, weighing the soul’s fitness to survive death against the body’s.

43. Dividing the Causes, Applications, and Preface to End in Nature

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks why the four causes get grouped against one another in different ways: matter set against form, mover, and end as potential against actual, or the mover set against the other three as what lies outside the process of becoming versus what lies within it. Drawing on Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics with Aquinas’s commentaries, he extends the scheme to God as cause and to definitions, where genus and difference mirror matter and form. He tests it against marriage, the sacraments, the Church, and geometric theorems to show that not every subject calls for all four causes equally. The class ends by turning to the harder question of whether nature itself acts for an end, a dispute Aristotle takes up at greater length later in the Physics.

43. Speaking About God: Wise vs. Wisdom, and the Two Objections on Undergoing

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with a theological digression, using Summa Theologiae I, q. 2, on why names like “wise,” “just,” and “good” apply to God only by affirmation and denial: our concepts, fitted to things composed of matter and form, cannot capture a God who simply is what he has, unlike Plato’s separately existing universal forms. Examples like health and healthy, sweetness and sweet, illustrate the point. He then returns to Aristotle’s De Anima, taking up two objections about how an immaterial understanding can be acted on by material things, and why identifying understanding with the thing understood doesn’t make everything self-understanding—setting up the need for an agent intellect. Along the way he flags translation problems, especially with “suffering” (paschein) and “power” (dunamis), that obscure Aristotle’s Greek in English versions.

43. Tocqueville, Democratic Customs, and the Influence of Science on Descartes, Kant and Marx

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and asks how democratic customs bend imaginative literature toward prose, future-oriented settings, and practical concerns rather than the past-facing forms of poetic tradition, and toward pantheistic tendencies in religion. He then shows the same currents running through science fiction, detective stories, and horror, and into philosophy itself, where Adam Smith and Marx make economics central and Kant, in the second preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, redescribes knowledge as an active “making” that puts experimental questions to nature. Against this, he reads Heraclitus’s “Royal Fragment” and turns to a passage in DHB Volume I on the first philosophers to recover an older, more receptive model of learning, one in which the knower stands as a student before a teacher rather than an interrogator before nature.

44. The Four Tools of Dialectic; How Aquinas Orders God's Attributes in the Two Summas

Thu, 20 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist lays out Aristotle’s four dialectical tools from the Topics: probable premises, verbal distinctions, differences among things, and likenesses among things, defining each and asking why they come in this order, with examples drawn from Shakespeare, Mozart, politics, and mathematics. He then turns to Aquinas, tracking how the Summa Theologiae and the Summa Contra Gentiles differ in the sequence they take up simplicity, perfection, infinity, unity, and immutability, and in how many arguments each work gives for a given attribute. He closes by returning to Aristotle’s Metaphysics IX on potency and act, showing how God as pure act underlies Aquinas’s arguments for divine unity and unchangeableness in both Summas.

44. What We Take Counsel About, Resolution, and Why Counsel Is Not Endless (Summa I-II, Q.14, Articles 3–6)

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up four articles of Aquinas’s question on counsel: whether it concerns only what we ourselves do, whether it covers everything we do, whether it proceeds by resolution — working backward from an end to the means and principles that secure it — and why the search doesn’t go on forever. He translates and glosses the Latin line by line, testing each objection against the corpus and replies, and grounds the abstract analysis in homely cases like baking bread and driving, plus political examples, to show how contingent, particular action gets settled through practical reasoning. He also notes Chrysostom’s reading of “Let us make man” as an image of divine counsel.

44. Summa III q.16 a.2–4: 'Man Is God', the 'Lordly Man', and Saying Human Things of God

Thu, 07 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up three articles from the Tertia Pars on Christ: can “God is man” and “man is God” be truly said, is “homo dominicus”—a phrase Augustine himself later retracted—a fitting title for Christ, and how far can divine and human predicates be swapped between the two natures. Against Nestorius, he argues that it is the single person, not a fused nature, that grounds these statements, and returns repeatedly to two lines meeting at one point as an image of that unity. Along the way he stops to sort out the fallacies of equivocation and accident, reads from a handout on dividing Shakespeare’s plays, and reflects on humility and Christ’s self-emptying.

44. Summa I q.12 a.8–10: What the Blessed See in God, Seeing Without Likenesses, and Seeing All at Once

Thu, 05 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up articles 8 through 10 of Aquinas’s question on the beatific vision, weighing objections from Gregory the Great, Augustine, Dionysius, and Aristotle against the claim that seeing God means seeing all things in Him. He concludes that such knowledge is proportioned to how perfectly God is seen, so no created intellect comprehends everything God can make or do. Along the way he draws on Aristotle on understanding greater and lesser objects, Augustine’s Confessions on knowing God versus knowing creatures, and even literary asides on Homer, Chaucer, and Shakespeare’s Henry V. He closes by opening article 10, contrasting angelic and temporal succession with the timeless, unified vision Augustine describes in De Trinitate.

44. Metaphysics Book 8, Reading 4: How Matter Relates to Its Products, to the Other Causes, and to Coming to Be (with Wine and Vinegar and Socrates' Argument from Contraries)

Thu, 20 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist continues his commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Book VIII, taking up the fourth reading on matter: first the distinction between proximate and remote matter and the reversible senses of “from,” then matter compared with the other causes, using the chest and the bed alongside the causes of man, an eclipse, and sleep. He then turns to why forms as such do not come to be, working through the puzzle of contrary states like health and sickness, and wine turning to vinegar. Following Aquinas’s commentary, he digresses into divine simplicity, angels as pure form, and Socrates’s cyclical-change argument for immortality in the Phaedo to sharpen Aristotle’s distinctions.

44. Equivocation, "As Such" versus Accident, and Being Simply or in a Certain Respect

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up three distinctions whose neglect breeds bad reasoning: equivocation in the meaning of words, what pertains to a thing “as such” against what is merely accidental to it, and being “simply” or without qualification against being “in a certain respect.” He works through potency and act with the examples of lumber becoming a house and marble becoming Michelangelo’s Pietà, then turns to moral cases, including abortion and the pursuit of an apparent good, to show how conflating these distinctions corrupts judgment. He closes over the opening lines of a text of Aquinas, in the manner of Charles De Koninck’s teaching, urging slow, wondering re-reading of a short passage over rapid coverage of many pages.

44. The Importance of the Question of Final Causality: Natural Philosophy and Ethics

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens by asking why the question of final causality matters at all: it decides whether man and his parts—down to a severed arm—have any natural purpose, with consequences for ethics, medicine, logic, and theology. He illustrates the stakes with examples like a grinder and a case of deception before turning to Aristotle’s technical apparatus in the Physics. He distinguishes per se from accidental causes and prior from posterior causes, then introduces the “removing” cause, or causa removens prohibens, using the buried treasure, the lioness and her cub, and a collapsed pillar to show how luck and chance are a peculiar species of accidental causation.

44. Why the Understandable Doesn't Always Understand; Reading Aristotle through Thomas; Liberal Education

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s puzzle, in De Anima Book III, of why understandable things do not always themselves understand, reading the text alongside Thomas Aquinas’s exposition. He draws out the distinction between potential and actual intelligibility, arguing that a thing becomes actually understandable only through separation from matter, and shows how this degree of immateriality grounds the division of speculative philosophy into natural philosophy, mathematics, and metaphysics. Along the way he pauses over the etymology of theoria and speculatio, insists on Aquinas as a necessary guide for reading Aristotle well, and closes with remarks on reverent study, liberal education, and Scripture.

44. Freedom, Equality and the Moderns: Nature as Measure, Self-Rule of the Mind, and Discussion

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks what happens to political philosophy once thinkers stop measuring liberty and equality against nature, as the Greeks and medievals did, and instead make freedom or equality themselves the highest standard. He follows this move through Locke, Rousseau, Hegel, and Sartre, then turns to democratic culture’s demand that everyone “think for themselves.” Using Anaxagoras’s fragment describing Mind as unlimited, self-ruling, and unmixed, and the Socratic method’s insistence on separating the known from the unknown, he argues most people claiming equal rights to opinion have not actually achieved self-rule. He closes by challenging Stanley Jaki on Christianity, determinism, and the incarnation’s role in science.

45. Distinctions and Likeness Among the Tools; Why Aristotle's Metaphysics Book III Begins with Doubting Well

Thu, 20 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist finishes chapter 12 of Aristotle’s Categories, reading closely from his own handout to show that the senses of “before,” “after,” and “in,” along with the topical tool of likeness, are ordered by mutual resemblance rather than arbitrarily—illustrating with genus and species, matter and form, and even modern physics. He then turns to the opening of Book III of the Metaphysics, working through Aristotle’s reasons, with Aquinas’s commentary in hand, for first raising and working through doubts (aporiai) before attempting solutions, comparing this dialectical procedure to the pro-and-con structure of disputed questions such as those in the De Veritate.

45. Aquinas on Consent (ST I-II q.15, aa.1-3): Will or Intellect, Animals, End or Means

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist reads closely through Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 15, articles 2 and 3, on the act Aquinas calls consent. He asks whether consent is an act of the appetitive power or the apprehensive one, whether brute animals can be said to consent, and whether consent bears on the end sought or only on the means chosen to reach it. Working through Aquinas’s objections and responses, he draws on Aristotle’s De Anima, Augustine’s De Trinitate, and John Damascene, and sorts consent out from neighboring acts like choice, counsel, and assent. Along the way he traces the Latin roots of consentire, assentire, and sententia.

45. Aquinas on the Incarnation (ST III q.16, a.5–6): Can Human Things Be Said of the Divine Nature? Was God Made Man?

Thu, 14 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae III, q.16, a.5–6, pressing the question of whether what belongs to human nature can rightly be predicated of the divine nature in Christ, and what it means to say God was made man. He works through Aquinas’s distinctions between abstract and concrete names and between nature and person, showing why concrete predication holds where abstract predication fails, and draws on Damascene, Athanasius, and Leo the Great alongside Aquinas’s own Summa Contra Gentiles and his commentary on John. The class opens with remarks on Benedict on faith and reason and a brief aside on reconciliation in As You Like It before settling into the text.

45. Summa I, Q.12, a.11–12: No Vision of God's Essence in This Life; Knowing God by Natural Reason

Thu, 02 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up two articles of Question 12: whether any human being in this life can see God through His essence, and whether God can be known by natural reason. He works through Aquinas’s objections and responses, testing the claim against scriptural cases—Jacob, Moses, Paul—and Augustine’s teaching on divine illumination, before turning to how far reason can reach God only through the effects of creatures. Digressions touch Boethius, Dionysius, Heraclitus, and Mortimer Adler. The class closes at the opening of Article 13, having settled that only special grace, not nature, allows any glimpse of the divine essence here.

45. Metaphysics Book 8, Reading 5: How Matter and Form Are One, and an Introduction to Book 9 on Act and Ability

Thu, 20 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the question of what makes matter and form—like the parts of a definition or a number—into a genuine unity rather than a mere aggregate. He works through mistaken answers (participation, contact, “putting together”) before laying out Aristotle’s own solution: matter and form need no third uniting cause because they stand to one another as potency to act. He extends this to mathematical objects, treated as form in intelligible matter, and to immaterial substances, unified through themselves as pure form. He closes by situating Book Eight within the whole of the Metaphysics and previewing how Book Nine’s account of act and potency moves toward the first cause as pure act.

45. Misunderstandings, Custom, and the Modern World's Mathematical Habit of Mind

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist closes out Aristotle’s case that nature acts for an end, distinguishing arts like medicine and ethics, which help nature reach what it already tends toward, from arts like carpentry, which impose a wholly new form—and clears up common confusions between final and efficient causality. He then turns to a different question: why custom so often governs belief more than argument does, using Socrates’s trial in the Apology, Max Planck, and the shift from geocentric to heliocentric astronomy as cases. From there he surveys three historical sources of the modern habit of mind—mercantile cities, mathematics fused with technical science, and the democratic revolutions—drawing on Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and McNeill’s Rise of the West.

45. De Anima III.5: The Agent Intellect as Light—Separable, Impassible, Unmixed, and Act

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the chapter of the De Anima where Aristotle distinguishes two intellects: the possible or “undergoing” intellect, able to receive the natures of all things, and the agent intellect, which actively renders material things—potentially intelligible in themselves—actually intelligible. He follows Aristotle’s analogies of matter and art, and especially of light illuminating potential color, to show how the agent intellect abstracts universal natures from sensory images. Reading with St. Thomas’s commentary, he examines the four properties Aristotle assigns to this intellect—separability, impassibility, unmixedness, and being essentially act rather than potency—comparing it to Anaxagoras’s Nous and drawing out its bearing on immaterial beings like angels and God.

45. Philosophy of Looking and Doing, and the Proemium to Wisdom: Wonder, Natural Desire to Know, and the Road from Sense to Experience

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins the proemium of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, read through Thomas Aquinas’s commentary, starting from the opening claim that all men by nature desire to know. He sets this text alongside the Nicomachean Ethics, comparing how each work opens and closes, and locates both within the larger division between speculative and practical philosophy. He then walks the natural road of human knowing—sensation, memory, experience—toward wisdom, using examples like reading novels, watching a ball game, and a cat learning to avoid a hot stove to show that knowing is sought for its own sake.

46. God's Simplicity, Macbeth's 'Fair Is Foul' and the Two Roots of Error: Speech vs. Things in the Fallacies

Thu, 27 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens on God’s simplicity, where knowledge and love, distinct acts in us, are one with the divine essence itself. He then asks where error comes from, distinguishing defects of intellect from defects of will, and tests the distinction against Shakespeare: the witches’ paradox in Macbeth, passages from Twelfth Night, The Tempest, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra, and a contemporary case of abortion rhetoric. Turning to Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations, read with Alexander of Aphrodisias, Albert the Great, and the De Fallaciis attributed to Aquinas, he works through the classification of fallacies “from speech” and “from things,” tying it back to distinction, division, definition, and order as safeguards against deception.

46. Consent and Higher Reason (q.15 a.4), then Use (q.16, aa.1-2): Is Use an Act of the Will, and Do Animals Use?

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist glosses Aquinas’s articles on consent and use from the Summa’s treatise on human acts, moving from the end of q.15 a.4—whether consent to an act belongs to higher reason alone—into q.16, aa.1-2, asking whether use (usus) is properly an act of the will, and whether non-rational animals can be said to use anything. He works through the objections, Augustine’s sed contra from De Trinitate, and Aquinas’s responses, drawing out the distinctions between higher and lower reason, use and enjoyment, and rational ordering of means to ends versus mere instinct. He illustrates the last point at length with Jean-Henri Fabre’s observations of insect behavior.

46. Aquinas on the Incarnation (ST III q.16, a.7–10): Was Man Made God? Is Christ a Creature? Did This Man Begin to Be?

Thu, 14 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up four articles of the Summa’s Tertia Pars, q. 16, where Aquinas tests statements the Incarnation tempts us to say carelessly: that man was made God, that Christ is a creature, that God began to be man, and that “that man” began to be. Working through each article’s objections, sed contra, and response, he shows how the truth or falsity of these propositions turns on whether a term is taken materially, for the person, or formally, for the nature—the distinction that keeps such language from collapsing into Arian error. He also digresses briefly on the difference between the names “Christ” and “Jesus,” on how to teach Scholastic texts, and on points of Latin grammar bearing on the argument.

46. Summa I, Q.12, a.13 and Introduction to Q.13: Knowing God by Grace and the Names of God

Thu, 02 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through Article 13 of Question 12, where Aquinas asks whether grace grants a fuller knowledge of God than natural reason achieves on its own. Grace, he shows, strengthens the natural light of understanding and can supply divinely-formed images, producing a more perfect knowledge even though God’s essence remains unseen in this life. Berquist then turns to Question 13, laying out its twelve articles—from whether God can be named at all, through the meaning of the word “God” and the name “He who is,” to whether affirmative statements about God are possible—showing how the question of naming follows directly from how we know God. He draws on Dionysius, Aristotle, and Scripture along the way.

46. Metaphysics IX, Reading 1: Substance, the Categories, and the Senses of Ability (Active and Passive Potency)

Thu, 27 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist situates Book Nine’s study of potency and act within the argument about being and substance built up across Books Four through Eight, previewing how Aristotle will carry potency/act from the case of motion to a fully universal sense reaching even immaterial beings and God. Working closely from his handout on the opening pages of Book Nine, he distinguishes several senses of “ability”: active power to act on another, passive power to undergo, and the power to resist corruption, each paired with a “doing well” sense, illustrated with Thomistic commentary and analogies drawn from self-rule and the Trinity. He closes by treating inability as the privative opposite of ability, linking it to the logical notions of privation and property.

46. Aristotle's Arguments for Nature Acting for an End, and the Objections

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s case in the Physics, Book II, that nature acts for an end, expanding Aristotle’s reasoning into six distinct arguments: nature’s regular production of the good, its orderly developmental stages, art’s necessary imitation of nature, induction from animal behavior, and the priority of form over matter. He illustrates these with spider webs, parasitic wasps, and bee navigation, drawing analogies to human craftsmanship and noting where Newton, Bohr, Heisenberg, and Empedocles bear on the question. He then lays out three standard objections—that purposive action requires mind, that nature’s failures tell against directedness to the good, and that chance together with the other causes might explain things without finality—but leaves the reply to these for the next class.

46. De Anima III: The Agent and Possible Intellect, and the Natural Light of Reason versus Faith

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s account in De Anima III of the two intellects: the possible intellect, which undergoes and receives, and the agent intellect, which acts, illuminating the analogy to matter and form and to an artist’s craft. He brings in Aquinas’s commentary, and turns to Thomas’s prologue to the commentary on Isaiah, following Jerome, to weigh prophetic vision and the natural light of reason against the light of faith, with St. Paul’s rapture as a case of possible supernatural illumination. He contrasts this Aristotelian epistemology with Plato’s forms, and closes with Metaphysics IX’s claim that act is prior to potency, pointing the discussion toward the divine mind as philosophy’s highest object.

46. From Experience to Art and Science: Knowing Why, Architectonic Arts, and the Aim of Wisdom (Metaphysics I, 1)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through the opening pages of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Book Alpha, chapter 1, following the ascent from sensation and memory to experience and then to art or science. Drawing on the Nicomachean Ethics and Plato’s Gorgias, he lays out Aristotle’s two distinctions between experience and art: singular knowledge versus universal knowledge, and knowing that something is so versus knowing the cause why. Experience, he shows, can even outperform art in practice, yet art is judged wiser because it grasps causes and can be taught, a point he illustrates with everyday and autobiographical examples. He closes by opening Aristotle’s ranking of the arts themselves, distinguishing those serving necessity from those serving leisure, with Egyptian mathematics as an example of science born from leisure.

47. Actual, Potential and Imaginary Double Meanings: Equivocation, Amphiboly, Two Senses of 'Before' and How Premises Cause a Conclusion

Thu, 27 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist distinguishes fallacies arising from actual multiplicity of meaning—equivocation and amphiboly, treated “in dictione”—from those arising from potential multiplicity, such as composition, division, and accent, and from a third, imaginative kind where grammatical likeness falsely suggests things belong to the same category. He tests equivocation’s ordered versus chance senses through examples: “Word of God” in Dei Verbum, “wisdom of nature” against “wisdom of reason,” and Aristotle’s several senses of “before.” Drawing on page six of the handout “Reasoning and the Four Kinds of Argument,” he closes by defining equivocation as diverse signification under one name, illustrated through Aristotle’s causal categories and Shakespeare’s line on being “true to thine own self.”

47. Aquinas on Use and Command: Whether Use Comes Before Choice, Whether Command Belongs to Reason, and Whether Animals Command (ST I-II Q.16 a.3–4, Q.17 a.1–3)

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Working through Question 16, article 3, Berquist takes up whether use can pertain to the last end, and in article 4 whether use is prior to choice or follows from it. He then turns to Question 17, asking in article 1 whether commanding is an act of reason rather than will, in article 2 whether command and use belong to the same power, and in article 3 whether brute animals can be said to command. Throughout he reads the Latin text closely and glosses the objections and responses, drawing on Augustine, Hilary of Poitiers, Damascene, and Aristotle’s Categories to sharpen the distinctions.

47. Aquinas on Christ's Unity: Whether Christ as Man Is a Person, and Whether Christ Is One or Two (Summa III, q.16–17)

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the question of Christ’s unity in the Tertia Pars, asking whether “man” said of Christ is predicated by reason of suppositum or by reason of nature, and whether Christ should be called one or two. He works from Boethius’s definition of person and his De Duabus Naturis, alongside Porphyry’s Isagoge and Aristotle’s logic, to show how abstract terms like “deity” and “humanity” differ from concrete terms like “God” and “man” when applied to the two natures united in one person. Along the way he pauses on the discipline of definition itself, citing Aristotle’s Topics and Shakespeare’s account of reason, as training for following Aquinas’s distinctions closely.

47. Aquinas on the Names of God, Part 1: Can God Be Named, and Do Names Signify His Substance? (Summa I, Q.13, Aa.1–2)

Thu, 09 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of divine names: can creatures name God at all, given that names arise from what we know, and God is known only through creatures? He traces the three ways names reach God—through causality, excellence, and negation—and asks why both abstract terms like “goodness” and concrete terms like “good” are needed, each catching something the other misses. Moving into Article 2, he asks whether any name said of God actually reaches his substance or only points toward it without expressing what God is. Dionysius, Augustine, and Maimonides are drawn on throughout to show how far, and how little, our words can reach the divine essence.

47. Metaphysics IX, Reading 2: Rational vs. Natural Abilities — Knowledge of Contraries and the Modern Misunderstanding of Reason and Nature

Thu, 27 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s claim in Metaphysics IX that rational abilities, unlike natural ones, extend to contraries: a doctor’s art can heal or harm, a logician can reason well or badly, whereas fire only heats and never cools. He draws parallel cases from Plato’s Symposium, Homer, Shakespeare, and Aristotle’s Politics to fill out this “single knowledge of opposites.” From there he presses the distinction into the relation between nature and reason or will, arguing against Mill and Sartre’s refusal to admit any natural determination in thinking or choosing, and closes by contrasting Aristotle’s naturally known first principles with the modern habit of treating all knowledge as testable hypothesis.

47. Nature Acts for an End: Replies to the Objections and the Infinity of Mind

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s defense of final causality in nature against three standing objections: that acting for an end requires a mind, that nature’s failures (monstrous births, bad outcomes) disprove purpose, and that Empedocles’ appeal to chance can explain apparent order without a fourth cause. Working through the text closely, he answers each in turn, drawing on examples like thermostats, habitual driving, hunting with buckshot, and seed dispersal to show that failure and chance are compatible with, not contrary to, nature acting purposively. He opens with a reflection on how “natural philosophy” narrowed into modern “science,” defending philosophy studied for its own sake before returning to the argument itself.

47. Intellect, Imagination, and the Two Acts of Reason: Nature vs. Reason and Will

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist finishes working through Aristotle’s account of the passive and agent intellect, distinguishing the brain-bound “particular reason” or cogitative power from the immaterial act of understanding, and explaining why the mind must still turn to images even once it has grasped a concept. He then takes up chapter six, where Aristotle lays out simple apprehension of what a thing is and judgment of truth and falsity through composition and division, setting these against the further act of reasoning. Along the way he uses examples—numbers, Shakespeare, cases of brain injury—to show how the soul’s partial independence from matter is being argued, and contrasts Aristotle’s account with modern confusions in Sartre and Mill about nature, reason, and will.

47. The Six Marks of the Wise Man and the Universal 'Said of All' vs. Cause of All (Hegel, Plato)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks what kind of causes and principles wisdom studies, taking up Aristotle’s six commonly-held opinions about the wise man—knowing all things universally, knowing difficult things, having greater certitude, being able to teach causes, being desirable for its own sake, and being architectonic. Reading Aristotle alongside Aquinas’s commentary, he shows the first three marks pointing toward wisdom as knowledge of the most universal, the “said of all,” and the last three toward wisdom as knowledge of first causes, the “cause of all.” He uses this distinction to expose confusions in Hegel and Plato, and draws on Aristotle’s Physics and Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy to illustrate how hard it is to rise from sensible, material knowledge to genuinely universal understanding.

48. Who Is Sylvia? Shakespeare, the Wisdom of Reason, and the Fallacy of Figure of Speech (Seeing Is Not Kicking)

Thu, 04 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works closely through “An Excellent Play,” Shakespeare’s “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” drawing out the song to Sylvia, the talk of angelic “principalities,” and the closing line “one feast, one house, one mutual happiness” as a figure for heaven, with a glance at “The Comedy of Errors.” He then takes up Aristotle’s fallacy of figura dictionis—why grammar can mislead us into treating “understanding” as an activity like “kicking”—moving through the categories of place, quality, and relation, and into Aquinas’s commentary on the De Anima and De Veritate on why understanding is immaterial and knower differs from agent.

