The Marriage of Medieval Metaphysics and Modern Personalism
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- Опубліковано 24 тра 2023
- In this lecture series, Dr. Peter Kreeft examines key ideas in philosophy by comparing and contrasting two representative philosophers in each episode.
In lecture 12, Dr. Kreeft discusses the possible unity between what he claims is the best of the old and the best of the new-a marriage of the metaphysics of St. Thomas Aquinas with the anthropology of Personalism.
To learn more about these philosophers and the other major philosophers who helped shape the world, check out Dr. Kreeft's book series, "Socrates' Children: An Introduction to Philosophy from the 100 Greatest Philosophers": books.wordonfire.org/socrates...
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I wonder how he will cover that! Definitely saint JP2 and and saint Edith Stein. Edith Stein's the science of the cross is just an amazing work.
Thank you for this excellent and eye-opening lecture series, Dr. Kreeft!
I can't get enough of these lectures Dr. Kreeft! After hearing this I am in awe. Here I thought the history of philosophy was of a great start and after the renaissance only shadows and the destruction of wisdom rather than love for it, and now I have a spark of hope thanks to this proposition I was not introduced to in my studies of philosophy. Thank you and God bless you and the Word on Fire Institute.
Amazing series. Truly the greatest philosopher of our time. Thank you, Dr. Kreeft!
have you studied all philosophers of our time and what makes a philosopher a great one?
I wouldn't say he's the greatest philosopher of our time (pretty sure that's Don Livingston with his work on Hume) but he's certainly a strong candidate for greatest philosophy teacher of our time
I think the genius of Dr. Kreeft is his ability to teach and communicate the complex ideas the history of Philosophy even to a novice in this field or to a little child.
Brilliant as usual. I will have to review it several times.
Need a transcript of this. Sanctity is to personhood as essence is to existence. The true introduction to metaphysics is the study of the saints. Sanctity is the actualization and perfection of personhood. Saints are more ontologically real than anyone else. I have to read some Gabriel Marcel's Essay on the Ontological Mystery. Wow .... just wow.
can i point out how underrated this channel is? a subscriber here...
Thank you , thank you…..an amazing series…..let’s hear it for that man Kreeft and those Word on Fire people.
Wonderful . Thank you for an enlightened summary of your incredible journey! A walk with God through the footsteps of philosophy.
What a wonderful presentation! I will soon enter the Ph.D in philosophy working on this exact subject. I agree that the antidote to modern philosophy is there in great part!
dear God, never let dr kreeft be separated from you.
Im a Lutheran and really enjoy Dr. Kreeft's lectures. Theres so much we agree on. I dont think Luther intended to divorce faith and reason from one another and this is true for his followers as well. For instance Protestants accepted Heleocentric model of the universe before Catholics and the Lutheran confessions refrence Aristotles ethics in a positive light.
this would be better as a discussion format especially for beginners
This was a profound lecture for me. Although I was being and doing (in layman's terms: working) while listening, I felt deeply enlightened by your unique and eloquent study of the saints and the sacred and their kind. I am therefore most grateful for what you have imparted to my understanding of not only who I am but what I am and what my place in the world with others means.
I will miss these so much!
Wow, what a gem-like finale! Such a delightful fusion of witty banter and deep meditation. This marvelous blend of Thomistic metaphysics and Personalist epistemology has me buzzing with curiosity about its far-reaching implications for every nook and cranny of human existence. It's as if a treasure trove of understanding and insight has been unlocked. Simply marvellous!
This is just amazing. If this lecture was a videogame, it would have been in God mode!
Thanks much Dr. Peter Kreef..
dr kreeft is a saint.
Thank you for a great series!
I need to see it again to catch all the concepts.
Shame this series has come to an end, but very grateful for it.
god bless thank you for all this knowledge and reason that you have to offer
Simply wonderful. Thank you for this tremendous series 🙏
Fantastic, as usual. Thank you Peter for your wisdom. God bless you
Legendary Peter Kreeft
This is my favorite episode of the lot!!
