This book collects six unpublished and published academic studies on the thought of Francisco Suárez, which is addressed through accurate textual analyses and meticulous contextualization of his doctrines in the Scholastic debate. The present essays aim to portray two complementary aspects coexisting in the work of the Uncommon Doctor: his innovative approach and his adherence to the tradition. To this scope, they focus on some pivotal, but often neglected, topics in Suárez’s metaphysics and psychology – such as his theories of (...) cognition and truth, angelology, continuous quantity – thereby developing an original inquiry into a crucial moment in the development of Western philosophy. (shrink)

Mathematics and music in practice and performance, and in learning and teaching, share many characteristics, such as beauty and harmony, memory and intuition and mind or intellect. These raise the principles of processing information in mathematics and music and, by implication, the role of an acquaintance with the essentials of perception, abstraction and affective connaturality in teacher education. This paper compares mathematics and music and considers the acquisition of knowledge and skills through the external and internal senses and emotions, utilizing (...) the role of knowledge through multiple intelligences. In doing so it does not canvas the utilities of mathematics and music as fields of human endeavour so much as their role in the cultivation of serenity and knowledge in the cultured mind. This is a theoretical paper but it is based on nearly a century of teaching from the combined work of the two authors in the teaching of music and mathematics. The paper highlights the importance of inspiration in teaching, inspiration built on a thorough basis of the foundations of anthropology to include the emotions as well as the intellect. While teacher education programs rightly concern themselves with knowledge of the field of study, knowledge of pedagogy, they do not always consider the ability to inspire which is at the heart of managing and mentoring people. (shrink)

This paper argues that Deonna and Teroni's attitudinal theory of emotions faces two serious problems. The first is that their master argument fails to establish the central tenet of the theory, namely, that the formal objects of emotions do not feature in the content of emotions. The second is that the attitudinal theory itself is vulnerable to a dilemma. By pointing out these problems, our paper provides indirect support to the main competitor of the attitudinal theory, namely, the perceptual theory (...) of emotions. (shrink)

Something is good insofar as it achieves its end, so says a neo-Aristotelian view of goodness. Powers/dispositions are paradigm cases of entities that have an end, so say many metaphysicians. A question therefore arises, namely, can one account for neo-Aristotelian goodness in terms of an ontology of powers? This is what I shallbeginto explore in this paper. I will first provide a brief explication of both neo-Aristotelian goodness and the metaphysics of powers, before turning to investigate whether one can give (...) an account of neo-Aristotelian goodness in terms of powers. I will suggest that the answer to this question is yes. (shrink)

En contra la posición de Tomás de Aquino de la distribución de las funciones cognitivas de la distinción real de los sentidos interiores –sentido común, fantasía o imaginación, potencia cogitativa y memoria o reminisciencia–, presento la reducción sustancial del alcance cognitivo del sentido interno simple, llamada fantasía, que realiza Francisco Suárez. Señalo las principales y diversas razones que implica la reducción del número de los sentidos interiores en la teoría de Suárez de la causalidad eficiente del alma y su concepto (...) específico del intelecto y su objeto. (shrink)

From the very beginning of ancient Greek philosophy up to the present day a puzzling correlation is found between rationality and reality. In this study this relation is examined with emphasis on the philosophical tradition of Aristotle and Aquinas. A comparison is made with the virtual reality created by computers and actual reality of our universe. The view expressed in the scientific neopositivism of Jordan and Mach is found to be an adequate approach to avoid contradictions in the interpretation of (...) modern physics. A challenging hypothesis is made by updating the Laplacian Demon by a powerful creative intellect in line with Judeo-Christian tradition. With this hypothesis a new light is shed on several fundamental issues in modern science. (shrink)

In this paper I consider a problem – originally raised by Thomas Aquinas – that is a side effect of integrating Aristotle’s epistemology with Augustine’s. Thus, how can the human soul obtain knowledge of its own stable dispositions? In a serious attempt to meet the constraints that Aristotle had placed on the possibility of human reflexive thought, Aquinas builds his answer on a distinction between actual and habitual self-knowledge. Both Matthew of Acquasparta and Roger Marston will draw on the distinction, (...) as well as on the overall formulation of the problem, and yet – due to a stronger commitment to Augustineʼs epistemology – they will reject with different arguments Aquinas’s solution. (shrink)