48. Aquinas on Command: Command and Its Act as One, and Commanding the Will, Reason and the Passions (ST I-II Q.17 a.4–7)

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist reads four articles of Aquinas’s treatise on human acts, following the question of how command relates to what it commands. He asks whether the act commanded is simply the same as the act of commanding, resolving it through the “one simply, many secundum quid” distinction, then turns to whether the will, reason itself, and the passions of the sensitive appetite can fall under reason’s command. Reason’s rule over the passions is compared to political rather than despotic rule—they obey, but can resist. Along the way he draws on Augustine, Aristotle, and Gregory/Nemesius, with asides on anger and music’s effect on the passions.

48. Aquinas on Christ (ST III, q.17 a.1–q.18 a.1): One Being and Two Wills

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist continues his reading of Aquinas on Christ, taking up the replies to objections in q.17, a.1–2, where the question is why Christ, having two natures, cannot simply be called “two,” and why there is only one esse in him—an analogy to how soul and body make one existing thing. He then opens q.18, a.1, tracing the heresies (Apollinarian, monophysite, Nestorian, Monothelite) that each denied Christ a full human will, and explaining how the Church, at Constantinople III, affirmed two wills united in one person without erasing his human freedom.

48. Aquinas on the Names of God, Part 2: Proper and Metaphorical Names, Figures of Speech in Scripture, and the Dangers of Imagination (Q.13, Aa.2–3)

Thu, 09 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of how creaturely names can signify God, distinguishing a name’s etymology from its meaning. “Good” and “living” name God properly, since their meaning carries no built-in material mode, while “rock” or “stone” remain metaphorical because their sense can’t be pried loose from matter. He surveys the rhetorical figures behind such naming—metaphor, irony, antonomasia, synecdoche, metonymy—drawing on Ambrose, Dionysius, and Thomas’s own scriptural commentaries, then asks why Scripture prefers metaphor. He closes on the imagination: its proper subjection to God, and its history of running “bold” and errant when it isn’t.

48. Metaphysics IX, Readings 1–3: Kinds of Ability, the Megarian Error, and Why Motion Seems Most Real

Sat, 05 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through Aristotle’s account of potency in Book IX of the Metaphysics, separating natural abilities from rational ones and asking how a single rational power can produce contrary effects while a natural one cannot. He then takes up the Megarian position, which collapses ability into actual exercise—so that a builder who isn’t building has no ability to build—and traces the absurd consequences this has for change, sensation, and the arts. He also considers the opposite error, which treats even impossibilities as mere unrealized potencies, and closes by asking why motion, despite being the least actual kind of act, strikes us as the most vivid instance of actuality.

48. Natural Hearing III: Why Motion, Place and Time Come First

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist closes out Book Two of Aristotle’s Physics by reviewing the arguments for nature acting for an end—its regular production of good results, its ordered steps, art’s imitation and completion of nature, the evidence of organic parts, and matter’s existing for the sake of form—and weighs what denying final causality costs ethically, with side glances at Denton, Bertalanffy, and Anaxagoras’s unlimited mind. He then turns to Book Three, unpacking the Greek title “natural hearing” as a call to listen to nature the way a student listens to a teacher, against Kant’s image of the judge interrogating a witness, and argues that motion must be defined first since it belongs to the continuous and unlimited.

48. Understanding the One and the Indivisible: Line, Point, Good and Evil, and Reason vs. Sense

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up a puzzle from Aristotle’s De Anima, Book III: how can the mind grasp something indivisible, like a geometric point, when knowledge normally proceeds by distinguishing parts? He shows that such things are known negatively, and draws out the parallel to Aquinas’s treatment of divine simplicity, where God too is approached through the via negativa. He then moves to Aristotle’s comparison of sense and reason, distinguishing perfect from imperfect acts through the contrast of seeing and walking, and explaining why sensation reaches good and bad only through pleasure and pain while reason grasps them universally. Along the way he brings in Plato’s Meno, the Gospel of John’s use of logos, and Aristotle’s Metaphysics on act and potency.

48. Certitude, the First Causes, and Which Philosophy Is Most Like Wisdom (Logic, Nature, Politics)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through why wisdom—knowledge of the most universal things and of first causes—must also be the most certain and most architectonic of the sciences, drawing on the Posterior Analytics’ comparison of arithmetic and geometry to show how degrees of certitude differ across disciplines. He then runs a dialectical exercise, asking in turn whether logic, natural philosophy, or political philosophy best satisfies each of the six attributes of the wise man from the Metaphysics proemium. The exercise clarifies how “philosophy” gets applied analogically to these other disciplines, and why, despite the resemblances, metaphysics alone truly earns the name wisdom.

49. Figure of Speech in Aquinas: the Trinity as One Principle, Forms Mistaken for Substances, and Why We Err

Thu, 04 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through texts of Aquinas—the Scriptum on the Sentences, Quaestiones de Potentia, and De Trinitate, along with De Virtutibus in Communi—to expose a recurring logical mistake: mistaking discrete or relational terms for continuous or substantial ones. He tests the fallacy against examples like drunkenness and homicide before turning to the Father and Son as “one beginning” of the Holy Spirit, and to how equality and inequality among forms get misread. That same confusion, he argues, makes people imagine forms as hidden quasi-substances, feeding errors like innatism. He closes by drawing on Aristotle’s Metaphysics and De Anima and Augustine’s De Trinitate to locate the mistake within a broader account of reasoning and human versus angelic cognition.

49. Aquinas, Summa I-II Q.17 a.8–9 and Q.18 a.1: What Obeys Reason, and Whether Every Human Action Is Good

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist closes out Summa Theologiae I-II, Question 17, articles 8 and 9, asking whether the vegetative soul’s operations and the body’s members are subject to reason’s command. Nutrition, generation, and the heartbeat resist reason’s control, while sense-rooted movements do not. He then glances back at the prologue to Question 6 to place this discussion within the Prima Secundae’s larger plan of human action, before turning to Question 18 and its opening article on how an act counts as good or bad — according to its being, its object, and whether it meets reason’s due measure. Aristotle, Augustine, and Gregory get pulled in along the way.

49. Christ's Sense Desire (ST III, q.18 a.2): The Emotions, Reason, Mozart and the Arts

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether Christ possessed a sense will—a “will of sensuality”—separate from his rational will, working through the concupiscible and irascible passions and how reason governs or is moved by them. He shows how this Thomistic account of the emotions stands behind Aristotle’s Poetics, Rhetoric, and Nicomachean Ethics, drawing examples from Mozart’s operas and Shakespeare to make the psychology concrete. The class closes on Thomas’s answers to the article’s three objections, including Augustine’s image of the serpent and the question of how Christ’s will remains one despite this distinction.

49. Hallowed Be Thy Name: Why Dionysius Writes About Names, and Why the Divine Names Are Not Synonyms (ST I q.13 a.4)

Thu, 16 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Why do many divine names all point to one simple God without collapsing into synonyms? Berquist traces Aquinas’s answer in Summa Theologiae I, q. 13, a. 4: each name like “good” or “wise” signifies the same reality but under a different ratio, an imperfect conception drawn from a distinct creaturely perfection. He contrasts Dionysius’s approach, organized around names themselves, with Aquinas’s, organized around things, and shows how thoughts and words both serve as starting points for speaking of God. The petition “Hallowed be Thy name” from the Lord’s Prayer frames the discussion, and the class closes with Aquinas’s reply invoking Aristotle’s semantic theory to explain signification without synonymy.

49. The Meanings of 'Necessary' and Metaphysics IX, Reading 4: Rational Ability, Choice, and Mind versus Love as First Mover

Sat, 05 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens by sorting out the several senses of “necessary”—absolute necessity, necessity for being versus for well-being, and the necessity of belief owed to revelation—before turning to Aristotle’s Metaphysics IX. There he draws the key distinction between non-rational powers, fixed to one effect, and rational powers, capable of contraries and requiring desire or will to settle which act occurs. He applies this to the pre-Socratics, asking why Anaxagoras posited Mind and Empedocles posited Love and Hate as the first movers of the cosmos, and closes by pressing the same analysis of will and necessity into a question about the divine generation of the Son.

49. Defining Motion: Descartes, Locke and Aristotle's Act of the Able

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the opening of Book Three of Aristotle’s Physics, asking why place and time are treated only after motion, and setting Aristotle against Descartes and Locke, who held that motion cannot be defined at all. He works through Aristotle’s strategy of defining motion in terms of act and potency, trying out formulas like “the act of what is able to be in the room” and checking each against the demands that a definition be true and not circular. Using walking, the heating of water, and entering a doorway, he narrows motion down to the incomplete act of what is potentially in a further act, closing with a brief comparison to learning as a similar case of a potency being actualized only incompletely.

49. Phantasms and Understanding: Aristotle on Intellect, Mill on Higher Pleasures, and the Five Intellectual Virtues

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through the passage from sensitive to intellectual soul in Aristotle’s psychology, asking how phantasms make understanding possible and how reason judges good and bad apart from mere pleasure and pain. He brings in an Osterwee article on Mill’s utilitarianism to test whether “higher” pleasures—art, music, thought—can be ranked without appeal to something above pleasure itself, man standing between brute and angel. Shakespeare, Plato’s Meno and Symposium, and Kierkegaard supply further cases linking imagination, love, and reasoning. He closes by laying out Aristotle’s five intellectual virtues—understanding, science, wisdom, prudence, art—divided between theoretical and practical reason.

49. Doubting Well Before Understanding Well: Aristotle's Metaphysics, Anaxagoras's Nous, and Heraclitus's Strife

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins a new reading on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, following his commentary through Thomas Aquinas’s exposition after two earlier sessions on the proemium. He takes up Aristotle’s claim that genuine understanding requires first working through the aporiai, the doubts and difficulties a question raises, and argues that doubting well beforehand and resolving that doubt afterward are really one act of discovery seen from two sides. Using Anaxagoras’s fragment on nous (read from “The Royal Fragment”) and Heraclitus’s account of strife as productive of progress, he draws parallels to later figures—Bohr and Einstein in science, Augustine and Aquinas’s disputed questions in theology—showing how apparent contradiction pushes the mind toward a deeper, previously hidden harmony.

50. Shakespeare's Definition of Reason, Words Equivocal by Reason, and the Fallacy of the Accident

Thu, 11 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens by dwelling on Shakespeare’s definition of reason as “the ability for a large discourse, looking before and after,” using its equivocal terms—ability, discourse, before—to ask how such words operate in definitions and axioms, and how this bears on Aristotle’s and Aquinas’s account of wisdom as reason’s highest perfection. He then turns at length to the fallacy of the accident, reading it through Albert the Great’s commentary and Aquinas’s Metaphysics Book XI, and tests it against a series of examples: Socrates and species, cats and dogs, squares, and butter turning hard, showing how necessity can hide an illegitimate slide from accidental to essential predication. He closes with related cases, including David of Dinant’s confusion of God with prime matter and a brief look at Aquinas’s treatment of the instant of justification in the De Veritate.

50. Aquinas, Summa I-II Q.18 a.2–4: Goodness and Badness from the Object, the Circumstances and the End

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up three articles of Aquinas’s question on the goodness and badness of human acts. Article 2 asks whether an act’s goodness comes from its object, article 3 whether it comes from circumstances, and article 4 whether it comes from its end, and he works through the objections, sed contra, and body of each with Thomas’s text open. Examples carry the argument: theft and drunkenness show how the object fixes an act’s species, almsgiving done for vanity and the Robin Hood case show circumstances and end shifting an act’s goodness without changing what kind of act it is. He closes with Thomas’s fourfold reckoning of an act’s goodness—genus, species, circumstances, and end—pausing along the way on the ordering of the divine attributes and of the evangelical counsels.

50. Summa III q.18 a.3–4: The Will as Nature and as Reason, and Free Choice in Christ

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s treatment of Christ’s will in Summa III, q. 18, articles 3 and 4. He unpacks Damascene’s Greek distinction between thelesis, will as bare nature, and boulesis, will as guided by reason, lining it up against the more familiar pairing of intellectus and ratio. From there he turns to whether Christ had liberum arbitrium, free judgment, weighing objections from Damascene and from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics on choice, counsel, and doubt. He grounds the technical argument in homely examples—choosing what to read, animal instinct—and in reflections on providence and the goodness of creation.

50. Carrying Names Over to God: Analogy Between Univocal and Equivocal, and Whether Names Apply First to God or to Creatures (ST I q.13 a.5–6)

Thu, 16 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist reads closely through articles 5 and 6 of question 13, objections and replies included, on whether names said of God and creatures are univocal, equivocal, or analogical. He lays out Aquinas’s two kinds of analogy—attribution and proper proportionality—and the distinction between the order in which we come to know a name, from creatures, and the order in which it truly belongs, first to God as cause. He brings in Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics, Dionysius’s Divine Names, and scriptural texts from Genesis, Ephesians, and Romans to show how a word like “good” is carried over from its creaturely sense to an eminent sense in God.

50. Metaphysics IX, Reading 5: Act Known by Induction and Proportion; Motion vs. Perfect Act

Thu, 10 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s fifth and sixth readings of Metaphysics IX, where Aristotle moves from act as motion to act in its widest sense, including form. He draws out the distinction between imperfect acts—walking, building, learning—which are never at once in progress and complete, and perfect acts—seeing, understanding, loving—which are whole at every instant. Since act is among the first, simplest notions, Berquist explains it cannot be defined but only grasped through induction and proportional analogy across cases. He ties this back to the definition of motion, criticizes Descartes and Locke on that point, and touches on how perfect versus imperfect and immanent versus transitive acts bear on ethics and on the argument for an unmoved mover.

50. Motion, the Continuous, and the Discrete: Why the Continuous Dominates Our Naming

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins with the sea-voyage imagery of Shakespeare’s “Come, bitter conduct” speech, linking it to Aquinas’s idea of wisdom as “sapida scientia” and to the Eucharistic hymn Adoro Te Devote. He then works through the opening of Book Three of Aristotle’s Physics, asking what motion is and how discrete quantity differs from continuous quantity, noting that the logician defines the continuous by form while the natural philosopher defines it by matter. Drawing briefly on the Nicomachean Ethics for context, he traces how this distinction bears on the immateriality of thought and on Aristotle’s ordered senses of “before,” “beginning,” and “in,” showing why language built for continuous things keeps getting borrowed to name discrete and abstract realities.

50. De Anima III.8: The Soul Is in Some Way All Things – the Hand as Tool of Tools, and Locke's General Triangle

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s claim, with Aquinas’s commentary, that the soul is in some way all things—not by material composition, as Empedocles held with his theory of like knowing like, but because sense and intellect receive forms in potency. He develops Aristotle’s comparison of the hand, “tool of tools,” to the intellect as “form of forms,” reading closely from a handout on Physics I. The class ends on the mind’s dependence on phantasms, using Locke’s confused account of the general idea of a triangle to show the difference between imagining one particular figure and understanding, in potency, what belongs to all triangles.

50. Metaphysics Book Three: The Fourteen Questions Around Plato's Position

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Book III of the Metaphysics, the book of aporiai, where Aristotle lays out fourteen questions that must be settled before an inquiry into first causes can proceed. He shows the deliberate order behind these questions—whether principles are universal or particular, whether causes exist apart from matter, whether corruptible and incorruptible things share principles, and whether unity and being are the same as substance—many turning on Plato’s claims about separated universals and mathematical objects. Using examples like letters composing words, a typist, and the sun’s causality, he clarifies the hard notion of a “universal in causing,” distinct from a universal merely predicated of many things.

Other philosophers

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Other philosophers #

248 passages mentioned in passing

All works

Mentioned in passing #

Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy #

Mentioned in 78 classes

Boethius, De Trinitate #

Text: Logic Museum, Latin – English, Kenyon

51. The Fallacy of the Accident Continued: Porphyry's Predicables, De Fallaciis, and What Is First Simply

Thu, 11 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist continues his treatment of the fallacy of accident, comparing how Porphyry orders genus, species, and difference in the Isagoge’s proemium against his fuller treatment later in the same work. He tests the per se/per accidens distinction against familiar cases—Socrates as a species, man as a definition—before turning to the four causes and the related fallacy of simpliciter and secundum quid. Examples range from Aristotle’s Metaphysics IX to present-day cultural commentary. He presses on the care needed to keep essential predication distinct from accidental predication, and warns against the carelessness with which modern philosophy handles that line.

51. Summa I-II Q.18 a.5–6: Good and Bad as Differences of Species; the End as Object of the Will

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Article Five’s question of whether good and evil constitute differences of species in moral acts, showing how an act is specified by its object as referred to reason. He then moves to Article Six, where Aquinas distinguishes the interior act of the will, specified formally by its end, from the exterior act, specified materially by its own object — worked out through the case of the thief who steals in order to commit adultery, and the contrast between the conjugal act and adultery. Along the way he digresses on privation versus positive being and on how reason orders both to sensation and to the higher sciences, reaching for illustrations from King Lear, drinking customs, and ordinary mealtimes.

51. Summa III q.18 a.5–6: 'Not My Will but Yours' – Christ's Human Will and the Divine Will, With No Conflict Between Them

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up two articles from the Tertia Pars on the structure of Christ’s willing. The first article asks whether Christ’s human will ever willed something other than what the divine will willed; the second asks whether there was any contrariety among Christ’s own several wills—sensuality, natural will, and rational will. Working through objections, the sed contra, and Aquinas’s responses, Berquist shows how these distinctions let Christ’s Gethsemane prayer, “not my will but thine,” express ordered, non-conflicting willing rather than inner struggle. He clarifies the technical vocabulary with analogies drawn from music’s effect on the passions, friendship, and personal anecdote.

51. Summa Theologiae I, Q.13, Article 7: Are "Lord" and "Creator" Said of God in Time or from Eternity?

Thu, 30 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether names that imply relation to creatures—“Lord,” “Creator”—apply to God only beginning in time, or from eternity. Drawing on Aristotle’s account of relation, he distinguishes real relations from relations of reason, and further separates relativa secundum esse from relativa secundum dici, using a column’s “right” side, a father and son, and knowledge of a known object as test cases. This lets Aquinas hold that God is truly called Lord in time without any change in God, since the relation is real only on the creature’s side. Berquist works through the article’s six objections and replies, reaching for analogies from a cat’s size to Bertrand Russell’s set theory along the way.

51. Juliet's Beauty and God's Self-Knowledge; Reading 6 on Proximate Ability; Opening of Reading 7 on the Senses of 'Before'

Thu, 10 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins with a digression: what does it mean to say Romeo sees Juliet’s beauty “before” he loves her, tracked through the four senses of “before” from the Categories, ch. 12 — in time, in being, in definition, and in goodness. He pushes the same distinctions into the question of God’s self-knowledge and self-love, faulting Plato’s Symposium and Republic for never quite saying the Good knows and loves itself, against Aquinas’s account of God’s substance and operations. He then returns to Metaphysics IX, working through Aristotle’s Greek terms for potency and denominative naming — the difference between calling something “wood” and calling it “wooden” — before turning to the coming readings on the order of act and potency.

51. Can Motion Be Defined? Why Descartes and Locke Say No, and Aristotle's Approach to Definition

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through the opening of Physics Book III, where Aristotle names motion, the infinite, place, the void, and time as what the study of nature must take up. Drawing on Thomas Aquinas’s commentary, he shows how Books III and IV are ordered by what follows upon motion: the infinite, bound up with the continuous, intrinsically (Book III); place, the void, and time extrinsically (Book IV), time as an extrinsic measure. He shows Aristotle’s habit of provisionally adopting predecessor opinions—Democritus and Empedocles on the void—before settling the truth later. He previews the “last instant” paradox of change, resolved only in Book VI, and pauses over points and surfaces as limits, with side glances at transubstantiation and modern physics.

51. Imagination vs. Thought: Truth in Statements, Universal vs. Singular, Words and Metaphor, Music, and Loving Reason and Wisdom

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s claim, read through Aquinas’s commentary on De Anima, that imagination deals only in images—never true or false—while thought becomes true or false only in judgment, the “intertwining” (symploke) of two thoughts. He asks why understanding, though it grasps universals, still depends on singular sense images, or phantasms, to do so. Along the way he draws on the handout of Natural Fragments of the first philosophers and material from DHB Volume I to open onto related questions: why metaphor works, what music and poetry are for, and how self-love relates to loving reason and wisdom.

51. Books Two to Four: Truth, Dialectic, Being as Being and the Axioms

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist follows Aristotle’s Metaphysics from the dialectical puzzles of Book III to the science of being as being in Book IV. He traces how the fourteen questions of Book III converge on whether mathematical objects exist separately, using the “through itself/through another” argument against Plato’s separated forms, with Descartes’ reduction of substance to extension as a foil. Turning to Book II, he shows why wisdom’s grasp of first causes makes it the science most concerned with truth, then follows the move into Book IV, where metaphysics as the study of being qua being must defend first axioms like non-contradiction against sophistical attack. Euclid, Shakespeare, and Aristotle’s own Ethics and Physics supply the comparisons.

52. Reason Knowing Itself: The Distinction of Distinction and the Fallacy of 'Simply' and 'Somewhat' (Induction, Rhetoric, Descartes, Hegel, Certainty vs. Dignity of Knowledge)

Thu, 07 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks what it means to say something is known simply versus known only somewhat, and shows how confusing the two senses produces a real fallacy. He traces the distinction through Aristotle—what is more known “to us” against what is more known “by nature,” and the different footing of enthymeme and example in rhetorical argument—and shows Aquinas using the same distinction to think about the Trinity. Descartes’ preference for the merely “distinct,” and the common habit of ranking mathematical certainty above knowledge of the soul, serve as cautionary examples of what happens when the distinction is dropped. Reading from “Foreword to Logic” and “Reasoning and the Four Kinds of Argument,” he treats the session as reason coming to know its own workings.

52. Summa I-II Q.18 a.7–9: Species from the End and from the Object; Indifferent Acts in Species and in the Individual

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes Aquinas’s articles 7 through 9 of Question 18 one at a time, reading the objections, the sed contra, and the determination before turning to the replies. He works out how the end can function both as what gives an act its specific moral difference and as a mere circumstance, and why genus stays singular while differences multiply in a definition—drawing on Porphyry’s Isagoge and Aristotle’s Physics for the logical apparatus. The same per se/per accidens distinction is then applied to ask whether an act can be indifferent by its species and whether an individual act, in the concrete, can likewise escape moral determination. Frequent digressions—literary references, anecdotes about students and clergy—interrupt but always return to the text.

52. Truth Crowned, the Wine of Wisdom, and Whether God Creates by Nature or Will; Christ's Two Operations (ST III q.19 a.1)

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens by pairing a passage from Shakespeare’s Pericles with Aquinas on mercy, justice, and truth, drawing on the Psalms, Aristotle on wisdom, John’s Gospel, and the Disputed Questions on Power to ask whether God creates from natural necessity or from intellect and will. He then turns to Summa Theologiae III, q.19, a.1, where Aquinas asks whether Christ’s divine and human natures act through one operation or two. Working through Dionysius, Ambrose, Pope Leo’s Letter to Flavian, and the Sixth Ecumenical Council’s rejection of monothelitism, Berquist traces Aquinas’s answer: two distinct natural operations, unconfused, with the human nature acting as instrument under the divine.

52. Summa I, q.13, aa.8–10: What the Name 'God' Signifies, Whether It Can Be Shared, and How It Is Said Analogously

Thu, 07 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist returns to Aquinas’s treatment of the divine name “God,” asking whether it signifies the divine nature itself or only God’s operation, whether the name can be communicated to creatures, and how it is predicated of God by nature, of creatures by participation, and of idols merely by opinion. Working closely through the Latin text of articles eight through ten, he draws out scholastic distinctions—between a name’s etymological source and what it actually signifies, and among univocal, equivocal, and analogical predication—illustrating them with examples like “stone,” “philosophy,” and “lion.” The class concludes that “God” is strictly incommunicable but extended analogically through likeness.

52. Metaphysics IX, Readings 7–8: Act Before Ability in Definition, Time and Perfection (The Chicken or the Egg)

Wed, 23 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s argument in Metaphysics IX that act is prior to potency, even though any changing thing seems to be in potency before it acts. Drawing on the Categories’ senses of “before,” the Physics on nature and motion, and Book V’s account of “perfect,” he shows why form outranks matter as substance, why a potency is only known and defined through the act it is for, and why the chicken must in some sense precede the egg. He closes by linking this priority of act to the claim that the first cause must be pure act, setting up the connection to God as taught later in the Summa Theologiae.

52. Act and Ability: Being versus Becoming and Aristotle's Definition of Motion

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Why does Aristotle define motion the way he does, and what work does the qualifying phrase “as such” do in that definition? Berquist moves from the categories—substance, quantity, quality, relation—into act and potency, using clay taking on shapes, someone entering a room, and water heating on a stove to show how motion differs both from actualities a thing already has and from mere static states like standing in a doorway. He digresses into univocal versus analogical predication, illustrated by “parallelogram,” “square,” and “cause,” and into Plato’s treatment of being and becoming, setting up Aristotle’s fuller account of the kinds of change in Physics Book V.