Making the beautiful simplicity of Christ complex.
Excellent lecture! Loved it! Also, what a tribute to Fr. W. Norris Clarke, SJ. !
Please tell me there will be another series, I've learned more from this than almost any reading I've read
What an incredible lecture! Thank you, professor Kreeft. God bless you.
Dr. Kreeft Thank you for this lecture and I hope for more lecture to come
Love his his work
It's the most beautiful and profound lecture I have ever heard and also my deepest interest in life! Thank you so much Dr. Peter Kreeft!
Amazing.
Wow. I think this is it. Nay, I know this is it.
Thank you Dr Kreeft. And thank God for the immense wisdom, intellect and love you possess.
Praise the Lord
Perhaps the evil is getting so much worse that we need, except for the Second Coming, no less than a single so powerful Peter Kreeft's lesson or a Marian apparition to heal our minds as well as our hearts, our civilization and our person, West and East, our politics and our beloved Catholic Church, our Mother, traditionalists and modernists, alleluia!
The Kingdom of God here on earth is near
Thanks for this video. A good way to continue searching for the truth is reading "Work of Human Hands" by Fr. Anthony Cekada.
this is your m😅st brilliant philosophy Dr Kreeft. And it was your own/His. You always wuote other philosophers. But here you have pleased Him well.❤❤❤
I love this series , thank you ! But can anyone advise on a reliable glossary to define the complex words that are constantly being used by Dr Kreeft?? Would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
By the grace of God, this will be the most important talk of the 21st Century.
🎯 Key Takeaways for quick navigation:
00:38 🤔 This lecture explores the possible marriage between medieval metaphysics (Thomas Aquinas' ideas) and modern personalism, seeking a synthesis of objective reality and subjective self-consciousness.
02:56 🙏 The speaker proposes the unification of Thomas Aquinas' metaphysics (focusing on the act of existence) and personalism's anthropology (emphasizing the primacy of the person) in philosophy.
03:36 💒 Father Norris Clark argues that personalism and Thomism are not opposites but can be married as personhood is the fullness of being itself.
04:17 🌟 Theological argument suggests that the synthesis of metaphysics and personalism is rooted in the self-revealed Divine name "I am," signifying the unity of subjectivity and objectivity in God.
07:43 🕊️ Saint Pope John Paul II supports the marriage of Thomism and personalism for a comprehensive answer to the question of what is man, bridging the gap between ethics and theology in contemporary culture.
12:20 📜 The central idea in Thomistic metaphysics is the Primacy of the act of existence, which is logically linked to the transcendence of persons over things, showing the compatibility with personalism.
21:08 🧠 Existence is not an essence but an act, and persons transcend things as subjects transcend objects, indicating their deeper connection and primacy in philosophy.
26:25 🌌 God's immanence and omnipresence are emphasized in the lecture, highlighting the personal and existential presence of God in all things and in man's soul.
27:24 🌌 Distinctive mode of being for persons: They exist from within, have self-consciousness, and moral conscience.
28:04 📚 Metaphysics is the study of sanctity, and the actualization of being is the actualization of personhood.
29:16 🤔 Striking claim: Saints are more ontologically real than others; Nietzsche's atheism denies the image of God's survival.
30:53 💞 All beings give themselves away, showing transcendentals of activity and relationship, reflecting love at the heart of ontology.
32:48 🌟 God is Love: Being, personhood, and love are inseparable in God, the perfect union of three persons.
33:55 📖 Time for reconciliation: Unite metaphysics and spirituality, depth of being and personal sanctity.
35:06 💑 Unite the objective and subjective: Rabbi Martin Buber and Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin advocate for this union.
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Supremely important video; many thanks.
At both the 7 and 10:32 minute marks, you address the “halves or poles” of the objective and subjective. However, a vital distinction is missing which leads to an error.