52. De Anima III.9 (Lectio 14): What Moves the Animal? Plato's Division of the Soul, and Why Neither Feeding, Sensing nor the Looking Mind Is the Cause

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the question of what in the soul accounts for locomotion, the animal’s capacity to move itself from place to place. He first sets aside Plato’s division of the soul in the Republic into reason, spirit, and desire, showing why it fails to answer the question. He then follows Aristotle’s argument that nutrition, sensation, and even reason taken by itself cannot be the cause, using the example of stationary sea creatures that sense but never locomote to sharpen the point, before turning to literary illustrations from Shakespeare and Tocqueville.

52. The Great Turnaround, the Order of the Sciences and Preview of Book Nine

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks why Aristotle treats wisdom’s three objects—first causes, being as being with the one and the many, and the axioms—in a different order across Books Four through Fourteen than the order in which the proemium and Book Four first establish them. He argues the reversal follows Aristotle’s habitual movement from what is more known to us toward what is less known to us, and checks this pattern against the Nicomachean Ethics, Euclid’s Elements, and Aristotelian natural philosophy. Turning to Book Nine’s treatment of act and potency, he connects it to Aquinas’s account of divine pure act in the Summa Contra Gentiles and Summa Theologiae. The handout “The Matter and Order of Wisdom” and DHB Volume III, The School of Aristotle, supply the texts under discussion.

53. Act Before Ability, the Best Laws and the Best Life, and Feuerbach's Infinite Mind: 'Simply' vs. 'Somewhat' in Metaphysics, Politics, Ethics and Theology

Thu, 07 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist traces Aristotle’s argument in Book Nine of the Metaphysics that act is unqualifiedly prior to potency, and follows Aquinas to the theological consequence that the first principle of all things must be pure act. He then shows how confusing “simply” with “somewhat” underlies a whole family of errors: materialist accounts of the world’s origin, Descartes’s stretching of mathematical certitude beyond its proper domain, and questions in Aristotle’s Politics and Ethics about the best laws, the best life, and one’s vocation. He closes with Feuerbach’s claim that the infinity of the human mind is itself God, set against Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae account of divine simplicity and infinity.

53. Circumstances and Moral Species; The Will's Goodness and Its Object (Aquinas I-II q.18 a.10–11, q.19 a.1)

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Articles 10 and 11 of Aquinas’s treatment of human acts, asking whether a circumstance can give an act a new moral species and whether every degree of increase does so. Theft carried out in a sacred place serves as the running example: it becomes sacrilege, a distinct species of sin, because the circumstance touches a new aspect of reason’s order, not merely because the act is worse. He contrasts this with simply stealing a larger amount of money, which intensifies the same wrong without changing its kind. The class closes by turning to Question 19, Article 1, on whether the goodness of the will’s interior act depends on its object, with digressions on etymology and Aristotle along the way.

53. Replies on the Theandric Operation, Christ's Human Operations, and Christ's Merit for Himself and for Us (ST III q.19 a.1-4)

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the theandric operation in Christ, asking with Dionysius, Damascene, and Augustine whether the divine and human natures act through one operation or two, and works the analogy of a tool moved by an agent to explain how Christ’s humanity operates under his divinity without being swallowed up by it. He then turns to whether Christ’s human acts were meritorious, both for himself and for others, weighing his simultaneous status as wayfarer and one already possessing the vision of God, and how, as head of the mystical body, his merit reaches the faithful through baptismal incorporation. He closes article four and opens onto question twenty.

53. Summa I, q.13, aa.10–12: Univocal, Equivocal and Analogous Names; 'He Who Is' as God's Most Proper Name; Affirmative Statements About God

Thu, 07 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist closes out the replies in article 10, on how “God” is used differently by believers and pagans, before turning to article 11’s question of why “Qui est”—He Who Is—stands as God’s most proper name, judged by signification, meaning, and universality. He distinguishes predication from signification, and equivocation “by chance” from equivocation “by reason,” which is analogy, using examples from Aristotle, Dionysius, Boethius, and Hilary of Poitiers. Article 12 then asks whether affirmative propositions can be truly formed about God despite his absolute simplicity. A handout page and a passage from the First Philosophers volume supply further illustration.

53. Metaphysics IX, Reading 9: Eternal and Corruptible Things, Necessary and Impossible, Pure Act, and What Is More Knowable to Us

Wed, 23 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist continues Book IX of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, asking how act is prior to potency—first within one and the same subject, then more sharply between different things, such as the incorruptible compared to the corruptible, or the necessary compared to the possible and impossible. He draws on Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Poetics, De Anima, and the Categories to show how beginnings, middles, and ends, and the composition of act and potency in creatures against pure act in God and pure potency in prime matter, are grasped by analogy. He closes on Aristotle’s distinction between what is more knowable simply and what is more knowable to us, bringing in Descartes, Plato’s dialogues, and Einstein on the intelligibility of the universe.

53. Motion as the Act of the Able, and Place: The First Senses of 'In'

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s notoriously compressed definition of motion in Physics III, “the act of what is potential insofar as it is potential,” and tests it against examples like the buildable, the healthy and sick, and bronze becoming a statue to show what the definition captures and what it rules out. He traces the distinction between act and potency across the categories that makes the definition intelligible. He then turns to Physics IV, setting Aristotle’s account of place—the inner surface of a containing body—against the common but mistaken idea that place is simply dimensions, and previews Aquinas’s ordering of the several senses of “in” that his commentary draws out of the text.

53. Practical Reason, Incontinence and Self-Control; Dividing the Soul by Its Root: Emotions, Tragedy and Comedy, Choice and the Image of God

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Why does reason sometimes fail to govern action? Berquist takes up Aristotle’s De Anima Book III to contrast the incontinent man, who knows the right course yet acts against it, with the continent man, who feels the same pull of desire but masters it. He sets this against the larger distinction between speculative and practical reason and the virtues attached to each—understanding, science, wisdom, prudence, art—then maps the concupiscible passions (love, desire, pleasure, hate, pain) and the irascible ones (hope, despair, boldness, fear, anger) onto Aristotle’s theory of motion. He closes by tying intellect and will together as the seat of the image of God, drawing on Shakespeare, Homer, and Mozart’s major and minor keys to illustrate self-control and its collapse.

53. Aristotle's Proemium: Wonder, Liberal Knowledge, and the Most Divine Wisdom

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist continues his commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics proemium, tracing the four marks Aristotle gives to wisdom: it springs from wonder rather than practical need, it is pursued for its own sake rather than another’s, it lies beyond man’s full grasp given his many servitudes, and it is the most divine science, being knowledge both about God and of the sort God himself has. He turns to Plato’s Theaetetus on wonder as philosophy’s origin, and to the pre-Socratics—Democritus, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Pythagoras, Socrates—on humility before divine things, with anecdotes on how leisure makes such pursuit possible.

54. The Good Will Depends on Its Object Alone, on Reason, and on the Eternal Law (Aquinas I-II q.19 a.2–4)

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up three articles of Aquinas’s treatise on human acts: whether the will’s goodness depends solely on its object, whether it depends on reason, and whether it ultimately depends on the eternal law. Working through objections, sed contra, and responsio in each article, he uses examples like accidental harm and prudent foresight to show object, reason, and eternal law as successive measures of a right will. The class closes with a wide-ranging aside on Augustine, Francis of Assisi, and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics on loving versus being loved, framing Christ as the “known and perfect” measure, before flagging next time’s fuller treatment of the eternal law.

54. Summa III, Q. 20: Is Christ Subject to the Father and to Himself? (with the 'crowning' sense of before and conjecture about the Trinity)

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Summa Theologiae III, q. 20, articles 1 and 2: is Christ subject to the Father, and can he be said subject to himself? Reading the objections and replies, which draw on Cyril, Damascene, and Augustine, he lays out Aquinas’s threefold distinction of the ways Christ’s human nature is subject to God. He pauses over Aristotle’s senses of “before” from the handout “The First Definition of Reason,” the definition of law from the Prima Secundae, and a passage on God’s self-understanding from the Disputed Questions on Power, with a brief aside on Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, before turning toward the next question on Christ’s prayer.

54. Summa I, Q.14: The Order of the Question on God's Knowledge, and Article 1: Is There Knowledge in God?

Thu, 14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Summa Theologiae I, q. 14 on divine knowledge, first situating it against the treatment of God’s operations in the Summa Contra Gentiles and distinguishing immanent from transitive operations. He surveys the question’s sixteen articles before settling on Article 1: is there knowledge in God? The answer turns on Aquinas’s account of knowing as the immaterial possession of another thing’s form, drawn out through Summa Contra Gentiles II, ch. 4 and IV, ch. 15. A handout on the four kinds of argument supplies the logical framework for reading the article’s structure.

54. Metaphysics IX, Readings 9–10: Act Is Better Than Ability, the Transcendentals, and the Ability for Contraries

Thu, 01 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist argues that act is more perfect than potency, first comparing act and potency within one thing, then comparing necessary, eternal beings to corruptible ones—drawing a parallel to reason’s rule over the passions and to Plato’s Republic. He connects this to Aquinas’s treatment of the transcendentals—being, thing, one, true, good—and to Metaphysics Book V, showing why goodness is one while potency reaches toward contraries, so that being as such is good and evil is privation, illustrated with health against sickness and knowledge against error. He closes with Aquinas on Romans, comparing Adam as “forma futuri” to Christ: sin and death entering through one man, redemption through another.

54. The Eight Senses of 'In', Equivocation and the Axioms

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist walks through Aristotle’s eight senses of “in,” from whole-in-part and part-in-whole to being in another’s power, and finally to being “in” the good or end one loves — illustrated by Augustine’s line that the soul is more where it loves than where it animates, and by “I left my heart in San Francisco.” He ties these distinctions to other equivocal terms like universal versus class, “before,” and “has,” and shows how failing to distinguish senses of “in” trips up Anaxagoras, Locke, Berkeley, Heidegger, and Weizsäcker. He argues that defending an axiom like “nothing is in itself” requires guarding against equivocation, and closes by noting that the spatial sense of “in” is primary — a point that will matter when the treatment turns to time.

54. De Anima III.10: Desire, Practical Reason, and Looking Before and After

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s De Anima III.10 with Aquinas’s commentary, asking what the two sources of animal motion are and how they finally converge on a single object, the good as desired. He traces the Greek terms—nous, orexis, epithumia, thumos—against Aquinas’s Latin, distinguishing theoretical from practical reason and the concupiscible from the irascible appetite. The key contrast is between sense desire, bound to what is present, and reason, which looks before and after to future consequences. He illustrates this with scenes from Shakespeare’s Henry V, Hamlet, and Henry IV Part One, plus an example from Dickens, showing the pattern at work in ordinary moral choice.

54. Wonder, Curiosity, and the Proemium: Q&A on Providence, Free Will, and the Central Question

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist traces Aristotle’s proem to the Metaphysics, where wonder at chance events, celestial motions, and the incommensurability of the diagonal starts philosophy—and is meant to dissolve once its cause is grasped, unlike the higher, non-privative wonder of admiration owed to God. Drawing on Aquinas’s commentary alongside examples from Shakespeare, Einstein, and Euclid, he separates wonder rooted in ignorance from wonder rooted in excellence, then works through Aristotle’s epilogue recapping the proem’s two aims. The class closes with a discussion ranging over divine providence, chance, free will, and Aristotle’s Categories, chapter 4.

55. Aquinas on the Will and Erring Conscience (ST I-II q.19 aa.5-7): Must We Follow Mistaken Reason, and Does Intention Make the Will Good?

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up three articles of Aquinas’s treatise on the will, pressing the hard case of erring conscience: is a will that agrees with reason it wrongly believes correct thereby good, or bad because the reason itself is false? He works through each article’s objections, sed contra, and corpus, using examples like fornication, a man mistaken about his wife’s identity, and almsgiving done from vainglory to test whether intention of the end suffices for goodness. Digressions touch confession practice, Aristotle’s logic, and Plato’s Protagoras. The session breaks off mid-reply in Article 7, at Pseudo-Dionysius’s principle that evil follows from any single defect while good requires every cause to be entire.

55. Summa III, Q. 21: The Prayer of Christ – Whether He Prayed, Through His Sense Nature, for Himself, and Whether He Was Always Heard

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Christ’s prayer as Aquinas treats it in Summa III, Q. 21, moving article by article: does prayer belong to Christ at all, does it pertain to him according to sensuality rather than reason, did he pray for himself as well as others, and was every one of his prayers heard? He follows Aquinas closely, working through Damascene’s definition of prayer and the objections and replies drawn from Hilary, Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome, Chrysostom, and Dionysius, while pressing key distinctions—reason versus sensuality, absolute will versus mere velleity, motion as imperfect act against operatio as perfect act. Along the way he ties the question to the Our Father, the virtue of religion and devotion, and Aristotle’s psychology.

55. Summa I, Q.14, Article 2: Does God Understand Himself?

Thu, 14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the question of whether God understands Himself, beginning from an objection drawn from the Liber de Causis and Aristotle’s De Anima before laying out Thomas’s response. Because God is pure act with no potentiality, His act of understanding, the one who understands, and the object understood are simply identical—unlike human and angelic knowing, where the possible intellect stands to intelligible objects as prime matter stands to natural forms, so that we know ourselves only indirectly, by first knowing other things. He draws out connections to act and potency in Aristotle’s Metaphysics IX, to the Nicomachean Ethics, and to the Trinity as reflected analogically in the soul’s own self-knowing and self-loving.

55. Metaphysics IX, Reading 10: Evil as Privation, God as Pure Act and the Best Thing, and Why Act Is More Knowable

Thu, 01 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist distinguishes privation from negation, sharpening the Physics account of matter, form, and lack, and ties this to Augustine’s case against the Manichaeans that matter itself is good. From there he draws the theological conclusion: since God is pure act with no passive potency, no evil can be found in him. He closes on Aristotle’s claim that actuality is more knowable than potentiality, using geometric proofs as an example, and explains why the divine—though maximally knowable in itself—remains hardest for the human mind to grasp.

55. Beginning the Study of Time: Puzzles About the Now

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins Reading 15 of Aquinas’s commentary on Book IV of Aristotle’s Physics, taking up Aristotle’s puzzles about time’s existence: past and future do not exist, yet the now that separates them cannot count as a part of time, any more than a point is a part of a line. He follows this into further paradoxes—whether the now stays the same or is always changing—using the geometric problem of a “next” point as an analogy, and setting the discussion alongside Augustine’s reflections on time and matter in the Confessions. He closes with a detour into Aristotle’s Metaphysics distinction between difficulty rooted in the thing known versus in the knower, applying it to natural philosophy, wisdom, and ordinary cases of failing to understand other people.

55. Knowing in Some Way, Choosing the Apparent Good, and the Deliberative Imagination

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through Aristotle’s account of animal motion in De Anima, tracing the mover-moved structure: the good as unmoved mover, appetite as moved mover, the body as instrument. He dwells on the “immediate pleasant thing” that appears simply good, linking this to the sophistical fallacy—drawn from the Sophistical Refutations—of confusing what is so “simply” with what is so “in some way.” He then contrasts animal sensitive imagination with human deliberative imagination, where reason applies universals to particular acts. Examples from the Meno and from contemporary debates like abortion show how this confusion underlies everyday moral error.

55. Poetry, Scripture, and Wonder: Philomuthos vs. Philosopher, and the Historian's View

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks what Aristotle means by calling the philomythos, the lover of myth and wonder, kin to the philosopher, and why the poet—named by antonomasia as “maker”—is neither. Working through Metaphysics Alpha and Lambda alongside the Poetics, he distinguishes the wonder that starts philosophy from the admiration that follows knowledge of excellence, as with God’s self-understanding in Lambda. He tests the distinction against devotional poems, the Adoro Te Devote and St. John of the Cross, asking whether prayer differs from imitation-as-likeness, drawing on Aquinas’s Summa I, q.1 and the Scriptum on the Sentences. He closes on history’s grasp of the singular versus philosophy’s and poetry’s hold on the universal, using anecdotes about a historian colleague.

56. Aquinas on the Will (ST I-II q.19 aa.8-9): How Much Good Intention Adds, and Conforming Our Will to God's

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist moves article by article through Aquinas on the will, first asking whether the will’s goodness increases in proportion to a good intention—distinguishing quantity of good “on the side of the object” from quantity “on the side of the intensity of the act.” He then turns to whether the human will must be conformed to the divine will, arguing that since we cannot know God’s will as He knows it, our conformity has to be understood as imitation rather than strict equality. Working closely through objections, sed contra, and corpus, he draws on Scripture, Aristotle, and Augustine to fill out Aquinas’s reasoning.

56. The Priesthood of Christ, Part 1: Christ as Priest and Victim, and How His Sacrifice Takes Away Sin (Articles 1-3)

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with a short reflection on love and friendship and the Aristotelian contrast between truth in the mind and good in things, using it to distinguish faith from charity. He then turns to Aquinas’s Commentary on John 6, on the multiplication of loaves, before taking up Summa Theologiae III, q. 22, articles 1 through 3: whether Christ is properly a priest, whether he is at once priest and victim, and whether the effect of his priestly sacrifice is the expiation of sin. Hebrews supplies the recurring scriptural anchor, alongside patristic testimony. Along the way he digresses briefly into the Our Father, the Psalms, and present-day moral commentary.

56. Summa I, Q.14, Arts. 3–4: Does God Comprehend Himself, and Is His Understanding His Substance? (with 'simply' versus 'in some way')

Thu, 21 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up two questions about divine knowledge in Summa Theologiae I, Q.14. Article 3 asks whether God comprehends Himself perfectly; since God is pure act, He is at once maximally knowable and maximally knowing, so the comprehension is complete. Article 4 asks whether God’s understanding is His very substance, and Berquist argues for this identity on the model of the earlier proof that in God essence and existence coincide. He leans on Aristotle’s Metaphysics IX and XII for the underlying act/potency framework, and pauses over the distinction between what holds true simply and what holds true only in a qualified sense.

56. Metaphysics IX, Chapter 10: Truth and Falsity in the Mind's Composing and Dividing

Tue, 06 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s discussion of truth and falsity in Metaphysics IX, asking where truth is actually located: not in reality itself but in the mind’s act of composing and dividing what is united or separated in things. He distinguishes contingent truths, which depend on how the mind judges, from necessary ones, and considers the puzzling case of simple, immaterial beings—including God—who are grasped by simple understanding rather than by affirming or denying anything. Along the way he ties this back to Aristotle’s own earlier treatment in Metaphysics VI, which locates truth in the mind and goodness in things, and to Aquinas’s parallel treatment of God’s truth and understanding in the Summa Theologiae.

56. Aristotle's Physics IV: Time Is Not Motion, but Something of Motion

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up two opinions Aristotle rejects — that time is identical with the circular motion of the heavens, or with the celestial sphere itself — before showing why neither survives scrutiny. Using the Rip Van Winkle story and our ordinary sense of fast and slow, he traces how time is tied to the before-and-after found in motion and magnitude, without simply being motion. The class points ahead to Book Six, where distance, motion, and time will be shown to share one continuous structure, and digresses briefly into the definition of things “of another” (like accidents or poetic meter) and the discreteness of thought against the continuity of line and number.

56. The Soul as Gateway, Naming God's Simplicity, and Student Questions

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist finishes Aristotle’s chapters twelve and thirteen on how the soul’s powers are ordered, read with Aquinas’s commentary, and proposes moving next to Aquinas’s treatise on the soul in the Prima Pars. The conversation then opens out past the text itself: how to speak of God’s attributes both concretely and abstractly, as when we call him wise and also call him wisdom, given divine simplicity; how reason grasps before and after and draws distinctions; and whether the will remains fixed after death. Students press him with questions throughout, and the talk drifts at points into other authors and ordinary things like food and bread before returning to these themes.

56. Why Dialectic Comes First: Contradiction, Right Questions and Universal Doubt in Aristotle's Wisdom, Book III

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks why Aristotle insists that wisdom cannot begin its work until it has first worked through dialectic: a systematic airing of contradictory opinions, or aporiai. Following Aristotle’s own four reasons, with help from Aquinas’s commentary, he brings in Heraclitus, a passage from Matthew, Meno’s paradox, and Heisenberg on quantum theory to show what is at stake in genuinely not knowing where to start. He then argues that the doubt raised in Book III is universal, unlike Aristotle’s ordinary piecemeal dialectic elsewhere and unlike Descartes’ willed doubt, because it questions the very starting points of wisdom itself. He closes by beginning to lay out the roughly twenty-three questions—about what wisdom studies, substance, and causes—that will govern the inquiry through Books IV to XIV.

57. Summa I-II Q.19 a.10 and Q.20 a.1: Must our will match God's will, and is goodness first in the will or in the outward act?

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether the human will must conform to the divine will not just in its general aim but in each particular thing willed. He works through the example of a judge willing a thief’s death for justice while the thief’s wife rightly wills his survival, showing that conformity belongs to the common formal reason for willing—the good aimed at—rather than to every material object. The class then turns to q.20 a.1, asking whether an act’s goodness resides primarily in the will’s interior act or in the exterior act itself, distinguishing goodness by genus and circumstance from goodness by ordination to an end. Along the way he draws on the Our Father, Job, Aristotle, and Shakespeare to sharpen the distinctions.

57. The Priesthood of Christ, Part 2: A Priest for Others, a Priest Forever, and the Order of Melchizedek (Articles 4-6)

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist glosses three articles of Aquinas’s question on the priesthood of Christ. He traces Thomas’s distinction between offering and consummating a sacrifice to ask whether Christ’s priesthood profits Christ himself as well as others, then takes up whether that priesthood is eternal, and finally why Scripture calls Christ a priest “according to the order of Melchisedech” rather than the Levitical order. Along the way he weighs prayer against sacrifice as priestly acts and touches lay participation in the Mass, Fatima’s teaching on sacrifice, and stories of Charles Borromeo and Peter Canisius, before returning to Thomas’s case for the eternity and superiority of Christ’s priesthood.

57. Summa I, Q.14, Arts. 5–6: God Knows Other Things in Himself, and Knows Each One Distinctly

Thu, 21 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up two linked questions in Aquinas: does God know creatures at all, and does He know them each in their particularity or only in a general way? He traces the objections and Augustine citations Aquinas marshals, showing that God does not know things by looking outward to them but by knowing His own essence, which contains their likenesses more perfectly than they possess them themselves. Along the way he reaches for comparisons outside the text—the geometric limit of a circle approached by polygons, Berkeley’s idealism, Sartre on freedom—to make the logical shape of Aquinas’s argument about universal versus particular knowledge vivid.

57. Time as the Number of Motion, and the Problem of the Now

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist follows Aristotle’s argument, as Aquinas lays it out in lectio 17, that “before and after” appears first in place, then in magnitude, and finally in motion by a kind of proportional transfer—setting up the definition of time as “the number of motion according to before and after.” He explains this with the numbering/numbered-number distinction and homely cases like counting days or minutes. He then looks ahead to lectio 18’s puzzle about the now—whether it is always the same or always different—comparing it to a point moving along a line, the same in substance but always other in position, and draws on Euclid’s Book V proportion theory to show how time stands to motion as the now stands to the moving thing.

57. De Anima: The Order Among the Soul's Powers, and the Senses of 'Before' (Why Breathing Isn't Better Than Philosophizing)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Reading the final chapters of Book II of De Anima with Aquinas’s commentary, Berquist takes up the order among the soul’s powers: why the nutritive is prior to the sensitive, and the sensitive prior to the intellective, since each higher power presupposes the lower without being reducible to it. He shows why touch, alone inseparable from animal life, counts as the most fundamental sense. Much of the class turns on a single distinction—“prior in being” versus “prior in goodness”—worked out through homely examples: eating and philosophizing, letters and words, plants and animals. The point is to guard against the common mistake of assuming that what comes first in existence must therefore be higher in worth.

57. The Nine Questions on What Wisdom Is About: Causes, Axioms, Material and Immaterial Substances, Accidents

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist continues reading Aristotle’s Metaphysics Book III, the collection of dialectical puzzles that set the agenda for the science of wisdom. He asks whether a single science can treat all four causes, whether it must also defend the axioms of demonstration — non-contradiction chief among them — against sophists and against Heraclitus, and whether wisdom’s subject is material substance, immaterial substance, or both, one or many, and substances alone or also their per se accidents like sameness, likeness, and priority. He brings in Plato’s Republic and Protagoras and Heraclitus’s fragments along the way, pointing ahead to how Metaphysics IV, VI, and VII–IX will settle these puzzles through being qua being and act and potency.

58. Summa I-II Q.20 aa.2-4: The inner will and the outward act, one goodness or two, and what the deed adds

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s treatment of human acts in Summa I-II, q. 20, articles 2 through 4, tracing the scholastic form of objection, sed contra, and resolutio through each question. The issue is whether the goodness or badness of an outward deed depends entirely on the will that commands it, whether the interior act of will and the exterior act performed share one and the same goodness or two distinct ones, and whether the exterior act adds anything beyond what the will already possesses. He works the arguments through familiar analogies—medicine ordered to health, the knife’s cutting power, the relation of form to matter—pausing along the way over related passages in Aristotle and the Fathers.

58. Summa III, Q. 23: Adoption – Does God Adopt Sons, and Is Christ an Adopted Son?

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Question 23 of the Tertia Pars, asking whether God adopts sons, whether this adoption belongs to the whole Trinity or to the Father alone, and whether it is proper to rational creatures. Working through each article’s objections, sed contra, and Thomas’s response, he arrives at article 4’s conclusion: because Christ possesses only one divine person, or hypostasis, he cannot properly be called an adopted son despite having a genuine human nature. Along the way Berquist digresses into appropriation in Trinitarian theology, the meaning of the Our Father, and the Boethian definition of person as it bears on Christology and Mariology.

58. Faith, Hope and Charity in Jude; Is God's Knowledge Discursive? Is It the Cause of Things? (Summa I, q.14, aa.7–8)

Thu, 04 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins with Jude 20–21, asking how the epistle’s ordering of faith, hope, and charity toward eternal life compares to other schemes for presenting sacred doctrine—the Bible’s own order, the Summa’s, and Augustine’s, echoed later in Dei Verbum. He then works through Summa Theologiae I, q.14, a.7, on whether God’s knowledge is discursive, using an example from Euclidean geometry to clarify what discursive reasoning is and why it cannot apply to God, who knows all at once. He starts a.8, on whether God’s knowledge causes things, drawing out how intellect and will together account for God causing what He knows. Along the way he brings in Aristotle, Augustine, Shakespeare, and Homer to sharpen the argument.

58. The Now, the Thing in Motion, and the Causes of Before and After

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the proportion Aristotle draws in the Physics: as the moving thing is to motion, so the now is to time. Through examples—a ball in flight, a car trip, someone waking from sleep—he shows how the now remains one in substance while being “other” in position or account, and how this sameness-with-otherness is what makes time continuous, divisible, and numerable without the now ever being a part or number of time itself. Along the way he digresses into exemplar causation and definitions drawn from Plato’s dialogues and the Nicomachean Ethics. He closes by previewing next week’s question of what it means to be “in time” as opposed to eternal.

58. De Anima's Last Chapter: Why Touch Is Necessary, Then the Summa and Music's Power Over the Soul

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through the final chapter of Book II of Aristotle’s De Anima, rejecting the view that soul is reducible to elements like fire or air and showing why touch, unlike sight or hearing, is necessary for an animal’s existence—excess in tangible qualities kills, while excess in other senses only damages the organ. He draws on Aquinas’s Summa Contra Gentiles and Psalms commentary, De Koninck on touch and certitude, and Hegel’s ranking of the arts to contrast touch’s interiority and sympathy with sight and hearing as the “spiritual” senses bound up with beauty and moral formation through music. He ends by announcing the class’s next text: the Summa Theologiae, Prima Pars, questions 75 through 89.

59. Summa I-II Q20 a.5–6 and Q21 a.1: Whether Consequences Add to an Act's Goodness, Whether One Act Can Be Both Good and Bad, and Rightness and Sin

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through the close of Question 20 and the start of Question 21 in Aquinas’s treatment of human acts. He asks whether a consequence that follows an act but wasn’t intended can add to its goodness or badness, sorting effects into those following per se and those per accidens. He then takes up whether a single act can be good in one respect and bad in another, distinguishing the genus of nature from the genus of morals, before turning to Question 21’s question of whether a good or bad act as such has the character of rectitude or of sin. Along the way he traces the terms ratio, concordia, and rectum, and brings in the Catena Aurea and Aristotle’s Physics and Ethics.

59. Summa III, Q. 24: The Predestination of Christ and Why It Is the Model and Cause of Ours

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s four articles on the predestination of Christ, asking whether Christ can properly be called predestined, whether this applies to him according to his human nature rather than his divine sonship, and whether his predestination serves as both the model and the cause of our own. He reads closely through the objections and responses of each article, drawing on Augustine’s De Praedestinatione Sanctorum and Paul’s Letter to the Romans to sort out how sonship, grace, and human nature relate in Christ. Digressions into Shakespeare, Aristotle’s Poetics, and mid-century political anecdotes punctuate the lecture before he returns to Thomas’s text.

59. God's Knowledge of Things That Are Not and of Bad Things; Knowing Our Own Ignorance (Summa I, q.14, aa.9–10)

Thu, 04 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up two articles of Aquinas on divine knowledge: whether God knows non-beings, things that are not, and whether God knows evil things. He follows the disputation itself—objections, sed contra, respondeo, replies—showing how Aquinas distinguishes the knowledge of vision from simple understanding, and argues that evil is known only indirectly, through the good it deprives. Along the way he draws on Aristotle’s Metaphysics and De Anima, Boethius, Augustine, and Dionysius’s Divine Names, and digresses into Plato’s Meno and Sartre on nothingness and freedom to sharpen the notion of privation and ignorance.

59. Time, Metaphor and Boethius: Measuring Time and the Numbering Soul

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks what motion time actually measures and what it means for a thing to be “in time,” working through Aristotle’s puzzle in the Physics about whether time could exist at all without a soul to number it. He digresses through Pope Leo’s address quoting the Kazakh thinker Abai Kunanbai, then to Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae article on how Scripture uses metaphor, drawing examples from Dickens, Aristotle’s Poetics, and Shakespeare to show how poetic fiction can make events more intelligible than bare fact. He closes by introducing Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy as the source of the classical definition of eternity, setting up a coming discussion of eternity as existence unmeasured by time.

59. Music, the Psalms, and the Mass: Prayer and Praise Set to Music

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with Homer’s sirens and Shakespeare’s sonnets to ask what music does to us: does it appeal to reason, or bypass it, as in military marches and Nazi propaganda? He then turns to Aquinas’s commentary on the Psalms, distinguishing prayer as petition from prayer as praise, and considers why there are a hundred and fifty psalms and how that number echoes in the structure of the Rosary. He maps the Mass’s own sequence—Kyrie, Gloria, Creed, Sanctus, Agnus Dei—onto Mozart’s liturgical settings, and closes with the Martha and Mary Gospel passage, reading vocal praise of God as a foretaste of the beatific vision.

60. Summa I-II Q21 a.1–3: Malum, Peccatum and Culpa, Praise and Blame, and Merit and Demerit Toward the Community

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s account of evil, sin, and fault in Summa Theologiae I-II, Q21, articles 2 and 3. He first clarifies terms with help from a supporting passage in the De Malo: malum is the broadest term, peccatum narrower, and culpa the most particular, since fault requires voluntariness. He distinguishes sin in art from sin in morals to sharpen what makes an act properly culpable. The class closes with article 3’s treatment of merit and demerit, arguing that praise, blame, and retribution belong to a person as a part owed to the community, not simply as an isolated individual.

60. Summa III, Q. 25, Arts. 1–3: One Adoration of Christ, Latria for His Humanity, and Adoring His Image

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question on the adoration due to Christ. Article 1 asks whether one act of adoration is shown to his divinity and humanity together, since it is the person, not the nature, who is adored. Article 2 pushes further: does Christ’s flesh itself receive latria, the worship owed to God alone, or only a lesser honor? Article 3 extends the question to images of Christ, weighing conciliar texts and Damascene against the iconoclast objection, with Berquist distinguishing latria, dulia, and hyperdulia along the way and touching briefly on relics and Marian devotion.

60. Summa I q.14 a.11: Whether God Knows Singulars – Practical Knowledge, Fiction and the Likeness of Matter to God

Thu, 11 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the question of whether God knows singulars, against the Aristotelian background in which understanding grasps universals and sense alone reaches particulars. He follows Aquinas’s answer in Summa I, q.14, a.11: God’s knowledge is not caused by things, as ours is, but is the cause of things, extending to matter as well as form, so it reaches singulars directly through the divine essence without needing abstraction. Along the way he digresses into Empedocles on the elements, the difference between universal and singular in fiction and history, and the discreteness of thought against continuous quantity, before turning to a related passage in q.93.

60. Eternity Defined: Boethius's 'Tota simul et perfecta possessio', the Now of Time, and Future Contingents

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through Boethius’s formula for eternity, showing how each phrase—“whole,” “simultaneous,” “perfect possession”—denies some feature of time itself: before-and-after, beginning and end, the passing now. Drawing on Aristotle’s Categories for the sense of “before/after” and “together,” and on figures like circle and center, he presses Aquinas’s account in the Summa Theologiae of how eternity relates to time and how God knows future contingents. He then digresses at length on Adam and Eve’s sin as a grasping after divine foreknowledge and self-direction beyond human nature, closing with Aristotle’s Ethics and Plato’s Phaedo on why truth must outrank friendship or loyalty in argument.

60. The Soul in the Summa: Introduction to Question 75

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins the treatise on man in Question 75, first locating the study of the soul within the Summa’s order of spiritual creature, bodily creature, and man. He explains Thomas’s threefold Dionysian division of essence, powers, and operation, and asks why theology considers man chiefly through the soul, contrasting this treatment with Aristotle’s De Anima. He previews the seven articles ahead, focusing on two errors Thomas corrects: the Pythagorean view of the soul as a mere accidental “harmony,” and the Platonic view, drawn from the Phaedo, of the soul as a complete separate substance—against which Thomas argues the soul is a subsistent substantial form. He ties this to the Mass, the psalms, and the doctrine of the resurrection and Assumption.

Literature

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Literature #

314 passages mentioned in passing

All works

Mentioned in passing #

Shakespeare, All’S Well That Ends Well #

Text: Folger Shakespeare

Mentioned in 21 classes

Shakespeare, As You Like It #

Text: Folger Shakespeare

61. Summa I-II Q.21 a.4: Merit Before God; Why Thomas Treats Human Acts Before the Emotions; Faith, Hope and Charity and the Senses of 'Before'

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through Article 4 of Question 21, weighing objections—among them the analogy of man as God’s instrument and the case of a citizen acting within a political community—against Aquinas’s answer that merit rests on man’s ordering to God as final end and universal governor. He then steps back to explain the Summa’s pedagogy: why the treatise on human acts precedes the treatise on the passions. Drawing on Aristotle’s four senses of “before” and 1 Corinthians 13, he shows how love and hope first name passions and only later, by analogy, name the theological virtues of charity and hope.

61. Summa III, Q. 25, Arts. 4–6 and Q. 26: The Cross, Mary's Hyperdulia, Relics of the Saints, and Christ the Mediator

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up three linked questions of worship: whether the cross of Christ is owed latria, whether the Blessed Virgin receives the higher dulia called hyperdulia, and whether the relics of the saints deserve veneration. He works each article’s objections, sed contra, and corpus, drawing on Damascene, Augustine, and Jerome, and sharpens the standing distinctions among latria, dulia, and hyperdulia with concrete devotional cases. He then turns to q. 26 on Christ’s mediatorship, asking whether it belongs to him alone and according to his human nature, closing with a glance ahead to q. 27 on Mary.

61. Summa I q.14 a.12: Whether God Knows Infinite Things – Senses of 'In', Potency vs. Act, and Limits in Modern Physics

Thu, 11 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the article asking whether God can know an infinity of things, walking through the objections and Augustine’s authority before reaching Aquinas’s answer: God knows all things through the divine essence, which serves as a likeness of each thing in its particularity, and this differs according to whether the knowing is “of vision” or “of simple intelligence.” He widens the discussion into Aristotle’s Physics, drawing on the commentary’s treatment of the senses of “in” and of limit and infinity from the Metaphysics, and works through matter-form relations and a translation question over logos, ratio, and oratio. He closes by testing potency versus actuality against examples from quantum theory, relativity, and elementary particles.

61. Why the Philosophy of the Continuous Matters: Motion, Time, Zeno and the Limits of Imagination

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

After a long personal digression on friendship, flattery, and honest criticism, Berquist turns to Aristotle’s Physics, Book VI, which he calls the foundation of geometry itself. His question: why can continuous magnitudes—lines, motion, time—never be built up out of indivisible parts, points or instants stacked one after another? He traces the stakes of this problem through Zeno, Parmenides, and Hegel, and into ordinary language, where words like “beginning,” “end,” and “in” already presuppose the continuous. He even draws out its bearing on theology—eternity, the soul’s immateriality—before the class begins reading Book VI’s opening lines together.

61. Is the Soul a Body? Objections, and Why We Picture the Soul as a Body

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with a short account of how the Summa’s article format condenses the fuller medieval disputed question, then turns to the first article of Aquinas’s treatise on the soul: whether the soul is a body. He works through the three objections, which draw on ancient views that the soul must be bodily since it moves the body and knows bodily things, then the sed contra from Augustine, and the corpus’s opening move, grounding the inquiry in Aristotle’s De Anima account of soul as the first principle of life shown through self-motion and knowledge. Along the way he uses examples from Shakespeare, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Plato’s Parmenides, and Locke to show how hard it is to think past imagination when the subject is immaterial.

62. Summa I-II Q.22 aa.1-2: Is There Passion in the Soul? The Meanings of 'Passio' and Why Passion Is More in Desire Than in Knowing

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins the treatise on the passions of the soul in the Prima Secundae, framing questions 22 and following as the key to understanding fortitude, temperance, tragedy and comedy, and rhetorical appeal to emotion. Working through the proemium and opening articles of question 22, he traces the word “passio” through its equivocal senses—bodily suffering, undergoing, being acted upon—showing how it extends by “equivocation by reason” from physical change to sensation and to the soul, drawing on Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics and Augustine’s City of God. He then takes up whether passion is found more in the soul’s appetitive power or its apprehensive power, concluding, with Aquinas, that it belongs more properly to desire.

62. Aquinas on Mary's Sanctification in the Womb (ST III q.27 a.1–2) and Pius IX's Definition of the Immaculate Conception

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist reads Aquinas’s question on Mary’s sanctification in the womb, tracking the arguments in q. 27, a. 1 and a. 2 over whether her sanctification preceded birth and, more precisely, whether it preceded animation—the moment the rational soul is infused. He follows Aquinas’s objections and replies, then turns to Pius IX’s Ineffabilis Deus to show where the later dogma of the Immaculate Conception pushes past what Aquinas himself could affirm. Along the way he pauses on the distinction between peccatum and culpa, and brings in Aquinas’s remarks on Mary’s sinlessness from his commentary on the Hail Mary.

62. Summa I, Q.14, a.13: Does God Know Future Contingents? Eternity, Boethius, and the Composed and Divided Senses

Thu, 18 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Can God know future contingent events without making them necessary? Berquist walks through Aquinas’s article, arguing that God does not know contingents merely as conjectured from their causes but as actually present to Him in the eternal “now,” following Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy definition of eternity. He takes up Thomas’s replies to the objections one by one, including the distinction between necessary causes and contingent effects, and the composition/division fallacy that shows why a foreknown event need not “have to” happen. Drawing on Aristotle’s Categories, Posterior Analytics, and Peri Hermeneias, he stresses how time-bound human reason struggles to picture eternity’s simultaneity, and notes its bearing on later Trinitarian questions.

62. Continuous, Touching and Next; Reason and the Brain; One Substance and Immanent Activity

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with Aristotle’s Physics distinctions among the continuous, the touching, and the next, then applies them to the act of reasoning: joining terms in a definition or syllogism is not a continuous process the way bodily motion is, so thinking cannot simply be identified with brain activity. He turns to Aristotle’s De Anima to work out how reason depends on sense and imagination without being reducible to them, and brings in Boethius’s De Trinitate on how we come to know immaterial things such as God and separated substances. Along the way he flags the fallacy of affirming the consequent and distinguishes the proper objects of intellect and imagination, drawing out what this means for the soul’s existence apart from the body.

62. The Soul as Act of the Body, and Substantial vs. Accidental Form

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the question of what the soul is by reading through the body of Article 1 of Question 75, where Aquinas argues the soul must be the first principle of life rather than a bodily organ such as the heart or eye, which are only secondary sources of vital activity. He follows Aquinas’s analogy to accidental forms like heat and shape to explain how soul stands to body as act to matter, then works through the replies to the first three objections, touching the unmoved mover, cognitive reception versus material composition, and two senses of bodily contact. He closes by distinguishing substantial from accidental form generally, preparing the later claim that the human soul’s operations exceed what body alone can account for.

63. Summa I-II Q.22 a.3 and Q.23 a.1: Why Passion Belongs Chiefly to the Senses, and How Concupiscible and Irascible Emotions Differ (Eleven Emotions and Mozart's Keys)

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Working through Summa Theologiae I-II, questions 22 and 23, Berquist takes up whether passion properly belongs to the sensitive appetite rather than the intellectual, drawing on Dionysius and Damascene, before asking how the passions divide in species between the irascible and concupiscible powers according to their objects. He digresses on equivocal predication and analogical naming of God, criticizing a modern theologian who denies that language about God can be literal. He returns to illustrate the six concupiscible and five irascible passions—love, desire, joy, hope, despair, fear, boldness, anger—through Mozart’s operas and symphonic keys.

63. Mary Free of the Fomes and of Actual Sin, and Her Fullness of Grace (ST III q.27 a.3–5)

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up three articles of Summa Theologiae III, q. 27, asking whether the fomes peccati—the “tinder” of concupiscence left by original sin—was wholly or only partly removed from Mary, whether she committed any actual sin, and whether her grace was full. He moves through each article’s objections, sed contra, corpus, and replies, drawing on Augustine, Damascene, Chrysostom, Basil, Ambrose, and Dionysius alongside Scripture (Canticles 4, Luke 2), with an aside comparing Mary’s death to Eastern tradition. A digression on Raphael, Murillo, Mozart, and Vivaldi illustrates knowing when a work of art should stop, before he returns to Mary’s exercise of the gifts of wisdom and prophecy.

63. Summa I, Q.14, aa.14–15: God's Knowledge of Statements and Why It Never Changes; Does Truth Require We Know Things as They Are?

Thu, 18 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up two Aquinas articles on divine knowledge: does God know enunciable things—truths formed by joining subject and predicate—and is that knowledge variable? Aquinas answers that God grasps every true statement in the single, undivided act of knowing His own essence, not by composing and dividing as we do. His knowledge stays unchanging even as the temporal things He knows change, because knowledge and love, unlike creating, name relations in the knower rather than in the thing known. Berquist digresses into Aristotle on relations and true/false statements, and, against Plato, argues true knowledge need not copy the mode of being of its object—illustrated with an example from Shakespeare.

63. Physics VI: The Continuous Is Not Composed of Indivisibles, and Democritus' Cone

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the opening arguments of Physics VI, asking why a continuous magnitude like a line cannot be composed of indivisible points. Working through Aristotle’s definitions of continuous, touching, and “next,” he shows that points can do none of these to one another without collapsing into a single point, and draws on Aquinas’s commentary and the De Potentia comparison of creaturely to divine goodness as illustration. He then returns to Democritus’s cone—cut parallel to its base, its cross-sections seem both equal and unequal—showing that denying any “indivisible next” between the cuts dissolves the contradiction. A digression on demonstrative versus persuasive “reason” and conditional syllogisms reinforces the lesson’s insistence on precise basic distinctions.

63. Summa I q.75 a.2: Is the Human Soul Subsisting? Why the Intellect Is Not a Body

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether the human soul is something subsisting, walking through the article’s three objections and Aquinas’s reply, which draws on Aristotle’s De Anima and Augustine’s De Trinitate. The core argument: because the intellect can know the natures of all bodies, and understanding occurs without any bodily organ, the intellect’s operation cannot be confined to matter—so its mode of existence must be immaterial, following the principle that operation reveals mode of being. Along the way he digresses into Plato’s Theaetetus and Parmenides, Aristotle’s life and school, and the distinction between continuous and discrete quantity, using these to reinforce the case for the soul’s immateriality before turning, time permitting, toward Article 3.

64. Summa I-II Q.23 a.1–3: Replies to the Objections, How Emotions Are Contrary, and Why Anger Has No Contrary

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 23, articles 1 through 3, where Aquinas asks how the irascible passions—hope, despair, fear, boldness—can be contrary to one another. He shows that contrariety follows one of two patterns: good opposed to evil, or approach opposed to withdrawal from the same object. The hard case is anger, which turns out to have no contrary at all, since it responds to an evil already inflicted rather than one still to be sought or fled. Along the way Berquist reaches for Aesop’s fox and the grapes and Mozart’s piano concertos to make the passions’ beginning-middle-end structure concrete, before returning to what despair and faith reveal about the spiritual life.

64. Summa III, Q27 a.6 & Q28 a.1–2: John the Baptist and Jeremiah Made Holy in the Womb; Mary a Virgin in Conceiving and Giving Birth

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist finishes Summa III, q. 27, a. 6, where Aquinas explains that Jeremiah and John the Baptist were also made holy before birth—not to equal Mary’s sanctification but to prefigure Christ’s passion and baptism. He then turns to q. 28, working through articles 1 and 2 on Mary’s virginity in conceiving and in giving birth, weighing objections drawn from Joseph’s presumed paternity and Matthew’s genealogy. Along the way he brings in Augustine, Jerome, and Ambrose, and points forward to the later doctrine of the Immaculate Conception to situate Aquinas’s argument within the Church’s fuller teaching.

64. Summa I, Q.14 a.16 and Intro to Q.15: Is God's Knowledge Looking (Speculative) or Practical? Plato's Forms and Whether Truth Requires That the Way We Know Be the Way Things Are

Thu, 25 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist finishes Article 16 of Question 14, where Thomas distinguishes speculative from practical knowledge in three ways—by the object known, the mode of knowing, and the end intended—to argue that God’s knowledge of Himself is purely speculative, while His knowledge of creatures is practical insofar as He intends to bring them into being. He then turns to Question 15 on the divine ideas, tracing the term back to Plato’s eidos, or separated Form, and asking whether truth requires that our mode of knowing match the mode of a thing’s being. Aristotle denies this requirement; Augustine, read alongside him, relocates Plato’s Forms into the mind of God rather than a separate world.

64. Motion and Indivisible Points: Aristotle's Physics, the Three Senses of "Before," and a Digression on Mill

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s case in the Physics against the idea that motion is composed of indivisibles. He sorts out three senses of “before” — before in time, before in motion, before in magnitude — and uses these to unravel the paradox of a body having moved across a point without ever moving through it. From there the class widens into a digression: the notion of “instantaneous velocity” in modern physics as a kind of useful fiction, questions of how historical periods get carved up, and Mill’s ranking of higher and lower pleasures, before drifting into unrelated conversation.

64. Replies to Article Two: Hoc Aliquid, and Is the Brain the Organ of Thought?

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s answers to the objections against the soul’s incorporeal, subsisting character in Summa Theologiae I, q. 75, a. 2. He sorts out what Aquinas means by “hoc aliquid,” and how Aristotle’s dialectical remarks in the De Anima are to be read. The longest stretch treats the dependence of thinking on the brain—injury, alcohol—arguing this touches the soul only through its object, the phantasm, not as a bodily organ, with sight and hearing offered as illustrative parallels. He closes with informal remarks before turning to the next article.

65. The Eleven Passions and Moral Good and Bad in the Emotions (ST I-II Q.23 a.4 – Q.24 a.1)

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Why do love and hate, joy and sadness, hope and despair come in contrary pairs, while an act of reason simply is or isn’t, with no opposite? Berquist takes up that question from Summa Theologiae I-II, Q.23, a.4, using it to organize Aquinas’s eleven passions across the concupiscible and irascible powers, then moves into Q.24, a.1 and Aquinas’s inquiry into whether the passions can be called morally good or bad. Along the way he draws on Aristotle’s Ethics, Rhetoric, and Poetics on the education of the passions through music and story, and illustrates the reason-will-appetite relationship with anecdotes about Washington and MacArthur.

65. Summa III, Q28 a.3–4: Mary Ever-Virgin, Christ's 'Brothers', and Mary's Vow of Virginity

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Articles 3 and 4 of the Summa’s question on Mary’s virginity, where Thomas answers objections built on Matthew’s “before they came together,” “until she brought forth her firstborn,” and Paul’s references to Christ’s “brothers.” Leaning on Jerome’s Against Helvidius and Augustine, he shows why these texts do not overturn Mary’s virginity before, during, and after birth. He then asks whether she had vowed virginity before her betrothal, concluding she had entrusted the desire to God beforehand and sealed the vow with Joseph afterward. The class ends with reflections on Joseph’s own holiness and De Koninck’s remark on a “Marian century” giving way to Joseph.