That distinction is between opposites which are COMPLEMENTARY (all of the opposites at the 7 minute mark are complementary) and opposites which stand in DIAMETRIC opposition to each other.
At the 10:32 mark you mention sinfulness and goodness as paradoxical opposites.
They are not.
Because paradoxes are only seemingly contradictory; in reality, paradoxical opposites are complementary in nature. Man’s goodness and his sinfulness are diametric opposites. As you say, “it has always been the glory of the Catholic faith to embrace both halves of the many paradoxes that we find both in God and in ourselves.” The Church does embrace complementary opposites; she exposes diametric opposites- like sin and goodness- as one distinguishes counterfeit from genuine; glass from diamond.
So reasoned my late father who wrote a slender but pregnant work zeroing in on this vital distinction between diametric and complementary opposites. He was too busy teaching to get it published, so it is only his family and former students who have, to date, benefitted from what I would call its Christological brilliance.
I would be happy to get a copy to you, if you would like.
If you are serious about philosophy, check out the History of Philosophy series by Arthur Holmes.
Given the extreme that the so called "subjective spin" of modern mind produces (gender theory being the most infamous example), the best way to overcome that is objective universalism recover the supremacy. Subjectivism must be under the thomist criteria, analysis and valuation, now enriched with more nuanced data.
You said essence was another word for substance -- you said that in a previous video. So I'm curious what would the substance of a unicorn be?
ESSENCE (to ti en einai) is what the entity is, what by which the entity is what it is. It is what our intellect captures in beings and beings. It is what we affirm in the definition of the thing. From a logical point of view, the essence is necessary and immutable: it cannot fail to be what it is; but from the ontological point of view, it can be necessary or contingent, corruptible or incorruptible. That essence that cannot not be is ontologically necessary. That essence that exists, but may not exist, as it is for unicorn, is ontologically contingent.
The contingent body comprises SUBSTANCE (usìa) and ACCIDENTS (symbebekòn). SUBSTANCE is the entity as it is that which subsists or exists in and of itself. It can be the subject of form, accidents, essence, or being. Or it can be a pure form.
@@PaoloGasparini-ux2kp So essence is not strictly interchangeable with substance because substance has existence whereas essence may or may not have existence. Also, substances without accidents seem to tell us nothing. A metaphor: substance is like a coat rack that we hang coats (accidents) on. The rack itself is not unique to the thing, it seems. I think you would say the rack (substance) and accidents could be called the essence of a thing. If the thing is imaginary there is no substance but there is an essence. The essence, in this case, seems to come out of thin air. It is really describing an idea. To further complicate matters, Sartre suggested that existence proceeds essence. That means there is no essence prior to existence -- that with existence comes essence. But how can that be with the unicorn story? That means that idea of a unicorn must exist first and then have an essence. That doesn't make sense.
@@countvlad8845 1/2
Perhaps I could translate your objection thus: since the unicorn does not appear, I cannot say that it is not there.
This safeguards the fact that the property of the entity is being. The entity necessarily is, because if it could not be, there would be a case in which the entity could have the predicate of non-entity.
It is like saying that the circle sometimes has the predicate of no circle. Does a squared circle appear? No, it is unthinkable and it is not real.
Does the unicorn appear? No, but it's not absurd. It is a possible entity.
The metaphysician does not study the horse as a horse but as a being.
From a metaphysical point of view, I don't care if there is a unicorn, but the law of being is being. Whether it's a horse, a zebra, or a unicorn, it doesn't matter, having no metaphysical substance.
If it is an entity, its property is being.
An answer to this objection could be the modern one, i.e. gnoseological dualism.
Descartes, Kant, the scientific revolution of the early twentieth century, with relativity and quantum mechanics, led to the abandonment of principles that until a few years earlier were so solid as to be considered metaphysical: this is one thing that is in thought, then you have to see the reality...
So what actually exists, per se? Extension and local motion. And all the rest? My elaborations, or at most I can try to recover them, because since there is a non-deceiving God (Einstein), if he has given me the inclination to believe that, in addition to local motion and extension, there are also qualities, it means to say that there will be those too!