65. Summa I, Q.15 aa.1-3: Ideas in the Divine Mind (Whether There Are Ideas, Whether Many, and Whether of All Things God Knows)

Thu, 25 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Question 15 of the Prima Pars, “On the Ideas,” working article by article through whether ideas are in God at all, whether they are many or one, and whether there is an idea corresponding to everything God knows. He follows Aquinas’s arguments and replies closely, drawing on Augustine’s Eighty-Three Questions and Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Physics, with side references to Dionysius, Plato, and Damascene. Along the way he distinguishes “idea” from “form” and asks how divine simplicity survives the plurality of ideas: not as many forms in God, but as the many ways one essence can be known as imitable. He tests the doctrine against hard cases—matter, genera, and evil as objects of divine knowledge.

65. The Continuous and Its Basic Role: Beginning, End, and the Point Without a Limit

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s Physics Book VI, with Aquinas’s commentary, on the continuous, asking why this single notion is foundational to every branch of philosophy. He distinguishes two definitions Aristotle gives—one logical, that the continuous is what has parts meeting at a common boundary, the other from natural philosophy, that it is what is infinitely divisible—drawing on Euclid, Plato’s Meno, and Melissus’s argument in Physics Book I to show equivocation and proper demonstrative order. He closes by beginning the argument that the continuous cannot be composed of indivisibles.

65. Article Three: Are Animal Souls Subsistent? Sense vs. Intellect, Proportion, and Greek Humility

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Article Three of Aquinas’s treatise on the soul (Summa Theologiae I, q. 75), asking whether the souls of brute animals are subsistent. Against the Platonists, Aquinas distinguishes understanding, which needs no bodily organ, from sensation, which always involves bodily change—so only the human soul subsists apart from the body. Reading from his handout on Aristotle’s Physics I, lectio 13, and from his paper on Plato’s Phaedo, Berquist places Aquinas between Plato’s soul-as-complete-substance and Simmias’s soul-as-harmony, showing how Aristotle’s account of substantial form holds the truth in each. Student questions follow on animals and the afterlife, Greek philosophical humility, and God’s mercy versus justice.

66. Stoics vs. Peripatetics, Passions That Increase Moral Goodness, and the Order of the Passions (ST I-II Q.24 a.2 – Q.25 a.1)

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up four articles on the passions of the soul: whether every passion is morally evil, whether passion lessens the goodness of a moral act, whether passions are good or bad according to their kind, and, opening question 25, how the irascible passions relate to the concupiscible. Throughout he sets the Stoic view of the passions against the Peripatetic, drawing on Augustine, Cicero, and John Damascene as the authorities Aquinas cites, and reaches for examples from comedy, tragedy, and his own experience to show how reason governs feeling without simply suppressing it. The class breaks off partway into question 25, before the ordering of the passions is settled.

66. Aquinas on the Betrothal of the Virgin: Why Christ Was Born of a Betrothed Virgin

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether Christ ought to have been born of a betrothed virgin, and whether Mary and Joseph’s union was a true marriage. He traces Aquinas’s fourfold reasons on Christ’s behalf, threefold reasons on Mary’s behalf, and further reasons on humanity’s behalf, then works through replies to objections touching on hiding the virgin birth from the devil, shielding Mary from suspicion of adultery, and safeguarding how the miracle was to be made known. A student question sends him briefly into the Compendium of Theology, weighing how Mary’s Immaculate Conception coheres with her still bearing bodily defects and suffering, via the notion of the “debitum” owed to fallen nature.

66. Summa I q.16 a.1: Is Truth in the Mind or in Things? (Doctors of the Church, Truth vs. Goodness, the Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth)

Thu, 08 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins with a brief note on Aquinas’s standing among the Doctors of the Church, citing tributes from Popes John XXII, John XXIII, and Leo XIII, before turning to Summa Theologiae I, q. 16. Laying out the prologue’s eight articles, he focuses on article 1: is truth found only in the understanding, or also in things? Weighing objections drawn from Augustine and Aristotle, he follows Thomas’s answer that truth is properly the conformity of intellect to thing, and belongs to things only secondarily, insofar as they correspond to an intellect—above all the divine intellect—as their cause. Courtroom testimony and geometrical examples illustrate the doctrine of truth as adequatio.

66. Points Cannot Compose a Line: Aristotle's Arguments in the First Reading

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist reads Aristotle’s argument in Physics VI that a line cannot be made of points: indivisibles have no edges or limits distinct from themselves, so they cannot be continuous or touch as lines, surfaces, and bodies do. He follows this into the logical axiom that nothing can be its own beginning, end, or limit, connecting it to Metaphysics V’s treatment of before, after, and limit and to the Posterior Analytics on demonstration and per se necessity. Digressions take up the impossibility of a true cause of oneself, the difference between negation and privation as applied to “unlimited,” and Aquinas on divine love and joy—all returning to the claim that a line is infinitely divisible, never a sum of points.

66. Summa I, Q.75 a.4: Is the Soul the Man? Body and Soul, and Truth as the Mean Between Extremes

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Article 4 of Question 75: whether the soul alone is the man, or whether “man” names the composite of soul and body. He works through Thomas’s case against the Platonic reading, using Plato’s Alcibiades and Augustine’s City of God as foils, and shows how the objection turns on genus, species, and difference in defining natural things. He treats the reply’s use of St. Paul’s “inner” and “outer” man, then draws out parallels to Trinitarian and Christological heresies and to Aristotelian ethics, where truth likewise lies between two extremes. He also reads from Aquinas’s commentary on Metaphysics VI and his own handout notes on that text.

67. Aquinas on the Order of the Passions: Love First Among the Concupiscible, Hope First Among the Irascible (ST I-II q.25 a.2-3)

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s treatise on the passions in Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 25, articles 2 and 3: is love first among the concupiscible passions, and is hope first among the irascible? He shows how Thomas answers by separating the order in which the soul intends a good from the order in which it actually attains it, so that love can precede desire even though desire moves toward possession. Along the way he brings in Summa Contra Gentiles IV, ch. 15, and handout material on the “Effects of Love,” and opens with remarks on Thomas as commentator on Aristotle, touching Albert the Great, Averroes, and the account of pure act in Metaphysics IX.

67. The True Marriage of Mary and Joseph, and the Annunciation: Why It Was Announced and Why by Gabriel

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Summa Theologiae III, q. 29, a. 2 and q. 30, aa. 1-2, asking how Mary and Joseph could have a real matrimony without consummation. Drawing on Jerome, Augustine, Ambrose, and Chrysostom, he distinguishes marriage’s “first perfection,” the marital consent and bond, from its “second perfection,” consummation and offspring, to show consent alone suffices for true matrimony. He then opens the Annunciation question, asking why it was fitting for the Incarnation to be announced to Mary in advance and through an angel, citing Bernard, Bede, and Dionysius. Along the way he digresses into canon law on consummation and annulment, betrothal customs, and consecrated chastity.

67. Summa I q.16 a.1–3: Same Knowledge of Opposites, Truth in Judgment, and Truth Convertible with Being

Thu, 08 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks why truth is found primarily in the mind rather than in things, even though goodness works the other way around, residing chiefly in things themselves. He distinguishes the intellect’s “first act,” simple apprehension of what something is, from its “second act,” the judgment made by affirming or denying, arguing with Aristotle’s Metaphysics and De Anima that truth strictly belongs only to this act of composing and dividing. He closes with the convertibility of truth and being, taking up the puzzle of how negations and non-being can still be known as “beings of reason,” illustrating the distinctions with comparisons to love and with everyday examples.

67. Which Definition Comes First? Circularity in Aristotle's Reasoning

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist returns to Physics VI, where Aristotle argues from faster and slower moving bodies that time and distance divide without limit, and to the book’s closing proof that the continuous cannot be built from indivisibles. He treats this as an example of convertible demonstration—arguing from one truth to a related one and back again—comparing it to Euclid’s reciprocal theorems and to how Aquinas orders his arguments for the divine attributes differently in the Summa Theologiae and the Summa Contra Gentiles. He ties this to Aristotle’s proemium on wonder and wisdom in the Metaphysics, then closes with the principle of simplicity in explanation, drawn out through examples from Born, Heisenberg, and Weizsäcker alongside the question of an unmoved first cause.

67. Summa I, Q.75 a.5: Is the Soul Made of Matter and Form? Objections, the Answer, and Form Received Universally

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Article 5 of Question 75: is the soul composed of matter and form? He lays out the objections built on act and potency, participation, and the properties attributed to matter, then follows Aquinas’s twofold answer—first from the general account of soul as form, then from the specific character of intellectual understanding, which receives forms universally rather than as individuated in matter. He shows how the soul can still be composed of essence and existence without having matter, and along the way distinguishes that composition from the substance/existence composition found in angels.

68. The Four Principal Passions, Comedy and Hope, and the Start of the Treatise on Love (ST I-II q.25 a.4; q.26 a.1)

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist closes out the question of whether joy, sadness, hope, and fear are the four principal passions, drawing on Aquinas’s cited authorities—Boethius, Cicero, Nemesius, Jerome, Augustine—before turning to the opening question of the treatise on love: whether love resides in the concupiscible appetite. Along the way he digresses into tragedy and comedy as ways of moving audiences toward opposite passions, pity and fear versus mirth and hope, and notes modern literature’s pull toward melancholy. He also marks the crucial distinction between sensitive love, amor, and rational or intellectual love, dilectio, a distinction the class will pick up again the following week partway through the article.

68. De Malo on Punishment and Sin; Summa III q.30 a.3: Why the Angel Appeared to Mary in Bodily Vision

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins with De Malo, Question 1, Article 5, asking why mortal sin is a graver evil than losing the beatific vision — because sin sets itself directly against God’s own goodness, not merely against a benefit owed to us. He then turns to Summa Theologiae III, q. 30, a. 3, where Aquinas asks why the Annunciation came through a bodily, sensible vision rather than an imaginary or purely intellectual one, weighing objections about the certainty of sense knowledge and Mary’s dignity, and noting her response of wonder rather than fear. Along the way he digresses on Origen, Augustine’s debt to Plato, and how Aquinas’s spare prose compares with the more poetic styles of Bernard of Clairvaux and Shakespeare.

68. Summa I q.16 a.4–5: Is the true before the good? Is God truth? (Simply vs. in some respect; appropriation; 'through itself')

Thu, 22 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up two questions from Aquinas’s treatise on truth: does the good take priority over the true, or the true over the good, and is God truth itself? He reads through the objections and replies of article 4, using the coffee-and-sugar example and the notion of what is “per se notum” to sort out priority “simply” versus “in some respect.” Turning to article 5, he considers how truth is appropriated to the Son within Trinitarian language. Aristotle’s Ethics and Augustine’s On True Religion are drawn in alongside a reading from a handout on the natural fragments of the first philosophers.

68. Student Questions on the Continuous, Kant, Natural Law, and Shakespeare

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up a set of student questions, beginning with Book VI of Aristotle’s Physics on the continuous: what distinguishes continuity from mere contact or succession, and the puzzle of how a magnitude infinitely divisible can still be traversed in motion, since one must always have moved some distance before completing any distance. From there the discussion ranges further afield, touching Kant’s claim that goodwill rather than good is ethics’ first principle, Aristotle’s Topics and Nicomachean Ethics on acts admitting no mean, such as adultery and murder, and questions of abortion and natural inequality between the sexes. He closes with an extended reflection on Shakespeare’s likely Catholic sympathies and the sonnets’ opposition of true birth to revolt from nature.

68. Q.75 a.5 Replies: Proportioned Abilities, Angels as Form and Being, and Pride as the Mother of Error

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the replies to objections in Q.75 a.5, asking why God as pure act need not be matched by some single “pure potency” the way prime matter underlies bodily things. He shows how intellect, will, and the senses each receive divine perfection according to their own proportioned nature, contrasting faith with charity and sight with hearing, and distinguishing angels—form without matter—from the composition of being and essence in material creatures. He digresses at length into Charles De Koninck, the difference between masculine and feminine love as treated by Francis de Sales and Paul VI, and pride as the hidden cause of error in scholarship.

69. Aquinas on Love (ST I-II q.26, aa.2-3): Love as a Passion, and Amor vs. Dilectio

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Article 2 of Question 26 in the Prima Secundae: is love a passion? He glosses Thomas’s Latin closely—passio, virtus, coaptatio, principium—tracing how love names both a motion of the appetite toward good and a kind of fittedness or union with it, backed by Aristotle, Dionysius, and Augustine. Moving into Article 3, he draws out the later distinction among amor, dilectio, caritas, and amicitia, pausing over what “principium,” a beginning or source, really means. Anecdotes about conversion and about rightly versus wrongly ordered love illustrate the stakes of getting the analysis right.

69. Summa III q.30 a.4: The Order of the Annunciation and Wonder as the Beginning of Philosophy; q.31 a.1: Christ's Flesh Taken from Adam

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks whether the Annunciation unfolded in a fitting order—why Gabriel first arouses Mary’s attention, then instructs her, then seeks her consent. He digresses to wonder as the beginning of philosophy, drawing on Aristotle, Plato’s Theaetetus, and Shakespeare’s Tempest, plus counterintuitive examples from Euclid and number theory, to clarify Aristotle’s distinction between a “beginning” and a “cause.” He then turns to q.31 a.1, opening Aquinas’s treatment of Christ’s conception as regards the matter of his body: whether Christ took his flesh from Adam without contracting original sin.

69. Summa I q.16 a.5–6: Privation, opposites and the fallacy of the accident; one truth or many? (Marx on making, teaching, the two Summas)

Thu, 22 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with an objection from the Disputed Questions on Truth: if God causes all truth, does he thereby cause sin? He answers by distinguishing mere non-being from privation, and by exposing the fallacy of the accident lurking in the objection. From there he digresses into Aristotle’s four kinds of opposition from the Categories—relatives, contraries, privation and possession, contradiction—and into analogous predication, using being and health as his examples, as treated in the Metaphysics. He compares how the Summa Theologiae, Summa Contra Gentiles, and Compendium Theologiae order the divine attributes, before finishing with Summa I, q.16, a.6: whether truth is one or many, distinguishing truth as it exists in many created minds from truth as things stand relative to the one divine truth.

69. Ends and Limits, and the Dependence of Philosophy on the Natural

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks what Aristotle means by “end” or “limit” in Metaphysics V—the boundary of a magnitude, the terminus of a motion, a final cause, and a definition—and shows through Aquinas’s commentary how these senses are ordered and analogically related rather than merely ambiguous. He pairs the axiom “nothing is an end of itself” with the earlier Physics axiom “nothing is a beginning of itself” to catch equivocations on “end,” “part,” and “before” that generate common logical fallacies. From there he broadens out to argue that all philosophical reasoning rests on naturally known first principles and natural desire to know, contrasting this with modern philosophy’s rejection of the natural since Descartes.

69. Summa I q.75 a.6: Why the Human Soul Is Incorruptible (Per Se and Per Accidens, Form and Existence, No Contrariety in the Understanding)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s article on whether the human soul is corruptible. He shows why the soul, though it can be corrupted per accidens through the body’s dissolution, cannot be corrupted per se, since it is subsistent and has understanding as an operation of its own, not dependent on any bodily organ. He also explains why a subsisting form cannot be separated from the existence proper to it. Along the way he brings in Aristotle’s De Anima and Physics, Plato’s Phaedo, and Dionysius’s Divine Names, using examples from poetry and acting to show how the mind holds contraries in knowledge without contrariety.

70. Aquinas on Love (ST I-II q.26 a.4, q.27 aa.1-2): Love of Friendship vs. Love of Wanting, and the Good, Beauty and Knowledge as Causes of Love

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through the close of Summa Theologiae I-II, question 26, where Aquinas separates the love of concupiscence—wanting something for oneself—from the love of friendship, wishing well to another for that other’s sake. He then turns to question 27, asking whether the good is the cause of love and whether knowledge is required for it. Drawing on Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Ethics, Augustine, Cicero, and examples from Shakespeare, Austen, Mozart, and Beethoven, he shows how these distinctions bear on friendship and courtship. The class ends mid-argument, distinguishing the kind of perfection knowledge needs to distinguish parts from the kind love needs to grasp a thing as a whole.

70. Summa III q.31 a.2–3: Christ as Son of David and the two genealogies (Matthew vs. Luke, Joseph's two fathers)

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s treatment of Christ’s Davidic and Abrahamic descent, working through objections raised by Mary’s lineage, her kinship with the Levite Elizabeth, and the prophecy against Jeconiah. He then turns to Article 3’s harder problem: Matthew and Luke give different fathers for Joseph, and different lines back through David, so Aquinas must show how both genealogies can be true. Drawing on Augustine, Jerome, and Julius Africanus, he lays out the traditional explanations—legal versus natural descent, levirate marriage—before Berquist digresses into related historical and philosophical asides along the way.

70. Summa Theologiae I, Q.16 aa.7–8: Is Created Truth Eternal? Is Truth Unchangeable? (with Aristotle's convertible terms: being, one, true, good)

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up two questions from Aquinas on truth: whether created truth is eternal (Article Seven) and whether truth is unchangeable (Article Eight), weighing objections drawn from Augustine and Anselm against Thomas’s replies. He digresses into Aristotle’s account of truth and being in the Metaphysics and Peri Hermeneias, explaining the convertibility of being, one, true, and good, and distinguishing privation from mere negation. Examples range from Socrates on the soul’s immortality to Shakespeare’s King Lear, and he opens by reflecting on a verse from Sirach about wine, music, and the love of wisdom. A brief passage from Summa Contra Gentiles IV on the world’s eternity also enters the discussion.

70. Motion and Time Divisible Forever: Aristotle's Argument from Faster and Slower

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s argument, read alongside Aquinas’s commentary, that magnitude, motion, and time cannot be composed of indivisible points but must instead be divisible without end. He works through the reasoning that a body moving toward a place cannot simultaneously have already arrived there, then shows how comparing a faster body with a slower one forces distance and time to divide endlessly in tandem. Along the way he turns to Aristotle’s Metaphysics on activity versus motion and to Euclid’s geometry, weighing ancient against modern accounts of continuity, infinity, and matter.

70. Q.75 a.6 continued: The Natural Desire to Exist Forever, Socrates in the Phaedo, and Replies to the Objections

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Summa Theologiae I, q. 75, a. 6: since nature does nothing in vain, the natural desire of intellectual beings to exist forever must point to something real and attainable, namely the soul’s incorruptibility. He ties this to Aristotle’s claim that all men by nature desire to know, and to the setting of Plato’s Phaedo, before working through the article’s replies—on texts comparing man to beasts, on what it means that the soul is created, and on how the soul’s knowing changes once separated from the body. He draws on Aristotle’s De Anima and Generation of Animals, with digressions on Boswell’s Johnson, Sartre, and St. Gertrude, then turns briefly to article seven.

Mathematics and science

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Mathematics and science #

88 passages mentioned in passing

All works

Mentioned in passing #

Euclid, Elements I #

Mentioned in 55 classes

Euclid, Elements II #

Mentioned in 9 classes

Euclid, Elements III #

Mentioned in 11 classes

Euclid, Elements IV #

Mentioned in 6 classes

Euclid, Elements V #

Mentioned in 5 classes

Euclid, Elements VI #

Mentioned in 5 classes

Euclid, Elements VII #

Mentioned in 11 classes

Euclid, Elements VIII #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Euclid, Elements X #

Mentioned in 1 class

Wisdom (2005) 7

Euclid, Elements I.1 #

Text: Joyce, English (after Heath) · Perseus, Greek, Heiberg

71. Aquinas on the Causes of Love: Likeness and the Other Passions (ST I-II q.27 a.3-4)

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s article asking whether likeness is a cause of love, moving through the objections and replies in Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 27, a. 3, then on to a. 4’s question of whether the other passions—pleasure, desire, hope—can themselves cause love. The pivot is Aquinas’s distinction between likeness “in act,” a shared form grounding friendship-love, and likeness “in potency to act,” grounding concupiscent or wanting-love. That distinction explains why potters compete and the proud clash, yet a coward can still love courage in another. Berquist fills out the technical vocabulary of proportion and connaturality with anecdotes ranging from Bohr and Heisenberg to Mozart and J.C. Bach.

71. Summa III q.31 a.3–4: The symbolism of the genealogy numbers, the women in the genealogy, and why Christ took flesh from a woman

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist continues through Summa III, q. 31, tracing Aquinas’s use of Augustine, Jerome, Ambrose, and Chrysostom to explain why Matthew’s and Luke’s genealogies differ in structure, generation-counts, and the women they include, and what these differences symbolize about Christ’s kingly and priestly roles and his taking away of sin. He then takes up article 4, on whether it was fitting for Christ to be conceived and born of a woman, working through objections about the nobility of the male sex, containment within the womb, and the uncleanness of conception, and Aquinas’s replies defending the fittingness of the Virgin Birth. He draws parallels to Aristotle’s psychology and to Trinitarian reasoning to show how numerical and hierarchical patterns recur across Aquinas’s arguments.

71. Summa Theologiae I, Q.17 aa.1–2: Falsity in Things and in the Senses (fool's gold, likeness and deception, proper, common and accidental sensibles)

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Question 17 of the Prima Pars, asking whether falsity can be found in things themselves and whether the senses are ever false. Reading Aquinas against Augustine’s Soliloquies and On True Religion, and against Aristotle’s Metaphysics, he shows why falsity belongs properly to the understanding rather than to reality, since a thing is only called false relative to a mind it misleads—as with fool’s gold, which deceives judgment without itself being false. Turning to article two, he traces how sense error arises: through accidental sensibles, a poorly disposed organ, or common sensibles known indirectly through proper ones, never through the proper sensible itself. Wine tasting and optical illusions supply the concrete cases throughout.

71. False Imagination, Wonder, and Learning from Nature: Student or Judge

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks how imagination deceives us about things that have no image: the soul, universals, mathematical objects. He draws examples from Homer’s Odyssey, Dante, Plato’s Parmenides, and Boethius’s De Trinitate to show the soul wrongly pictured in sensible terms, then turns to Aristotle’s Physics, using incommensurability, tangent lines, and the bisection of a line to show imagination misleading reason even in geometry, alongside Aristotle’s account of wonder. He closes by weighing natural sign against convention (the smile, the frown), Plato’s Apology on the examined life, and, following Aristotle and Kant, whether reason should stand toward nature and the passions as student or as judge.

71. Q.75 a.7: Are the Soul and the Angel of One Species? Lowest Species, Origen's Error, and Understanding Compared with Reason

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Article 7 of Question 75: are soul and angel of one species? He lays out three objections—drawn from their shared final end, the nobility of “understanding” as a specific difference, and the soul’s ordering to body—before giving Thomas’s answer, that angels are immaterial subsisting forms individuated by species alone, while each human soul is proportioned to its own particular body and depends on sense images to understand. Along the way he digresses through geometric examples like squares and oblongs to explain lowest species versus genus, Aristotle’s division of intellectual virtue, and Origen’s mistaken doctrine of the soul’s pre-existence, closing by answering the three objections and pointing ahead to Question 76 on the soul’s union with the body.

72. The Effects of Love: Union and Mutual Indwelling (ST I-II q.28 a.1-2)

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the question of what love does to the lover, tracking Aquinas through Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 28, articles 1 and 2, on union and mutual indwelling as effects of love. He works the Latin text closely, distinguishing formal from effective union and love of concupiscence from love of friendship, and asking whether it is knowledge or love that properly unites lover and beloved. Along the way he draws on Shakespeare, Augustine, Dionysius, Aristotle, and Mozart to fill out the psychology at stake, and pauses on a Trinitarian parallel—the appropriation of beauty to the Son—as another case of the same careful distinction-making.

72. Summa III q.31 a.5–8: The Matter of Christ's Body – The Virgin's Pure Blood, Christ in Adam and the Fathers, and Why He Was Not Tithed in Abraham

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through four articles of the Tertia Pars on the material origin of Christ’s body. He asks whether Christ’s flesh was formed from the most pure blood of the Virgin, whether that flesh existed in a determinate, individually-signed way in Adam and the patriarchs before him, whether it was thereby infected by original sin as it lay in his ancestors, and whether Christ can be said to have been tithed in Abraham’s loins as Levi was. He reads Aquinas’s objections, sed contra, and corpus closely, drawing on Damascene and Augustine, with asides on ancient biology and etymology, plus a tangent into Aquinas’s John commentary on the post-Resurrection appearances and the 153 fish.

72. Summa I, Q.17, a.3: Whether Falsehood Is in the Understanding; Natural vs. Reasoned-Out Understanding; the Four Kinds of Opposition

Thu, 15 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Can the intellect itself be deceived, or only its judgments? Berquist follows Thomas through Article Three of Question Seventeen, distinguishing the mind’s simple grasp of what a thing is—where error has no purchase—from its act of composing and dividing propositions, where falsehood becomes possible. He sets this against Aristotle’s four kinds of opposition (contradiction, privation, contrariety, relation) to place truth and falsity correctly among them, reaching toward Article Four. Examples range from sense perception and everyday misjudgments to a Trinitarian case, with side excursions into Macbeth’s witches and a handout on Shakespeare and error.

72. Zeno, Parmenides and the Continuous: Why Nothing Continuous Is Indivisible

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s argument in Physics VI that nothing continuous—time, magnitude, or motion—can be composed of indivisible parts, working through Zeno’s paradox of infinite points and Aristotle’s ad hominem reply to it. He tests the claim with the example of a faster and a slower body each crossing a supposedly indivisible stretch, showing the notion collapses. He digresses to Parmenides and Zeno’s denial of change, and to how the principle of non-contradiction resolves apparent contradictions like health and sickness or day and night through an underlying subject, drawing comparisons to wave-particle duality and to Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger.

72. Summa I, Q.76, Art. 1: Is the Understanding Soul the Form of the Body? The Objections, and Words for Beginning, Mode and Happiness

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Article 1 of Question 76, on whether the intellectual soul is united to the body as its form, first sketching all eight articles of the question, including the unicity of the intellect against Averroes and whether the whole soul is present in every bodily part. He lingers over Aquinas’s vocabulary, tracing “principium” and “modus” and comparing Latin, Greek, and English terms for happiness (felicitas, eudaimonia) and understanding (intellectus, nous), reading from the handout “Reasoning and the Four Kinds of Argument.” Along the way he names the errors Aquinas is answering—Averroistic monopsychism and the Platonic or Origenist picture of the soul as an imprisoned angel—before turning to Article 1’s objections themselves.

73. Aquinas on the Effects of Love: Ecstasy, Zeal, and Whether Love Harms the Lover (ST I-II q.28 aa.3-5)

Thu, 03 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist continues through Aquinas’s account of what love does to the one who loves, taking up ecstasy (going outside oneself), zeal, and the question of whether love can injure the lover, in Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 28, articles 3 through 5. He shows how the love of friendship and the love of concupiscence produce different kinds of ecstasy and zeal, drawing on Dionysius, Augustine, and the Song of Songs alongside examples from Shakespeare, Mozart, and Socrates’ Symposium. He closes on love’s bodily effects—melting, fruition, languor, fervor—and on whether love perfects or corrupts depending on the fitness of its object.

73. Summa III q.32 a.1–3: The Holy Spirit and Christ's Conception – Appropriation to the Spirit, 'Conceived de Spiritu Sancto,' and Why the Spirit Is Not Christ's Father

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up three articles of the Tertia Pars on the Holy Spirit’s role in Christ’s conception. He asks whether the Spirit acted as efficient cause, then examines the phrase “conceived of the Holy Spirit,” weighing the Latin prepositions de and ex to pin down exactly what kind of causality is meant. A third question asks why, given this causal role, the Spirit is not called Christ’s father according to the flesh, which turns on the difference between perfect and imperfect sonship. Throughout, he draws on Thomas’s citations of Augustine, Jerome, Chrysostom, and Damascene, and explains the principle of appropriating a common divine work to one Person of the Trinity.

73. Summa I, Q.17, a.4: True and False as Contraries; Q.18 on the Life of God and the Grades of Life

Thu, 15 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the question of whether true and false stand as contraries, drawing on Aristotle’s Peri Hermeneias and Metaphysics IV to sort out negation, privation, and contrariety, and answering objections that invoke Augustine on falsehood and idols and on divine truth. He then moves into q. 18, a. 1 on whether life belongs properly to God, setting the Summa Theologiae’s treatment beside the Summa Contra Gentiles and turning to Aristotle’s De Anima for the grades of life and kinds of soul, before showing why understanding is treated ahead of will and how John’s Gospel appropriates life and truth to the Son.

73. The Now as Indivisible Limit of Past and Future

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist finishes the general account of the continuous and turns to Reading 5 of Book VI of Aristotle’s Physics with Aquinas’s commentary, where Aristotle shows that the “now” is indivisible, that nothing moves within it, and that whatever is moved must itself be divisible. He sets this within Aquinas’s larger picture of natural philosophy’s subject, ens mobile, and its properties, then reaches back to Metaphysics V’s discussion of the senses of “beginning” to explain how the now serves as the shared limit joining past and future. He closes by weighing the strange fact that, strictly, only this indivisible now exists at all.

73. The Remaining Objections and Aristotle's Proof That the Soul Is the Form of the Body

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Summa Theologiae I, q. 76, a. 1, where objectors argue that the soul cannot be a bodily form because understanding is immaterial and universal while bodies are particular and material. He unpacks Aquinas’s answer, grounded in Aristotle’s De Anima, Book II: a thing’s form is that by which it first acts and lives, so the soul is truly the body’s form even though understanding and willing occur without a bodily organ. Sensing, nutrition, and movement, by contrast, belong to the soul-body composite together. Along the way he draws on the Metaphysics and Physics, plus everyday examples, to sharpen terms like intellectus, form, and act and potency, and to reject the Platonic view that the soul alone is the human person.

74. Love as the Cause of All Action, and the Start of Hate: Its Object and Its Cause in Love (ST I-II q.28 a.6; q.29 aa.1-2)

Thu, 03 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with the question whether love is the cause of everything anyone does, working through the article’s objections and replies to show how Aquinas draws Aristotle, Dionysius, and Augustine into a single answer. He then turns to hatred, asking what its proper object is and how it depends on love as its cause, since nothing is hated except as opposed to something already loved. Along the way he reaches for concrete cases — the taste of wine, Shakespeare’s division between comedy and tragedy — to make the distinctions vivid, and pauses over Aristotle’s categories to clarify the order these questions on the passions are meant to follow.

74. Summa III, Q.32 a.4 & Q.33 aa.1–2: Mary's Role in Conceiving Christ, the Body Formed and Given a Soul in an Instant

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with informal remarks connecting Aquinas’s division of the sacraments—confession and extreme unction—to the Hail Mary’s two petitions and to other paired distinctions such as body and soul, reason and imagination, matrimony and holy orders. He then turns to Summa III, Question 32, Article 4, asking whether the Virgin Mary was an active or merely material principle in conceiving Christ, before moving into Question 33’s opening articles on whether Christ’s body was formed and given a rational soul in a single instant. Along the way he brings in Aristotelian natural philosophy—motion, change, and the puzzle of instantaneous transformation—to clarify what is at stake theologically.

74. Aquinas on Life (ST I q.18 a.1–3): Moving Oneself, Life as Being, and the Grades of Life up to God

Thu, 22 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up three articles of the Summa’s question on life. Article 1 asks whether “to live” applies to all natural bodies, using self-motion—plants moving toward nourishment, animals toward sense objects—as the test for what distinguishes living from merely moved things. Article 2 asks whether life names an operation or the very being underlying operations, and Article 3 asks whether life belongs to God. Drawing on Aristotle’s Metaphysics XII, Berquist follows Aquinas’s ascent from plant to animal to rational self-motion, concluding that God, whose understanding is eternally in act, possesses life most perfectly and is, properly speaking, life itself.

74. No Motion or Rest in the Now, the Divisibility of What Moves, and Boredom and Loneliness

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s argument in the Physics, Book VI, that motion and rest cannot occur in an indivisible instant, since rest, properly understood, requires the before-and-after that only time supplies. He follows this into the connected proof, worked through examples of locomotion and alteration, that anything undergoing change must itself be divisible. Along the way he distinguishes negation from privation using terms like “unlimited” and “blind,” touches Xenophanes on divine simplicity, and criticizes the modern habit of equating reality with motion or history, closing with a comparison between Aristotle’s analysis of the instant and puzzles in quantum physics reminiscent of Zeno.

74. Averroes' Mistakes, the Soul Not Wholly Immersed in the Body, and St. Teresa, Mother of Spiritual People

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Averroes’s theory that the intellect is one separate substance touching individual men only through phantasms, and shows why Aquinas rejects it along with any “mover” account that would make body and soul two things loosely joined. Working through Summa Theologiae I, q. 76, a. 1 and q. 12, he argues instead that the intellective soul is truly the substantial form of the body even though understanding and choosing exceed what any bodily organ can do, and traces what this means for the soul’s subsistence and its natural bent back toward the body. He closes by reading ten minutes from the handout “Nature and Kinds of Love,” turning to wisdom that comes through charity rather than study, with St. Teresa of Ávila as the example.

75. Summa I-II q.29 aa.2-4: Love Stronger Than Hate, and Whether a Man Can Hate Himself

Thu, 10 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist closes out Article Two’s treatment of Aristotle’s “before” and “together” from the Categories, then turns to Article Three: is hatred stronger than love? He works through the per se versus per accidens distinction, drawing on Augustine’s De Diversis Quaestionibus and Dionysius’s Divine Names to show how love underlies and outlasts hatred even where hatred seems fiercer in feeling. Moving into Article Four, he opens the harder question of whether a man can hate himself, distinguishing what one is simply from what one is in some respect. Shakespeare’s Richard III and Coriolanus supply the concrete cases against which these distinctions are tested.

75. Summa III, Q.33 aa.3–4 & Q.34 aa.1–2: Flesh Taken On as It Was Conceived, a Miraculous Conception, Christ's Holiness and Free Will from the First Instant

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s account of Christ’s conception in Summa III, q. 33, aa. 3–4 and q. 34, aa. 1–2. He asks whether the flesh assumed by the Word pre-existed or was taken on precisely as conceived, and whether that conception was a natural act or a miraculous one worked by the Holy Spirit. Turning to q. 34, he examines whether the child possessed sanctifying grace, free judgment, and sensation from the first instant, drawing on Aristotle’s distinction in the De Anima and Nicomachean Ethics between perfect and imperfect operations to explain how a conceived infant could already act humanly. He glosses the Latin closely and pauses to connect the argument to Augustine and the Athanasian Creed.

75. Life in God (ST I q.18 a.3–4): Perfect Act, All Things as Life in God, and Moving On to the Divine Will

Thu, 22 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas on God’s life, using Aristotle’s three senses of act—motion, immanent activity, and form—to show how Plato’s self-moving God and Aristotle’s unmoved mover can both be true of God. He then works through whether all things are “life” in God, drawing on the Prologue of John and Paul’s “in Him we live and move and have our being,” and explains through Thomas’s replies why creatures have a higher being in the divine mind than in themselves, and why evil cannot be called life in God. He closes by sketching how the treatise moves next into God’s knowledge, will, love, and providence, organized around the same distinction between immanent operation and activity directed outward.

75. Nature and Reason: Distinction, Equivocal Names, and Why the Beginning Matters

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up a text from Aquinas, read alongside Aristotle on wisdom and causation, to ask what relationship “nature” bears to “reason” or “will.” Rather than a strict logical opposition, he argues it is inclusive: reason and will are natures with something added, as three contains two. He tests the distinction against Shakespeare, contrasting Hamlet’s praise of Horatio with Coriolanus’s rigid soldierly nature, and against Plato’s Meno and Porphyry on equivocal naming. He closes by arguing Sartre gets this backward, treating free will as severed from nature instead of built upon it.

75. Summa I q.76 a.2: Is There One Intellect for All Men? Against Averroes and Plato

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Does every human being think with the same, single intellect, or does each person have his own? Berquist lays out the article’s objections, built from Plato’s separated Forms and Averroes’s claim that one separate intellect serves all mankind, then works through Aquinas’s answer: each soul is proportioned to and united with its own body as substantial form, so a shared intellect for the whole species is impossible. He also takes up why diverse phantasms cannot rescue Averroes’s position, and touches on individuation in material versus immaterial substances and on angelic inequality and love of the common good.

76. Per Se vs. Per Accidens; Hating the Truth, Hating in General (aa.5-6), and Why Hate Follows Love

Thu, 10 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up two articles from Aquinas’s treatise on hatred, q. 29 of the Summa’s Ia-IIae: whether a man can hate himself, and whether truth can be an object of hatred. The governing tool is the distinction between what something is per se and what it is only per accidens, which he shows Plato, Sartre, and Berkeley all blur in their own ways. He explains why hatred follows immediately after love in Aquinas’s order—one science covers opposites—and draws on Aristotle’s account of the good as what all things desire, matter’s desire for form, along with illustrations from the Phaedo, Timon of Athens, and the Iliad, to show how misanthropy and envy stand against friendship.

76. Christ's Merit and Beatific Vision from the First Instant of His Conception; Is Birth Said of the Person or the Nature?

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist reads and glosses St. Thomas’s text article by article: did Christ merit in the very first instant of his conception, and was he from that instant a perfect comprehensor possessing the beatific vision, not merely a wayfarer moving toward it? He draws on Augustine’s letters and Aristotle’s Physics to press the underlying questions about grace, free will, and how the hypostatic union bears on Christ’s soul. Passing then to question 35 on the nativity, the class begins asking whether birth is properly said of a nature or of a person, setting up the distinction that will govern the rest of the treatment.

76. Summa I, Q.19, Arts. 1–2: Light and Life in St. John; Whether There Is Will in God and Whether He Wills Other Things

Thu, 29 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins in St. John, tracing Aquinas’s division of the Gospel and asking why light and life appear coupled in John 8 much as way, truth, and life are elsewhere—a pairing he links to Aristotle on the soul and life in living things. He then moves into Summa Theologiae I, q. 19, working closely through Article 1, whether will exists in God, and Article 2, whether God wills things besides Himself, unpacking Thomas’s arguments and replies to objections against comparisons drawn from Aristotle, Plato, and Augustine. He closes on divine freedom in willing creatures into existence, and what that freedom implies for human gratitude.

76. Physics Book VI: The Division of Motion, the Three Roads, and First and Last Philosophy

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Physics VI, lectio 6, where Aristotle divides motion in two ways: according to time, and according to the parts of the thing moved. He traces how time, motion, the mobile, and the medium of change all divide correspondingly, and argues that the moving thing itself is the deepest basis for this divisibility. Drawing on Aquinas’s commentary, he distinguishes “division” from the broader term “distinction,” illustrating the difference with Trinitarian theology, and explains the threefold sense of “way”—via naturae, via rationis, via disciplinae—that orders the sciences and underlies Aristotle’s idea of first philosophy. He closes by previewing the next readings, which turn to whether motion has a first and how before and after establish order.

76. Replies to the Objections, the Central Question of Philosophy, and Thessalonians 5 and Psalm 99: Rejoice, Pray, Give Thanks

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist finishes the replies to objections in Summa Theologiae I, q. 76, a. 2, pressing the question of how the intellective soul, though individuated to each body, can still know universals shared by many knowers — weighing Aristotle’s account of abstraction against Plato’s. He contrasts one thing known with the many who know it, working out what individuation of soul to body actually requires. He then reads Psalm 99(100) and 1 Thessalonians 5, showing how their pattern of rejoicing, praying, and giving thanks mirrors the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity as Augustine organizes them in the Enchiridion, closing with Augustine and Paul VI on love, praise, and music.

77. Concupiscence I: Is It Only in the Senses, and Is It Its Own Passion? (ST I-II q.30 a.1–2)

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens Question 30 of the Prima Secundae on concupiscence, the desire that follows pleasure and pain among the passions of the soul. He takes up the first article’s question of whether concupiscence exists only in the sensitive appetite, then the second’s question of whether it names a passion distinct from the others in the concupiscible power, citing Aristotle’s Rhetoric, John Damascene’s Orthodox Faith, and scriptural passages from Wisdom, Romans, and the Psalms. Along the way he distinguishes desire, love, and pleasure by species, treating love as conformity to an object and pleasure as rest in a good already possessed, with digressions on etymology and literary illustrations from Shakespeare and Augustine.

77. Christ's Two Births, Mary as True Mother and Mother of God, and Whether Christ Has Two Sonships

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether a temporal birth belongs to Christ alongside his eternal generation, and whether this commits him to two sonships rather than one person with two births. He follows the articles’ objections and replies closely, bringing in John Damascene, Augustine, and Cyril of Alexandria against errors that would split Christ into two subjects. Central to the resolution is Aquinas’s distinction between real relations and relations of reason, which lets one eternal hypostasis be truly called son of a temporal mother. That same distinction grounds the final question: why Mary is rightly named Mother of God, not merely Mother of Christ.

77. Summa I, Q.19, Arts. 3–4: Absolute vs. Suppositional Necessity in God's Will; God's Will as the Cause of Things

Thu, 29 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up two articles from Aquinas’s question on the divine will: does God will all things necessarily, and is His will the cause of things? He draws out the objections and Thomas’s replies, distinguishing absolute necessity from necessity by supposition to show why God wills His own goodness necessarily but other things freely. Along the way he contrasts the necessity proper to divine knowledge with the freedom proper to divine willing, and brings in Aristotle, Averroes, Dionysius, and Augustine to sharpen the text. Digressions on Plato’s and Aristotle’s literary forms and on natural versus voluntary causation serve to clarify Thomas’s argument.

77. Physics Book VI: The First in Change, Contradiction, and Relation in the Trinity

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aristotle’s argument, read through Aquinas’s commentary, that whatever has first changed must already be in the terminus reached, not still caught between start and end. To sharpen the point he distinguishes four kinds of opposition—contradictory, privative, contrary, and relative—using being and non-being, sight and blindness, virtue and vice, and double and half as examples. A digression follows on the Greek preposition “pros” (toward), which Aristotle uses for relation in the Categories and which John’s Gospel uses when it says the Word was “with,” or toward, God, with a further aside on how Luke renders the love commandment. He closes by turning to whether this first moment of having changed is itself indivisible, preparing the ground for the later argument to a first unmoved mover.

77. Summa I q.76 a.3: One Soul or Three? The Objections, Substantial Form, and the Meaning of Per Se

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Does a human being have separate souls for vegetative, sensitive, and intellective life, or one soul doing all three jobs? Berquist lays out the case for plurality drawn from Plato, from Aristotle, and from ecclesiastical authority, then follows Aquinas’s argument that the soul is a single substantial form. To make sense of that argument he digresses into Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, working out what necessity and per se predication mean and how they bear on demonstration. He fixes the abstract points with plain examples—worms, a piece of wooden furniture, a syllogism—to show why one soul, not several cooperating souls, must account for a human being.

78. Concupiscence II: Natural and Acquired Desires, and Whether Desire Is Infinite (ST I-II q.30 a.2 replies, a.3–4)

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist continues through the replies of question 30 before turning to articles 3 and 4, where Aquinas asks whether concupiscence regards only the absent and whether it can be infinite in scope. He separates natural desires, fixed by nature toward determinate goods, from the rational, non-natural desires that reason can extend without limit, drawing on Aristotle’s Ethics, Rhetoric, and Politics and Augustine’s Eighty-Three Questions. Illustrations range from the appreciation of Mozart and Shakespeare to the beatific vision and the desire for wealth, showing how apprehension shapes what appetite can reach. He closes by pointing ahead to the next session’s treatment of pleasure as a related passion.

78. The Nativity of Christ: Born Without Pain, in Bethlehem, at the Fullness of Time (ST III, q.35, a.6–8)

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up three fittingness questions Aquinas poses about the Nativity: whether Christ’s birth spared Mary the pains of labor, whether Bethlehem was the fitting birthplace, and whether the timing of His birth—under Roman peace, in winter darkness—was rightly ordered. Working through each article’s sed contra and respondeo, he draws on Augustine, Jerome, Gregory, Bede, and Chrysostom to show how Davidic prophecy and cosmic symbolism converge on this child and this place. Along the way he digresses into papal asceticism, Shakespeare and Sophocles, and the traditional pairing of the four Gospels with Old Testament prophets.

78. Summa I, Q.19, Articles 5–6: Nothing Causes God's Will, and His Will Is Always Fulfilled (Antecedent vs. Consequent Will)

Thu, 19 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Can anything be assigned as a cause of God’s will, and is his will always accomplished even when creatures resist it? Berquist works through Aquinas’s arguments in Article Five and Article Six, showing why God’s willing is simple and non-discursive rather than reasoned like ours, and why nothing external can determine it. He develops the antecedent-consequent distinction—illustrated by a judge’s will toward a condemned man and Christ’s will in Gethsemane—to explain how a particular effect can seem to thwart God while his will as universal cause remains unfrustrated. Augustine, Aristotle, and Damascene are drawn in along the way, with a digression touching Einstein and quantum debates.

78. Distinction, Order and the Strange Lack of a First in Motion (Physics Readings 7–8)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the question of why a motion has no first instant or first part, whether one looks to its terminus, its beginning, or the time and magnitude it traverses. Working closely through the text, he shows that “having moved” and “moving” each presuppose the other, so neither can claim strict priority — a result he ties to Aristotle’s later argument, developed by Aquinas in the Summa Contra Gentiles, that nothing moves itself. Along the way he distinguishes “order” from mere “distinction.” He closes with a digression into Aquinas’s Sentences commentary and De Potentia, on how before-and-after and genus-and-difference are, and are not, predicated of the Trinity.

78. One Soul in Man: Predication, the Sign from Intense Activity, and Souls Compared to Numbers

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the question whether man has a single soul or separate vegetative, sensitive, and rational souls, and argues for their unity against the view that treats them as distinct substantial forms. He draws on Aquinas’s reasoning from per se versus per accidens predication, from the observed fact that intense activity in one power impedes another, and from the comparison of the soul’s powers to numbers or geometric figures, where the higher grade contains and perfects what the lower has. Throughout, he ranges through examples from logic, Scripture, the saints, Shakespeare and Dryden, and composers like Mozart, Bach, and Handel to make vivid the hierarchical ordering of nutrition, sensation, and understanding in one form.

79. Aquinas on Pleasure, Part 1: Is Pleasure a Passion? (Summa I-II q.31 a.1)

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 31, a. 1, asking whether pleasure (delectatio) is a passio—a genuine motion or emotion of the soul. He works through the article’s objections and Aquinas’s reply, drawing on Damascene, Aristotle’s Physics, De Anima, and Nicomachean Ethics, and Augustine’s City of God. Central to the discussion is the dispute between Plato and Aristotle over whether pleasure is a process of “becoming” or the perfection already attained, and how pleasure, though named from its effect and predicated “through its cause,” still qualifies as a motion of the sensitive appetite. He also traces the word passio and links the argument back to the earlier treatise on love, setting up later questions on pleasure’s causes and moral status.

79. The Manifestation of the Newborn Christ: To Whom, Why Hidden, Shepherds and Magi (ST III, q.36, a.1–4)

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up q. 36 of the Tertia Pars, asking whether the Nativity should have been made known to everyone, to no one, or only to some — and why it fell to shepherds and Magi in particular, representing Jews and Gentiles. He follows Thomas’s arguments and replies to objections article by article, drawing on Augustine, Leo the Great, Chrysostom, Ambrose, and Gregory to explain the ordering of divine wisdom in revelation and the merit of faith. He also treats the final article’s question of why Christ made himself known through others rather than directly, pausing along the way for reflections on faith and the Eucharist.

79. Summa I, Q.19, Articles 7–9: God's Will Does Not Change, Does Not Make Everything Necessary, and Does Not Will Evil

Thu, 19 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up three hard questions about the divine will in Question 19: is it changeable, does it impose necessity on everything willed, and does God will evil? Working through each article’s objections, sed contra, and corpus, he draws out Aquinas’s key distinctions—willing a change is not the same as a change of will, and necessity can be conditional rather than absolute, per se causes differ from per accidens ones. Everyday analogies help show how divine immutability and providence coexist with contingency and free choice. The discussion closes by locating evil’s presence within, rather than against, a well-ordered universe.

79. Moving and Having Moved, Becoming and Contradiction, Eucharist and Idealization in Science

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with Aristotle’s treatment of beauty—order, symmetry, and limit—illustrated through the arrangement of Plato’s dialogues, Shakespeare, Mozart’s Mass, and McNeill’s history of the world, distinguishing strict before-and-after order from mere symmetry. He then returns to Physics VI, working through the argument that whatever has changed was previously changing, and that no first instant of motion exists given the infinite divisibility of time and magnitude. This opens onto the harder problem of change between contradictories, such as becoming a sphere or the Eucharistic change of substance: why there is a first “now” of the new state but no last “now” of the old. Drawing on De Koninck’s article and the mathematical image of polygons approaching a circle, he shows how accidental predication—as in “day becomes night”—resolves what looks like Hegelian contradiction.

79. Replies to the Objections and Soul vs. Spirit in Scripture (1 Thessalonians, the Magnificat, John 4)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the objections and replies bearing on whether the intellective, sensitive, and nutritive souls in man form one substance, weighing arguments from corruptibility versus incorruptibility, genus and species, Aristotle’s embryological order of ensoulment, and how “animal” and “rational” combine to define man. He then turns to Scripture—1 Thessalonians 5:23, the Magnificat, Gethsemane, and Christ’s conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well—to show how “spirit,” “soul,” and “body” track the distinction between the soul’s immaterial and bodily powers without implying two souls. Analogies drawn from geometry, friendship, and ordinary moral judgment help clarify how one soul can be described generically or specifically.

80. Aquinas on Pleasure, Part 2: Is Pleasure in Time, How Joy Differs from Pleasure, and Pleasure in the Intellect (q.31 a.2–4)

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether pleasure is in time, working through the distinction between motion, the “act of the imperfect,” and operation, the “act of the perfect” — a distinction that bears directly on why the beatific vision is timeless even though it is a kind of pleasure. He then moves to article 3, separating gaudium (joy) from delectatio (pleasure) more broadly, and closes with article 4’s question of pleasure’s proper subject, asking whether angels and intellectual creatures share a pleasure of their own, analogous to but distinct from the bodily pleasure common to animals. He draws throughout on Aristotle’s Ethics, Physics, and De Anima, with digressions through Augustine and Plato.