If I stick to experience, says Aristotle, Heraclitus is right (gray logic, contextual thinking, cosmology, both/and, mathematics of the continuum or geometry), if I stick to reasoning, Parmenides (either/either logic, white /black, the mathematics of the discrete, or arithmetic, ontology).
One cannot agree with both.
Unless Plato turns up and says that one cannot agree with both at the same time if the object of inquiry were one, but if there are two then yes, the contradiction disappears.
Is the apple (not the table and the apple) white or red?
Plato says that the peel is red, multiple, and in flux, like experience; instead, the pulp is white, i.e. the world above, beyond experience, one and permanent.
There are two planes of being that respect two different laws, of Heraclitus and Parmenides, immanent experience and transcendent experience.
All classical medieval thought, of the relationship between God and the world, ontology, and cosmology, being and becoming, develops from these two samples.
We can talk about God because it is creatures that push us to talk about him.
In fact, seeing that all things have existence, we ask ourselves from whom they received it and from whom they still receive it because if they had it by themselves they would have always had it and would keep it forever.
At the end of our reasoning, we conclude that they received it from someone who has it on his own and who identifies himself with existence.
And this is God.
Therefore, we say that God is the Being because in our reasoning starting from the visible things that have existence, we access the invisible ones.
Likewise, we say together with Aristotle that God is substance, deducing the concept from the realities of this world which are made up of substance and accidents.
In God, however, as the essence is identified with existence, everything is substantial and nothing is accidental.
Every quality in God is predicated (attributed) with the verb to be and not with that of having, as instead it is done for all other beings.
God transcends existence because he is not one among many that exist.
For while all others have existence and are kept in existence - moment by moment - by God, God alone is the Being superior to every other.
In this sense we can say that he transcends being, understood as created, visible, and invisible.
In answering the question of the existence of God we start from what we see and touch.
From here we go back to the First Cause which is necessarily different from what was created.
Therefore, we know of God that he is, but not what he is, in the impenetrable abyss of his nature. To say of him that he exists, that he is the cause of being, that he is nothing of what is created, but that he transcends everything, does not mean knowing what the mode of a divine being is in itself. St. Paul says in other words that "God dwells in an inaccessible light, no one among men has ever seen him or can see him" (1 Tim 6:16)".
Here our mind stops in an adoring attitude and is full of amazement.
Wondering who made it or where it came from is the same thing as forgetting that the Creator is totally other.
We go back to his existence from the works he did.
We cannot ask ourselves: why does it exist rather than not exist? In fact, it exists.
And it can be seen in the creation he made.
Our reason must recognize his creature limit.
@@countvlad8845
2/2
As you can see, I too am reasoning by asking why's to which I try to give rational answers.
And I come to say rationally together with Saint Augustine: "If you understand him, he is not God" (si comprehendis non est Deus" (Sermo 117, III,5).
And according to St. Thomas: “The supreme knowledge we can have of God while we are in the present life is that he transcends all our thoughts, that he is above all that we can think of him: “haec est summa cognitio quam de ipso in statu viae habere possumus, ut cognoscamus Deum esse supra omne id quod cogitamus de eo” (De veritate, 2,1, ad 9).
What assures us that God is demonstrable?
Metaphysics is a science, it is knowledge and it is certain knowledge.
But it is not science in the way that is now commonly called science.
But the scientific statute of metaphysics is not identical to those of the exact or mathematical sciences, born above all under the impulse of the medieval school of Oxford, of Nominalism. (Ockham, Bacon, Grossatesta, Newton and so on.)
It is based on those very first principles that are formed in our intelligence as soon as it opens up to knowledge.
The first is that which is formed immediately, as soon as the intelligence awakens to thought (percipitur statim ab intellectu; St. Thomas, Somma theologica, I-II, 57, 2). It is the habit of the first speculative principles and is called "intellectus ut intellectus." It is identical in all and provides those great coordinates of logic which allow men to understand and understand each other despite the distances of time and space.