80. The Manifestation of Christ's Birth: Angels, the Star, and the Order of Revelation (ST III, Q.36, aa.5–7)

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up three articles of Question 36 in the Tertia Pars: why the shepherds were told of Christ’s birth by angels while the Magi were led by a star, why shepherds, Magi, and the just—Simeon and Anna—learned of the Nativity in that particular sequence, and whether the star itself was an ordinary heavenly body or something created expressly as a sign. He follows Aquinas’s use of Chrysostom, Augustine, Gregory, and Leo the Great, drawing out the fittingness of each mode of revelation and pausing over questions of symbolism and providence along the way.

80. Summa I, Q.19, Arts. 10-12: God's Free Choice and the Will of the Sign (Command, Counsel, Prohibition, Operation, Permission)

Thu, 26 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether God possesses free judgment (liberum arbitrium), working through the objections, sed contra, and corpus of Article 10 with citations from Jerome, Ambrose, and Augustine. He then turns to Article 11’s account of the “will of the sign,” distinguishing the metaphorical sense in which God’s will is signified from acts that are properly volitions. Examples from Scripture, Shakespeare, and classical philosophy illustrate points about necessity and divine willing. He closes by laying out the fivefold division of the signs of God’s will—operation, permission, precept, prohibition, and counsel—and connecting counsel to the three evangelical counsels and the goods of soul, body, and exterior things.

80. Q&A: Motion and Rest in the Now, More Known to Us, Purgatory and Baptism

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks a puzzle from Aristotle’s Physics: since motion and rest belong properly to time rather than to an indivisible instant, is there any real difference between a moving body and a resting one at the very “now” where both coincide? He works through act and potency in motion, the divisibility of lines and points, and the paradoxes of Zeno and Democritus, leaning on Aquinas’s commentary to explain why motion is the least actual yet most familiar of acts. The class closes with questions on purgatory, baptism, and the beatific vision, drawing on the Summa Contra Gentiles and the testimonies of Catherine of Genoa and Gertrude the Great.

80. ST I q.76 a.4: Is There Another Substantial Form in Man? The Objections (with Digressions on Antonomasia, Synecdoche and Mixture)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens Aquinas’s inquiry into whether the human body requires a substantial form distinct from the rational soul itself. He first digresses on antonomasia, the rhetorical figure of naming by an outstanding trait, drawing examples from Scripture, Shakespeare, and historical speeches, before turning to synecdoche and the nature of mixture in bodies. He then lays out the article’s four objections, which appeal to friendship, number, and the composition of mixed bodies to argue that soul alone cannot account for the body’s own perfection. Against these, he presses toward Aquinas’s thesis that one substantial form, the soul, suffices for both bodily and rational life.

81. Summa I-II q.31 a.5: Are Spiritual Pleasures Greater Than Bodily Pleasures? (Understanding, Curiosity, and the Natural Starting Point)

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Why do bodily pleasures so often feel stronger than the pleasures of understanding? Berquist works through Aquinas’s answer in I-II q. 31 a. 5: intellectual pleasure is greater and more stable in itself, but bodily pleasure seems more vehement because it is familiar, tied to the body, and bound up with relieving pain, points he traces back to Aristotle’s Ethics, Augustine, and Summa Contra Gentiles IV. He also digresses on the “natural starting point” proper to different kinds of inquiry, drawing examples from Aristotle, Plato, and Shakespeare to show how philosophy, poetry, and drama each begin from what is most evident to us before reaching what is most knowable in itself.

81. The Magi's Adoration and Gifts; the Circumcision of Christ and the Name Jesus (ST III, Q.36 a.8; Q.37 aa.1–2)

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist closes out ST III, q. 36, a. 8, working through objections on why the Magi’s homage, gifts, and inquiry at Jerusalem were fitting, drawing on Augustine, Chrysostom, Leo the Great, and Gregory as Aquinas cites them. He then turns to q. 37, articles 1 and 2, opening Aquinas’s treatment of Christ’s circumcision and the imposition of the name Jesus, translating and glossing the Latin sentence by sentence. Along the way he digresses into stories about naming and history—Bonnie Prince Charlie, a papal visit to England—before returning to the text. The session traces Aquinas’s ordered account of the events immediately following Christ’s birth: the Epiphany, the circumcision, and the naming.

81. The Eleven Emotions and Summa I, Q.20, Art. 1: Is There Love in God?

Thu, 26 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through the eleven concupiscible and irascible movements of the soul—love and hate, desire and aversion, joy and sadness, hope and despair, fear and boldness, and anger—tracing their bearing on ethics, rhetoric, music, and literature. He then follows Aquinas in transferring these emotional names analogically to the will, drawing on the Summa Contra Gentiles and the Prima Secundae before turning to a close reading of Summa Theologiae I, q. 20, a. 1. Using the principle that what belongs to a thing “through itself” is prior to what belongs “through another,” he shows why love is the root of every appetitive act, and why love and joy, stripped of their bodily component, can properly be attributed to God.

81. Zeno's Paradoxes, the Socratic Method, and the Four Kinds of Conversation

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Zeno’s four paradoxes against motion in Aristotle’s Physics, Book Six, showing how each tries to defend Parmenides’ claim that change is impossible because it would require being to come from not-being. He explains Aristotle’s resolution: a continuum is divisible without limit only potentially, never actually, which dissolves the contradiction Zeno relies on. He extends the problem to change between contradictories like life and death and to the puzzle of circular motion, drawing on Plato’s Parmenides and Meno and the Socratic method, and uses a proposition from Euclid’s Elements, Book II, to show how a paradoxical-sounding truth can provoke genuine wonder.

81. The One Substantial Form: Being Simply vs. Being in Some Way, and How Higher Forms Contain the Lower

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s article defending the unicity of the substantial form in man, against an objection drawn from the principle that a thing has only one substantial being. Working through Aquinas’s reply, he draws out the logical distinction between being simpliciter and being secundum quid, testing it against ordinary cases like health, geometrical knowledge, and being present in a room. He then returns to the article’s own point: that the higher substantial form, the intellective soul, virtually contains the powers of the lower forms it replaces, using Aristotle’s comparison of forms to numbers to explain how one form can do the work of many.

82. Summa I-II q.31 a.6–8: Pleasures of Touch and Sight, Unnatural Pleasures, and Whether One Pleasure Can Be Contrary to Another

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist reads through three articles of the Summa Theologiae on pleasure, article by article, weighing objections against Aquinas’s resolutions. Article 6 asks whether touch or sight affords the greater pleasure, turning on the distinction between pleasure taken through knowledge and pleasure taken through bodily utility. Article 7 asks whether any pleasure counts as “unnatural,” distinguishing what is natural according to reason from what is merely natural to animals as such. Article 8, on whether one pleasure can be contrary to another, closes by linking Aquinas’s analysis to Aristotle’s Poetics on the pleasure proper to different literary genres, with Berquist drawing in illustrations from Plato’s Phaedo and Shakespeare along the way.

82. The Faith of Peter, the Articles of Faith, and Christ Presented in the Temple (ST III q.36-37)

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens by asking how the Apostles’ Creed divides between Christ’s divinity and humanity, sketching a six-article scheme for the divine attributes before turning to the human articles. He then works through q. 37 of the Tertia Pars on the Presentation and circumcision in the Temple, tracing the objections and Thomas’s replies on why turtledoves or pigeons were offered in place of a lamb and what the birds signify. He also pauses over a textual puzzle in Luke’s Gospel—the plural “their purification”—comparing how the Vulgate and the Catena aurea render the passage concerning Mary.

82. Part 1: God's love for all things, and whether He loves them equally (Q.20, a.2–3)

Thu, 03 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Question 20 of the Prima Pars, reading closely through the objections, sed contra, and body of Articles 2 and 3. The question is whether God loves all things, and whether He loves them all equally. He draws out Thomas’s distinction between the love of concupiscence and the love of friendship, and the key point that God’s love causes goodness in creatures rather than responding to goodness already there, unlike human love. He also explains how God can be said to love some things “more,” through the greater good willed to them, even while the intensity of His will remains one and undivided—drawing on Dionysius, Augustine, Aristotle, and passages from Wisdom and the Psalms.

82. Wisely and Slow: Friar Lawrence, Shakespeare, and Seven Places Where the Wise Man Proceeds Slowly

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins with evidence for Shakespeare’s Catholic sympathies before turning to Friar Lawrence’s counsel to Romeo in Act II, Scene III of Romeo and Juliet: “wisely and slow, they stumble that run fast.” He uses the line to ask what distinguishes the wise man’s deliberate slowness from culpable hesitation or plain dullness, drawing on Aquinas’s account of wisdom as “savory knowledge” and touching Hamlet, Augustine’s De Trinitate, Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Physics, and Plato’s Timaeus. From these he draws out several situations—complex judgments, difficult objects, first principles, ordered inquiry, and reasoning from general to particular—where genuine wisdom refuses to rush.

82. Replies to the Objections, Knowing the Composed Before the Simple, and the Catechism's Definition of Hope

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist walks through objections and replies in Summa Theologiae I, q. 76, a. 4, where Aquinas defines the soul as the “first act of an organic body having life in potency,” drawing on Aristotle’s De Anima and De Generatione et Corruptione to address substantial form, elemental mixture, and how the soul moves the body through its organs. He raises the question of why we know composed things before simple ones, using act/potency and the dialectical tools of difference and likeness. In the second half he turns to Summa Theologiae I, q. 12 and the Catechism’s definition of hope, breaking it into its component parts and relating it to eternal life, the Our Father, the beatitudes, and Aquinas’s treatment of happiness and wonder.

83. Truth, Life and Appropriation in the Trinity; the Meter of the Adoro te; Operation as the Cause of Pleasure (ST I-II q.32 a.1)

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with Christ’s titles—Son of the Living God, Truth, Life, Way—and explains appropriation, the device by which attributes common to the whole Trinity get assigned to one Person, working this out through the hymn Adoro Te Devote, its trochaic meter, and phrases like “Word of Truth.” He then turns to Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 32, a. 1, asking whether operation is the proper cause of delight, drawing on Aristotle’s Ethics, Rhetoric, and Physics to distinguish motion, which is incomplete, from perfect operation or act, the ground of pleasure. Summa Contra Gentiles II, ch. 11 is also read along the way.

83. The Baptism of John: Why John Baptized, Whether It Was from God and Gave Grace (ST III q.38 a.1-4)

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Question 38 of the Tertia Pars, where Aquinas asks whether it was fitting for John to baptize, whether his baptism was divinely instituted, and whether it actually gave grace. He works through the objections, sed contra, and responsio of each article, showing how Aquinas argues John’s rite was preparatory rather than grace-conferring, distinct from circumcision, and draws together scattered authorities—Augustine, Chrysostom, Gregory, Bede, Jerome—into a single account. He also compares this method of harmonizing sources to Aquinas’s procedure elsewhere, and touches on modern parallels like adult baptismal preparation and Dei Verbum.

83. Part 2: Whether God always loves the better more, and the justice of God (Q.20, a.4 – Q.21, a.1)

Thu, 03 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through Article 4 of Aquinas’s question on the love of God, asking whether God always loves the better thing more. He tests the claim against hard cases—Christ versus the human race, angels versus man, Peter versus John, the penitent versus the innocent—before turning to Aquinas’s answer that God’s love causes goodness in things rather than responding to goodness already there. He then opens Question 21 on divine justice and mercy, distinguishing commutative from distributive justice and weighing objections about God’s will, debt, and the difference between essence and act, drawing on the Sentences commentary, the Ethics, Scripture, and Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory along the way.

83. Shakespeare's 'Stumbling on Abuse': Nature, Bad as Privation, and Equivocal Words

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Starting from the Lord’s Prayer and the liturgical Kyrie and Agnus Dei, Berquist turns to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, where Friar Lawrence’s meditation on plants warns that nothing so good but, “strained from that fair use, / Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse.” He uses the line to draw out Aristotle’s and Aquinas’s account of nature and natural ends, and the sense in which “bad” names a privation rather than a positive thing. The class closes with a technical distinction between equivocal and analogous terms — words like “virtue,” “political,” and “bad” that carry several meanings ordered to one primary sense.

83. Summa I, Q.76 A.5: Why the Understanding Soul Is Joined to Such a Body (Touch, Reason and the Hand)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Article 5 of Question 76, where Aquinas defends why the human soul is united to flesh and blood rather than to something purer such as fire or air. He traces the argument’s reliance on touch as the most fundamental sense, requiring a body of “mean” complexion, and on the soul’s many powers demanding diverse organs. Along the way he brings in Aristotle’s De Anima and Physics, Dionysius, and concrete illustrations—Anaxagoras’s remark on the hand, and the heightened sensitivity of touch shown in Christ’s Passion—to explain why reason and the hand together substitute for the fixed instincts and built-in weapons other animals possess.

84. Motion, Hope and Memory, Sadness, and the Actions of Others as Causes of Pleasure (ST I-II q.32 aa.2–5)

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question on pleasure, asking in successive articles whether motion, hope and memory, sadness, and the deeds of other people can each be a cause of pleasure. He reads through the objections, the sed contra, and Aquinas’s own determination for articles 2 through 5, drawing on Aristotle’s Ethics, Rhetoric, and Physics alongside Augustine’s Confessions and City of God. Examples range from Shakespeare to Berquist’s own anecdotes. The class ends on the third article’s account of how love, hate, or admiration toward someone lets that person’s good or evil actions become a cause of our own pleasure or pain.

84. The Creed's Articles on Christ's Humanity; John's Baptism: Why It Continued and Why Its Recipients Were Baptized Again

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Summa Theologiae III, q. 38, working through articles 4 through 6 on John’s baptism. The questions at issue: why did John keep baptizing after Christ himself had been baptized, and why did people who had already received John’s baptism need to be baptized again under Christ’s? He follows Thomas’s use of Chrysostom, Augustine, Jerome, and Bede to draw out the difference between John’s baptism of repentance and Christ’s baptism of grace, likening the shift to how confirmation and matrimony each build on and complete an earlier rite. He also reads from a handout on the causes of love.

84. Summa I, Q.21 (Arts. 2–4): Justice as Truth, God's Mercy, and Mercy as the Root of Justice

Thu, 10 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up three articles of Summa Theologiae I, q. 21, tracing Aquinas’s case that divine justice can be called truth, since justice concerns reason rightly ordering will and action. He then asks whether mercy fits God at all, distinguishing mercy from mere pity and showing how goodness, justice, liberality, and mercy name one divine reality under different aspects. Along the way he digresses on the words felicitas, misericordia, and wretched, and draws parallels from Shakespeare and Greek tragedy and comedy. The class closes by opening article four’s question of how mercy and justice together underlie every work of God, starting with creation.

84. Can a Philosopher Deny God? Humility, Wisdom and Likeness to God

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the question of whether one can genuinely philosophize while denying God, arguing from Aristotle’s Ethics and Metaphysics, Plato’s Theaetetus, the pre-Socratics Heraclitus and Empedocles, and even Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing that real humility and the pursuit of wisdom already presuppose some recognition of the divine. He illustrates the point with the natural ordering of the sexual faculties toward the common good, using it as an analogy for how the mind is ordered toward truth and, ultimately, toward God. He then turns to Aquinas, comparing the arguments for God’s existence in the Summa Contra Gentiles, which offers two distinct arguments from motion, against the Summa Theologiae’s single, more compactly stated argument from motion, noting how the two works differ in developing the premises and divine attributes.

84. Metaphorical Theology and the Metaphor 'Sweet'; Q.76 A.6: No Accidental Dispositions Between Soul and Body (Simply vs. In Some Way)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up a question pitting St. Ephrem’s metaphorical, poetic speech about God against St. Thomas’s supposedly dry dogmatic dissection, and answers it by showing Thomas’s own division of Dionysius’s names of God—proper, metaphorical, and Trinitarian—and his handling of the metaphor “sweet” in the Psalms commentary, so that Thomas himself speaks both properly and poetically. He then works through Article 6 of question 76 on the union of soul and body, asking whether the understanding soul is joined to the body through accidental dispositions, tracking the objections and Thomas’s answer on substantial form, matter, and quantity. Analogies—candy on a road trip, cookie dough, geometric figures—illustrate the simpliciter/secundum quid distinction throughout.

85. Aquinas on the Causes of Pleasure: Doing Good to Others, Likeness, and Wonder (ST I-II q.32, a.6–8)

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up two articles from Aquinas’s treatise on pleasure. Article six asks whether doing good to others is a cause of pleasure, prompting a discussion of liberality against prodigality and the pleasure of victory drawn from Aristotle’s Ethics and Rhetoric. Article eight asks whether wonder causes pleasure, and Berquist distinguishes two kinds of wonder—one from ignorance of a cause, the other from an effect too great to comprehend, as in contemplating God—tracing the theme through Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Poetics and Plato’s Theaetetus. He moves steadily between Aquinas’s Latin text and its objections, sed contra, and replies, illustrating points with examples from sports and literature.

85. The Baptism of Christ: Why He Was Baptized, Why by John, and Why at Thirty

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s treatment of Christ’s baptism in Summa Theologiae III, q. 39, moving through the first three articles in turn. He asks whether it was fitting for Christ, sinless as he was, to undergo baptism at all; why he received John’s baptism specifically rather than some other rite; and why he waited until thirty, the age Aquinas and the tradition call the “perfect age.” Along the way Berquist draws out Aquinas’s use of Ambrose, Chrysostom, Augustine, and Gregory Nazianzen to answer objections, pausing over side matters like Homer’s Odyssey and questions of etymology to sharpen points about humility and fatherhood before turning toward the next article’s problem of Christ’s place among John’s followers.

85. Summa I, Q.21 Art. 4 Replies and Q.22 Art. 1: Mercy in Every Work of God; Providence as God's Foresight

Thu, 10 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through the replies to Article 4, answering objections drawn from the damned, the conversion of Jews and Gentiles, the sufferings of the just, and creation itself, to show that mercy and justice are both present in every act of God even when one is more prominent — an “Anaxagorean” point about naming things from what stands out in them. He then turns to Question 22, Article 1, asking whether providence belongs to God, tracing the term through Cicero, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics Book VI, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, and Damascene, with the etymology of providentia and prudentia and examples from politics and war along the way.

85. The Argument from Motion in the Summa Contra Gentiles: Everything Moved Is Moved by Another

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with Aquinas’s rejection of two extremes on knowing God: that his existence is self-evident, and that it cannot be demonstrated at all, truth lying between them as in the Trinitarian and Christological heresies. He then turns to chapter thirteen of the Summa Contra Gentiles and Aristotle’s argument from motion, drawn from books six and seven of the Physics, that whatever is moved is moved by another. Along the way he distinguishes demonstration quia from demonstration propter quid, cites Romans 1:20 and the First Vatican Council on demonstrating God’s existence, and uses Euclid and the figures of antonomasia and synecdoche to clarify how such arguments work.

85. Article 7 and the objections to Article 8: whether something joins the soul to the body, with a digression on Augustine

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up two questions from Aquinas on the soul-body union: whether some intervening body is needed to join soul to body, and whether the whole soul is present in each part of the body. He draws out the distinction between quantitative parts and essential, matter-form parts to show why no medium like a “subtle spirit-body” or celestial light is required, refuting Platonic images of the soul as pilot of a ship along the way. Aristotle’s hylomorphism grounds the argument, and everyday analogies—a spoken word, a Manhattan, a rubber ball—illustrate how form unifies a whole. The class closes with Augustine’s claim in De Trinitate that the whole soul is in the whole body and in each part.

86. Aquinas on the Effects of Pleasure: Expansion of the Heart, Thirst for More, and How Pleasure Hinders Reason (ST I-II q.33, a.1–3)

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist continues his reading of Aquinas’s treatise on the passions, moving from pleasure’s nature and causes to its effects in q. 33. He takes the articles in order: whether pleasure causes an expansion or dilation of the heart, whether pleasure generates a desire or thirst for itself, and whether pleasure impedes the use of reason. Drawing on Aristotle’s Ethics and Physics, Augustine, Dionysius, and Scripture, he distinguishes spiritual from bodily pleasure and desire from rest, testing the arguments against ordinary cases like food and music.

86. Aquinas on Christ's Baptism (ST III q.39 a.4–5): Why the Jordan, and Why the Heavens Opened

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s treatment of Christ’s baptism in Summa Theologiae III, q. 39, articles four and five, reading the objections, the sed contra, and the responses in turn. He asks why the Jordan was the fitting place for baptism rather than the Red Sea, and why the heavens were opened as Christ came up from the water, tracing Aquinas’s use of Matthew, Mark, Luke, Joshua, and Hebrews alongside Chrysostom, Jerome, and Augustine. Along the way he digresses into humility versus charity as causes of merit, the symbolism of sitting versus standing in confession and in Stephen’s vision, and how baptism, faith, and prayer relate to one another.

86. Sweet and Right: A Psalm Commentary on God's Mercy and Justice, and Whether All Things Fall Under Providence (Summa I, Q.22 a.2)

Thu, 24 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Why does Scripture call mercy “sweet” but reach for words like rectus and veritas to name God’s justice? Berquist works through Aquinas’s commentaries on Psalms 24, 30/31, 35, and 39, along with passages from Tobias, Wisdom, and Ephesians, to draw out a threefold likeness — refreshment, delight, rest — behind the metaphor of sweetness as it applies to mercy, goodness, and beauty. He connects this to the Summa’s own ordering of mercy before justice and the hope and fear each attribute stirs. The class then opens Summa I, q.22, a.2, asking whether all things are subject to divine providence.

86. Shakespeare Introductions and Aquinas's First Way: The Infinite Regress of Moved Movers

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens by praising older Shakespeare scholarship—Hudson, Kittredge—including Kittredge’s note that Antony’s speech runs through Aristotle’s qualities of an orator, before returning to Aquinas on motion. He distinguishes Plato’s broad sense of “motion,” covering any operation such as understanding or willing, from Aristotle’s stricter sense, then walks through the three proofs Aquinas offers against an endless series of moved movers, illustrating the point with a train and a hanging lamp. He closes by extending the same logic analogously to final causality, the ordering of ends and means in Aristotle’s ethics and metaphysics.

86. The body of Article 8: the whole soul in every part, kinds of wholes, and the Holy Spirit as the soul of the Church

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the body of Article 8, where Aquinas asks how the soul can be entirely present both in the whole body and in every part of it—unlike an accidental form, such as an engine’s arrangement or a house’s structure, which cannot survive division. To answer, he lays out Aristotle’s distinctions among quantitative, essential, generic-differential, and universal wholes, adding Aquinas’s own category of the “potential whole,” and shows how each bears differently on the soul’s relation to organs like the head and heart. He resolves objections touching the will, the intellect, and bodily “principality,” then draws the analogy to the Holy Spirit as soul of the Church before turning briefly to Question 77 on the soul’s powers.

87. Natural Beginnings; How Pleasure Perfects Activity (I-II q.33 a.4) and the Case That All Pleasure Is Bad (q.34 a.1)

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks whether pleasure perfects operation, and what it even means for something to be a “natural beginning” for inquiry — a notion he traces through Aristotle’s Ethics and Poetics, Plato’s Timaeus, and Augustine. He works out the distinction between pleasure as a supervenient end riding on an activity and pleasure as an efficient cause driving it, using wine-tasting, music, the difference between tragedy and comedy, and cooking to show how fitting pleasure tracks a fitting operation. Having settled article 4 of question 33, he turns to open question 34, article 1, and the case for holding that all pleasure is bad.

87. Aquinas on Christ's Baptism (ST III q.39 a.6–8): The Dove, Whether It Was Real, and the Father's Voice

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up three articles of Aquinas on the circumstances of Christ’s baptism: whether it was fitting for the Holy Spirit to appear in the form of a dove, why fire rather than a dove marked the Spirit’s descent at Pentecost, and whether the Father’s voice was rightly heard proclaiming the Son. He works through each article’s objections, sed contra, and corpus, drawing on Augustine, Chrysostom, Jerome, Hilary, and Rabanus Maurus, and lingers over the dove’s seven traditional properties as figures of the Spirit’s gifts and over how the Trinity is manifested in the scene. The session closes partway into the next question on the baptism.

87. Chance, Evil and Free Will Under Divine Providence; God Plans Everything Directly but Acts Through Other Causes (Summa I, Q.22 aa.2–3)

Thu, 24 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Does chance, evil, or human freedom show that God’s providence cannot reach every particular thing? Berquist takes up Aquinas’s objections in Summa Theologiae I, q. 22, aa. 2–3, arguing that each rests on confusing universal with particular causality, or God’s knowledge with His mode of executing it through secondary causes. He illustrates the point with chance meetings and the contrast between art and nature, and draws in the Book of Job on faith amid evil, Augustine’s Enchiridion, and Plato’s threefold providence via Gregory of Nyssa to show providence extends to particulars and evils without destroying creaturely freedom.

87. The Second Way: Per Se and Per Accidens, and the Principle That What Is Through Itself Comes First

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s proof for God from efficient causality, reading the fuller version in the Summa Contra Gentiles against its terser counterpart in the Summa Theologiae. He lingers on Aquinas’s claim that “if every mover is moved, either this proposition is true per se or per accidens,” using it to unpack propositio, the per se/per accidens distinction, and necessary versus contingent truth, tracing these terms back to Aristotle’s Prior and Posterior Analytics. He then returns to the argument’s logical structure, following it toward an unmoved first mover, and brings in Plato’s self-subsisting forms to illustrate why what exists “through itself” must be prior to what exists “through another.”

87. Summa I q.77 a.1: Is the Soul's Essence Its Power? Act and Ability, Properties, and Augustine's Hard Sayings

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the first article of Summa I, q. 77: whether the soul’s essence is the same as its powers. He tracks Thomas’s argument that essence, as act, and powers, as ordered to operation, belong to different genera and so cannot be identical, working through the objections drawn from Augustine’s De Trinitate on mind, knowledge, and love. He turns to Porphyry’s logical distinction between accident and property to explain how the powers relate to the soul as a “potential whole,” flowing naturally from its essence. Along the way he draws on Aristotle’s De Anima, Boethius, and Dionysius’s Celestial Hierarchy to place Thomas’s treatment against its sources.

88. Good and Bad Pleasures, Whether All Pleasure Is Good, and the Best Pleasure: Seeing God (I-II q.34 aa.1-3)

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas’s question of whether pleasure is good, working through articles 1 through 3. He rejects the Stoic position that pleasure is simply evil and the Epicurean position that all pleasure is good, drawing Aquinas’s distinction between pleasure as rest of appetite in a good conforming to reason and pleasure taken in what is only apparently good. He separates pleasures bound up with an operation from those tied to generation or motion, following Aristotle against Plato’s account of pleasure as mere motion. He closes with article 3’s question of the best pleasure, naming the vision of God, and along the way digresses into the moral formation of children and temperance in music.

88. Summa III, Q. 40, Art. 1: Why Christ Lived Among Men, Not Alone (with a Side-Discussion on Church Music)

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins Question 40 of the Tertia Pars, on Christ’s “manner of life” during his public ministry. The article at hand asks whether Christ ought to have lived among men or apart in solitude; working through Aquinas’s sed contra and respondeo, Berquist ties the answer to the purposes of the Incarnation itself—teaching truth, freeing men from sin, and giving them confidence to approach God—and compares it to the Dominican motto of handing on to others what one has contemplated. Along the way he digresses at length into symbolic theology, church music (Palestrina, Mozart, Handel), and assorted historical asides, before circling back to the text to explain why Christ nonetheless periodically withdrew from the crowds.

88. Six Senses of Sleep, Tocqueville's Doubt, Providence and Contingency, and Whether Men Are Predestined (John 11–12; Summa I, Q.22 a.4 – Q.23 a.1)

Thu, 31 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist opens with Aquinas’s Commentary on John, distinguishing six senses of “sleep” that bear on the Lazarus narrative before asking why Christ was rejected in Chapter 12, comparing this to the parallel account in Matthew 21–23. He digresses through Aristotle on chance and fortune, Augustine’s numerological reading of the 153 fish in John 21, and Tocqueville’s late reconciliation with the Church as a case of doubt overcome by faith. The class then moves into the Summa Theologiae, asking whether providence imposes necessity on the things it governs (I, Q.22, a.4) and opening the question of predestination (Q.23, a.1).

88. The Self-Moving First Mover, the Eternity of the World, and the Meanings of Spirit

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist traces Aristotle’s argument that any self-moving thing must contain a part that moves without itself being moved, working through Physics Book VIII with side glances at Book VI and the De Generatione et Corruptione. Drawing on Aquinas’s commentary, he follows Aristotle into Metaphysics Book XII to show how this unmoved mover within things points toward a wholly separate, immobile first mover, pure act incapable of receiving anything further. Along the way he takes up the eternity-of-motion premise and act and potency, and turns to gratitude, the Eucharist, and how mortal things imitate divine eternity through reproduction and teaching. He closes with notes on upcoming texts and a digression on “spirit” versus “soul.”

88. Summa I q.77 a.1–2: Differences and Properties, the Definition of Faith, and Why the Soul Has Many Powers

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas on the soul’s powers in Summa I, q. 77. He first shows, against objections about composition and act-potency, that substantial differences are usually grasped only through accidents and clusters of properties—reaching for Aristotle’s definition of tragedy, the definition of a square, and Augustine’s definition of faith as parallel cases. He then turns to the second article’s question: why does the human soul require a diversity of powers, when God is utterly simple and angels more unified? The answer turns on man’s place “on the horizon” between spirit and body, attaining angelic perfection only through multiplicity.

89. Reason Looks Before and After: Pleasure as the Measure of Moral Good, and Whether Pain Is a Passion of the Soul

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist works through Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 34, a. 4, where Aquinas asks whether pleasure is the measure or rule by which we judge moral good and evil, then moves into q. 35 and its first article on whether pain, or sorrow, counts as a passion of the soul at all. He tracks the objections and the authority drawn from Augustine before laying out Thomas’s own resolution, pausing along the way over Aristotle’s account of “before and after” from the Categories and Physics as it bears on pleasure and pain. He also brings in Falstaff’s speech from Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part One and a comparison to Mozart’s symphonies to illustrate how virtue and its felt experience relate.

89. Summa III, Q. 40, Arts. 2–4: Christ's Ordinary Way of Life, His Poverty, and His Keeping of the Law

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up three articles of the Tertia Pars on the fittingness of Christ’s manner of life. Article 2 asks whether Christ ought to have led an austere life, weighing his ordinary eating and drinking against John the Baptist’s asceticism. Article 3 asks whether he ought to have lived in poverty, and article 4 whether he kept the Law, including Sabbath observance and dietary precepts. Working through objections, sed contra, and responses, Berquist draws out Aquinas’s authorities—Chrysostom, Augustine, Jerome, Bede—with anecdotes along the way.

89. Predestination in the Divine Mind, Reprobation, and Divine Choice and Love (Summa I, Q.23 a.2–4)

Thu, 31 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist follows Aquinas article by article through Question 23 on predestination, asking first whether predestination places anything real in the one predestined, then whether reprobation belongs to God at all, and finally whether the predestined are objects of divine choice. Working closely through each article’s objections, sed contra, and corpus, he draws on Augustine, Dionysius, and Aristotle to unpack distinctions between immanent and transitive action, and between God’s antecedent and consequent will, showing how these bear on love, choice, and providence. Along the way he digresses into Origen and Calvin on related errors. The class breaks off mid-argument in Article 4, with the rest left for a later session.

89. Q.77 a.3: Powers Distinguished by Acts and Objects; Active vs. Passive Ability

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the question of how the soul’s various powers are distinguished from one another, following Aquinas’s answer: powers differ according to their acts, and acts differ according to their objects. He lingers over the Greek dunamis and the difficulty of rendering it in English as “power” versus “ability,” then works out how an active power relates to its object as moving cause while a passive power relates to its object as end or term. He draws on Aristotle’s De Anima—common sense, contraries, sight and touch—and a fragment of Empedocles to illustrate the point, closing by setting up Article 4’s question of the order among the soul’s powers.

90. Sadness and Pain: How They Differ, Why Pain Is Contrary to Pleasure, and Whether Every Sadness Opposes Every Pleasure

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Aquinas on pain and sadness, asking first whether dolor and tristitia name the same thing, then whether pain is strictly contrary to pleasure, and finally whether every sadness excludes every pleasure. He glosses Aquinas’s Latin terms against Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Ethics and Augustine’s City of God and Confessions, using Aristotle’s distinction between homonymous and synonymous terms to sort genus from species contrariety. Examples carry the argument: animal sensation versus human aesthetic delight, sorrow at parting, and the strange pleasure taken in tragic drama or in penance, where sadness itself becomes, per accidens, an occasion of joy.

90. Question 41, Articles 1–2: Why Christ willed to be tempted, and why in the desert (with digressions on Mozart's symmetry and the virtues in music)

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Question 41 of the Summa Theologiae, where Aquinas asks whether it was fitting for Christ to be tempted and why the desert was the place chosen for it. He traces Aquinas’s reasons—drawing on Augustine, Gregory, Chrysostom, and Hilary—and the devil’s uncertain grasp of Christ’s divine identity, opening with reflections on the second commandment of love and God’s design in making unequal creatures so some illuminate others. A long digression compares structural symmetry in Mozart’s late symphonies, Shakespeare, and Plato’s dialogues on Socrates’ death, before returning to close commentary on the text.

90. Aquinas on Predestination (ST I, Q.23, Arts. 5–6): Is It Caused by Foreseen Merits, and Is It Certain?

Thu, 07 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up two articles of Question 23 in the Prima Pars: whether God predestines on account of foreseen merits, and whether predestination is infallibly certain. Working through Aquinas’s objections, sed contra, and responses, he draws on Romans, Titus, Job, and Augustine to show that predestination’s ultimate reason lies in God’s goodness and will rather than in anything foreseen in the creature, yet remains certain without destroying human freedom or the contingency of secondary causes. Along the way he digresses into Pelagianism, the order of the universe, and de Tocqueville on democratic custom to sharpen the reading of the text.

90. Essential vs. Incidental Differences, the Fallacy of Accident, and Replies to the Objections

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the Summa’s question on the soul’s powers, asking why some differences among objects diversify a power while others don’t—the per se versus per accidens distinction. He runs through the objections and replies: the priority of act to potency, whether the object stands extrinsic or intrinsic to the power, contrariety within one genus, and how a single subject, like God or a beloved person, can be the object of really distinct powers under different formal aspects, as with faith and charity, or a woman loved differently as wife, mother, daughter, and sister. He repeatedly invokes the fallacy of accident to sharpen the point, ranging through Heraclitus, Plato’s Symposium, Cicero, Hamlet, and Romeo and Juliet along the way.

Other works

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Other works #

284 passages mentioned in passing

All works

Mentioned in passing #

Summa Theologiae, a. 7 #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 120

Summa Theologiae, q. 26, a. 3 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 96

Summa Theologiae #

Mentioned in 106 classes

Antepredicamenta #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Aristotle’s definition of syllogism #

Mentioned in 27 classes

Aristotle, biological works #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Antepredicaments #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 7

Memory and Reminiscence #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 26

De Morte et Vita #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 1

Aristotle’s biological works (De Partibus Animalium) #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 50

De Plantis #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 1

De Progressu Animalium #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 1

Aristotle’s dialogues (fragment on philosophizing) #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Magna Moralia #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Aristotle on the Margites #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Aristotle (reading from last class on contradiction) #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Aristotle on friendship and justice #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Aristotle’s treatise on friendship #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Aristotle on envy and indignation #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 93

Aristotle On Dreams #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 150

Aristotle, On Generation #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 139

De Longitudine et Brevitate Vitae #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Aristotle, On Philosophy (fragment) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 44

Aristotle On Prophesying by Dreams #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 150

Organon #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Parva Naturalia #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Aristotle on the four causes #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 165

Aristotle on catharsis in tragedy #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 101

Aristotle on tragedy and epic #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Aristotle on tragedy #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 90

Aristotle on the syllogism #

Mentioned in 1 class

Wisdom (2005) 10

Pseudo-Aristotle Problemata #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 107

Aristotle’s lost dialogue (Protrepticus) #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Aristotle’s dialogue Introduction to Philosophy (Protrepticus) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 227

Sense and Sensible #

Mentioned in 1 class

Wisdom (2005) 32

Aristotle, Sophistic Refutations #

Mentioned in 6 classes

Sophistic Refutations I #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 51

Aristotle’s four tools of dialectic #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Aristotle, definition of form as ’the logos of the what it was to be' #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Aristotle’s fifth sense (of reason/definition) #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Aristotle’s four causes #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Aristotle on matter desiring form #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Diels-Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Knox translation, Harmony of the Gospels #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 5

Heath’s edition of Euclid #

Mentioned in 7 classes

Loeb Classical Library #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Loeb edition of Greek mathematics #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 63

Marietti edition #

Mentioned in 3 classes

McKeon edition of Aristotle #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 87

Nova Vulgata #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Oxford translation of Aristotle #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 12

Rheims New Testament #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Stuttgart Vulgate #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Vulgate #

Mentioned in 4 classes

A Division of the Meno #

Mentioned in 1 class

Introduction to Philosophy & Logic (1999) 15

A Note on Practical Philosophy #

Mentioned in 14 classes

An Excellent Play #

Mentioned in 6 classes

An Exposition of Hamlet’s Exhortation to Use Reason #

Mentioned in 2 classes

An Introduction to the First Road in Our Knowledge #

Mentioned in 10 classes

Anaxagoras’ unlimited beginnings and their refutation #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 35

Aristotle, Book Two of Wisdom, Reading Five #

Mentioned in 1 class

Wisdom (2005) 20

Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book Eight, Reading One #

Mentioned in 6 classes

Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book Nine (Ninth Book of Wisdom) #

Mentioned in 13 classes

Becoming: the underlying subject and the opposite (simple and composed becoming) #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Beginnings of Philosophy in the Senses and Reason #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Causes of Love #

Mentioned in 21 classes

Chapter Four of the Categories (The Ten Categories) #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Chapter Two of the Categories: Two Divisions #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Contradiction and the Growth of Reason #

Mentioned in 4 classes

DHB Vol III - The School of Aristotle.pdf #

Mentioned in 423 classes

Distinction of the Roads in Our Knowledge #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Drawing a Line Around the End of Man #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Effects of Love #

Mentioned in 17 classes

First Book of Natural Hearing, Reading One #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 1

Follow the Common #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Foreword to Consideration of Love and Friendship #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 11

Foreword to Logic #

Mentioned in 9 classes

Friar Laurence on Stumbling #

Mentioned in 8 classes

Know Thyself #

Mentioned in 6 classes

Matter and privation distinguished; matter ungenerated and incorruptible; end of Book I #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Matter of the Syllogism #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Meno (paper on the Meno as an introduction to logic) #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Natural Hearing (Physics), First Book, Reading Ten #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Natural Theology Fragments #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 24

Nature and Kinds of Love #

Mentioned in 14 classes

Note for Aristotle’s Proemium to Wisdom #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Note for Book One of Natural Hearing, Reading I #

Mentioned in 24 classes

Note for Book One, Reading Eleven #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Note for Book One, Reading Fifteen #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 38

Note for Book One, Reading Nine #

Mentioned in 6 classes

Note for Book One, Reading Ten #

Mentioned in 6 classes

Note for Book One, Reading Thirteen #

Mentioned in 15 classes

Note for Book One, Reading Twelve #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 32

Note for Readings Two through Four #

Mentioned in 9 classes

Note for Second Book of Wisdom, Reading One #

Mentioned in 1 class

Wisdom (2006, Colorado) 27

Note for Word Beginning #

Mentioned in 5 classes

Note for Word Cause #

Mentioned in 5 classes

Note for Word One #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 8

Note for the Second Book of Wisdom #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 86

Note on End or Purpose of Man #

Mentioned in 5 classes

Note on the Eight Books of Natural Hearing #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Nothing Too Much #

Mentioned in 1 class

Love & Friendship 16

On Dividing Shakespeare’s Plays #

Mentioned in 7 classes

On the Natural Fragments (Natural Fragments of the First Philosophers) #

Mentioned in 35 classes

Paper on the Phaedo (Phaedo Talk) #

Mentioned in 5 classes

Pride as a Cause of Error #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Proemium #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Proemium: the certitude proper to political knowledge, and the proper hearer #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Quantity - Chapter Six #

Mentioned in 6 classes

Reasoning and the Four Kinds of Argument #

Mentioned in 20 classes

Second Road in our Knowledge #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Shakespeare on Error #

Mentioned in 10 classes

Shakespeare’s Exhortation to Use Reason, with a Proemium (and appendix on Aquinas’s division of moral philosophy) #

Mentioned in 13 classes

Shakespeare’s Understanding of a Play #

Mentioned in 6 classes

Texts for the Name Being #

Mentioned in 1 class

Wisdom (2006, Colorado) 11

Texts on Necessity and Difficulty of Beginning Well #

Mentioned in 3 classes

The Art About Statement #

Mentioned in 6 classes

The Before and After in the Acts of (Looking) Reason #

Mentioned in 8 classes

The Division of Shakespeare’s Plays #

Mentioned in 3 classes

The First Definition of Reason #

Mentioned in 42 classes

The First Statement and King of Statements (Commentary on First Statement) #

Mentioned in 24 classes

The Form of the Simple Syllogism #

Mentioned in 6 classes

The Matter and Order of Wisdom #

Mentioned in 38 classes

The Proemia to Logic #

Mentioned in 4 classes

The Royal Fragment #

Mentioned in 13 classes

The Skopos or Aim of the Categories #

Mentioned in 4 classes

What Is Good & What Is Better - The Order of the Discourse #

Mentioned in 7 classes

Whether the beginnings are two, three or more #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Thomas Aquinas, Proemium to Practical Philosophy (beginning of his laying out of the 1st Bk of Nicomachean Ethics) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 1

Aristotle, Proemium, Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, Reading 2 #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Note for Book One of Natural Hearing, Reading 2 #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Note for Sixth Book of Wisdom, Reading 4 #

Mentioned in 16 classes

Substance - Chapter 5 #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Note for Book Two About the Soul, Readings 5-6 #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Quality - Chapter 8 #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Before - Chapter 12: A Carrying Over from Greek into English of Chapter Twelve #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Natural Hearing (Physics) I, Reading 13: the principles as subject and form (and privation); how many principles #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Mozart, A Musical Joke #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 75

Toynbee, world history (A Study of History) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 48

Mozart, Abduction from the Seraglio #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 168

Act of Contrition #

Mentioned in 1 class

Wisdom (2016) 8

Amoris Laetitia #

Mentioned in 1 class

Secunda Secundae 6

Anima Christi #

Mentioned in 6 classes

Benedict XVI on the Gospels #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Prokofiev, Classical Symphony #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 132

Codex Apocryphus Novi Testamenti (book on the infancy of the Savior) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 94

Commendatio Sacrae Scripturae #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 22

Compendium of the Creed #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 41

Creed (Tu solus Altissimus) #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 42

Decision Points (Bush) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 43

Declaration of Independence #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Decretals #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Decretals, De constitutionibus, Cum omnes #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 227

Gratian #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Mozart, Don Giovanni #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Mozart, Don Giovanni; Requiem #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 53

Denziger #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 191

Enchiridion of Indulgences #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Evangelium Vitae #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 240

First Distinctions and Definitions in Logic #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 3

Teresa of Avila, Foundations #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 2

Cardinal Siri, Gethsemane #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Glossa Ordinaria #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 284

Mozart, Great Mass in C minor #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 18

Hail Mary #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Mozart’s Haydn Quartets; Don Giovanni #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 80

Henry VIII #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 156

Infancy Gospel (book about the infancy of the Savior) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 79

It Happened One Night #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 173

Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 110

Mozart, Jupiter Symphony #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Justinian (jurisperitus) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 228

Mozart, La Clemenza di Tito #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 1

Laval Théologique et Philosophique #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 10

Le Nozze di Figaro #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 107

Mozart, letter to his father (Die Entführung aus dem Serail) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Introduction to Philosophy & Logic (1999) 41

Liber de ortu Salvatoris #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 78

Life of Saint Teresa of Avila, chapter 24 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 9

Mozart, litanies for the Blessed Sacrament #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 59

Oesterle, Logic: The Art of Defining and Reasoning #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Ratzinger, Milestones #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 38

Miserantissimus Redemptor (Pius XI) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 35

Gorecki, Miserere (Great Amen) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 27

Misericordiae Vultus #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 251

Girdlestone on Mozart piano concertos #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 210

Reading six (friendship) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Love & Friendship 19

Office of the Dead #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 108

Partridge, Origins #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 11

Osservatore Romano #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 67

Mozart piano concertos #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 29

Pope’s address in Astana, Kazakhstan #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 59

Proemium to logic #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Questions on the Old and New Testament #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Reading eleven #

Mentioned in 1 class

Wisdom (2005) 55

Rome and the Study of Scripture #

Mentioned in 1 class

Sacred Scripture 1

Salve Regina #

Mentioned in 1 class

Love & Friendship 5

Haydn, Seven Last Words #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 113

Spe Gaudentes #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 84

St. Teresa of Avila, Spiritual Relations #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 19

Spiritus Paraclitus #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 32

Alphonsus de Liguori, book on heresies #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 48

Studiorum Ducem (Pius XI) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 33

Te Deum #

Mentioned in 9 classes

The Blue Angel (film) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 34

Louis Chardon, The Cross of Jesus #

Mentioned in 1 class

Secunda Secundae 3

The Intellectual Life (Sertillanges) #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 16

Mozart, The Magic Flute #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Marriage of Figaro #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 182

The Moderns on the Mover #

Mentioned in 2 classes

The New Criterion #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 42

Kagan, The Peloponnesian War #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 41

Ratzinger Report #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 15

Raphael, The School of Athens #

Mentioned in 2 classes

The Thirty Three Doctors of the Church #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 66

Britten, Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 1

Towards an Evaluation of Music (essay) #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Towards the Evaluation of Music (Ostling) #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 97

Brahms, Variations on a Theme by Haydn #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 44

William McNeill, world history #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 79

Mozart, Zaide #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 27

Paul VI address on Teresa of Avila #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 68

Paul VI, address on the feast of St. Cecilia #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 76

Weisheipl, biography of Thomas #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 21

Cornelius a Lapide commentary #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Mozart, letter to his father on The Abduction from the Seraglio #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 18

Paul VI sermon on Saint Cecilia #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 97

Paul VI text on music #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Handel trio sonatas Opus 5 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 29

Decretals, Urban, causa 19 q.2 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 227

Mozart Piano Concerto No. 23 in A major #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Mozart Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor and D minor concerto #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 18

Mozart piano concertos (D minor, C minor No. 24) #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 53

Mozart piano concertos 26 and 27 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 7

Mozart Piano Concerto No. 27 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 28

Mozart Symphony No. 36 (Linz) #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Mozart, Symphony No. 36, 38, 40, 41 (Jupiter) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Logic (2016) 13

Mozart Symphonies 36–41 (Jupiter) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 90

Mozart, Symphony No. 36 (Linz) and Symphony No. 41 (Jupiter); C major Quintet #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Mozart Symphony No. 41 (Jupiter) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Natural Hearing 29

Mozart K. 515 and 516 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 87

Mozart string quintets K. 515 and K. 516 #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 18

Mozart Piano Sonata K. 570 in B flat #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Mozart, String Quintet in D major K. 593 #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 51

Beatitudes #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 88

Book of Maccabees #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 103

Book of Samuel #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 256

Chronicles #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 70

Decalogue #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Elijah and the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 115

St. Paul’s epistles #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Epistles of Paul #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Epistles to Timothy #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Epistles to the Corinthians #

Mentioned in 1 class

Sacred Scripture 2

Epistles to the Thessalonians #

Mentioned in 1 class

Sacred Scripture 2

Bible (I am who am) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Wisdom (2005) 23

First Corinthians 3:8 #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Fourth Book of Kings #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 109

The fourth commandment (Decalogue) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Alia 2

Gospel (Sadducees and resurrection) #

Mentioned in 2 classes

Gospels #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Lord’s Prayer (Hallowed be thy name) #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Magnificat #

Mentioned in 6 classes

New Testament #

Mentioned in 1 class

Wisdom (2005) 56

Scripture: Sadducees and the resurrection #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Our Father #

Mentioned in 16 classes

Parable of the Good Samaritan #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 199

Gospel parable of the mustard seed #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 99

Parable of the sower #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 108

St Paul (Christological hymns, firstborn of all creatures) #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 4

Sapiential books #

Mentioned in 1 class

De Anima 98

Second Corinthians #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Second Epistle to the Corinthians 4:13 #

Mentioned in 1 class

Secunda Secundae 11

Second Epistle to the Thessalonians 1:11 (Opus fidei in virtute) and its gloss #

Mentioned in 1 class

Secunda Secundae 11

Sermon on the Mount #

Mentioned in 7 classes

Sermon on the Mount (Our Father) #

Mentioned in 2 classes

St Paul (apostle) #

Mentioned in 4 classes

Synoptic Gospels #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 86

Ten Commandments #

Mentioned in 1 class

Ethics 1

The Ten Commandments #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 197

Third Book of Kings #

Mentioned in 1 class

Tertia Pars 61

St Paul on charity greater than faith #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 16

Second Maccabees #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Secundae 74

Second Timothy #

Mentioned in 3 classes

Third Esdras #

Mentioned in 1 class

Prima Pars 36