It is from here that we start to reason with metaphysics within which we find those truths that, for example, led a pagan philosopher like Aristotle to speak of pure Act and immovable Mover, that is, of God.
However, it is advisable to take a leap (today, May 28, is the feast of Pentecost, for us Christians!) and speak of God not only starting from the things of this world but from what God has said about himself, starting not only by what God has done in creation but also by what he has done in the history of salvation.
Then we know God with other categories, such as charity, love, communion, and mercy.
This knowledge is much superior to the previous one and is typical of Christian theology.
It is not simply cold knowledge that leads one to inquire about God but establishes a relationship.
It is not only the relationship of the creature with the Creator but of the one who becomes a child of God with the Father by adoption.
It is a family relationship, a friendship.
It is an interpersonal relationship of communion.
As St. Thomas notes, at this point we are no longer speaking of a "Verbum qualicumque," of a Logos whatever it may be, but of a "Verbum spirans Amorem" (Summa theologica, I, 43,5, ad 2), of a Thought and a Word that communicate Love and give the ability to love him in turn.
Thank you for your intervention, which allowed me to deepen the link between reason and faith, and happy Pentecost to you, to all the readers, and to the wonderful staff of WOF, especially Peter Kreeft and Msgr. Barron, hallelujah!
@@PaoloGasparini-ux2kp You say, "We cannot ask ourselves: why does it exist rather than not exist?" Well, Heidegger certainly asked that question. A question he borrowed from another philosopher, no doubt. Another conundrum is that part of the essence of the unicorn is its non-existence. This flies in the face of Sartre's existence preceding essence theory. There is an essence - the essence of nonexistence - with the unicorn. So essence does precede existence with the unicorn. Have a good day!
Catholic spy, lol.
This is a beautiful lecture, thank you for giving it.
I am , therefore i think
Before i can think i must frist exist .
Before i can exist i must frist be created .
For me to be created
there must frist be a
Creating force.
For there to be a
Creating Force there must be a purpose of
Existence .
The purpose of existence is to exist.
I exist that I exist ,
I am that i am.
I am therefore i think.
I am in the image of that which created a me.
That which created me is greater then me
I have being because i was given being
That which gives being frist has being
Nonexistence cannot give what it does not have .
Therefore an uncreated existence is the source of my
Existence.
Haveing been given
Existence therefore
I am .
Because
I am , therefore i think
READ ELMAR J. KREMER TO UNDERSTAND BARRY MILLER'S POSITION THAT ESSENCE BOUNDS EXISTING, THAT PROPERTIES ARE BOUNDING RATHER THAN 'INHERING.' "ANALYSIS OF EXISTING," BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC PUBLISHING, 2014. THIS IS CRITICALLY IMPORTANT.
Unfortunately no reference to psychoanalysis. Brilliant as an astronomer's understanding and exposition may be all is sheer nonsense as long as his premise is founded on pre-copernican constellation. However, these lectures are the best as far as I can judge; and I have been reading, attending lectures and seminars at renowned universities in the United States and Europe since 1973.
Thought, thinking itself, the I is an illusion, a deception. Transcending the thinking I is silence....
K mention
First time in my life I'm pro divorce 😂
Cs lewis sadlybthough a brilliant author has a shady past 😢
As usual xtian boredom of brainwash 😢
Hardly brainwashing. What is your position, then, O wise one?
@@aclark903 I listened to the whole series, he was contrasting every philosopher with Jesus as the role model, I think this is a catholic sponsored program, the only solace I found was that what the philosophers actually said, as I am a novice to the philosophy as a subject.
@@rk_1383 Jesus IS the greatest philosopher of all time. Prove me wrong.
@@aclark903 maybe true but others made him god with resurrection crap, read the last chapters of the gospels, it's all made up to make believe.
@@rk_1383 Why do you think so? Death is not a problem for God.