Being born into a family structure—being born of a mother—is key to being human. It is, for Jacques Lacan, essential to the formation of human desire. It is also part of the structure of analogy in the Thomistic thought of Erich Przywara. AI may well increase exponentially in sophistication, and even achieve human-like qualities; but it will only ever form an imaginary mirroring of genuine human persons—an imitation that is in fact morbid and dehumanising. Taking Lacan and Przywara at a (...) point of convergence on this topic offers important insight into human exceptionalism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Giles of Rome on Political AuthorityGraham McAleerDabo tibi regem in furore meo“I will give you a king in my rage” 1It is a commonplace among historians of medieval political theory that two great systems of thought dominate the period. Augustine’s City of God held the field until Thomas Aquinas absorbed Aristotle’s political thought largely culled from the latter’s Politics and Nicomachean Ethics. Aquinas stands as a watershed, a moment (...) when both sources meet and a synthesis is worked out in which Augustine loses ground to Aristotle. Indeed, Augustine’s thought loses such a hold on the political theory of the age that R. A. Markus has spoken of a “comfortable obliviousness” in the minds of theorists subsequent to Aquinas that “a profound cleavage” had been wrought by Thomas in the tradition of Christian political thought. 2 Ptolemy of Lucca and Giles of Rome, both of whom were students of Thomas, are picked out by Markus as typical of those theorists who are oblivious to the definitive break that Aquinas makes with Augustine.Although modern commentators of medieval political theory speak of an Augustinian tradition after Aquinas they are only referring to a series of thinkers who defended papal authority over and above monarchical authority. This tradition is said to be Augustinian because the thinkers defending papal authority, who included Giles, James of Viterbo and Augustinus Triumphus, were members of the Order of Hermits of St. Augustine. Nevertheless, these Augustinians are said to have absorbed Thomas’s Aristotelianism: convinced by his argument that since coercive power is intrinsic to political authority and since political authority is natural to the human condition, it must have been the case that coercive power existed in the state of innocence. These Augustinians, [End Page 21] modern scholarship maintains, did not then defend Augustine’s thesis that coercive political authority is unnatural to human society and was only introduced (albeit necessarily) into post-lapsarian society so that the worst excesses of our sinful condition might be controlled. Markus is by no means alone in identifying Giles as a follower of Thomas whose theory of dominium marks a radical break with Augustine. 3 Recently, J. M. Blythe has cited Markus when concurring with him that Giles simply adopts Thomas’s position which, as he puts it, “was to become ubiquitous in late medieval political discourse.” 4Perhaps this consensus has its origin in a most peculiar fact about twentieth-century scholarship on Giles’s political thought: none of it is based on a wide reading of his philosophical and theological corpus. Admittedly, an extensive reading of Giles is a daunting task. The editors-in-chief of the project to provide critical editions of Giles’s works catalogue sixty-seven titles and this vast array of writings match those of the other “greats” of the period in their scope, variety, complexity, and influence. 5 The hope of this essay is to show that a reading of Giles’s Sentences-commentary reveals him to be far more Augustinian than previously acknowledged this century.Although it is well recognized that Giles was one of the most original and influential political theorists of the Middle Ages, the pages dedicated to his political ideas amount to a few pages here and there, and sometimes as little as a few isolated comments, in the standard works on medieval political theory. 6 Moreover, these works unanimously consider only Giles’s explicitly political works. This limitation began with Otto Gierke, who single-handedly demonstrated the depth and richness of medieval political theory. At the beginning of his classic work, Political Theory of the Middle Age, Gierke provides a fifteen-page list of sources. For Thomas’s political thought Gierke directs us not only to Thomas’s explicitly political treatises such as his commentary on Aristotle’s Politics and the opusculum, De regimine principum, but also to the Summa theologiae, Summa contra gentiles, Thomas’s Disputed and Quodlibetal questions, [End Page 22] his exposition of the Psalms, and commentaries on Paul’s Letters as well as his Sentences-commentary. Yet for Giles only his De regimine principum and De potestate ecclesiastica are cited. 7 Gierke’s selection is repeated... (shrink)

Disputing the Unity of the World: The Importance of Res and the Influence of Averroes in Giles of Rome's Critique of T homas Aquinas concerning the Unity of the World G. j. MCALEER 1. INTRODUCTION tILES OF ROME earned, after a decidedly difficult start, the most complete honors open to an academic religious in the Middle Ages. Joining the Hermits of St. Augustine at age 14, he became the first regent master of his order at the University of Paris ; (...) his works were made compul- sory in the education of students entering the Hermits in 1287; finally, in 1292 he became the general of the order itself.' Giles is significant, as Mandonnet puts it, because he "est incontestablement au premier rang des th~ologiens de la fin du XIII e si~cle. "2 But this is not all. Giles is also important to the period because his writings were censured by the same commission that composed the famous Parisian condemnation of 1277. As a result of this I would like to thank Robert Wielockx, Jos Decorte, Jennifer DeRose, and especially two anonymous referees of theJHP, for their extremely useful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. P. Nash, "Giles of Rome," New Catholic Eneydopedia, vol. 6 , 485 9 "P. Mandonnet, O. P., "La carri6re scolaire de Gilles de Rome," Revue des sciences philosophiques et thlologiques 4 09t~ 497. [~9] 3 ~ JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 36: I JANUARY 1998 censure, Giles had to leave.. (shrink)

This first book-length treatment of Thomas Aquinas'stheory of the body presents a Catholic understanding of the body and its implications for social and political philosophy. Making a fundamental contribution to antitotalitarian theory, McAleer argues that a sexual politics reliant upon Aquinas's theory of the body is better than other commonly available theories. He contrasts this theory with those of four other groups of thinkers: the continental tradition represented by Kant, Schopenhauer, Merleau-Ponty, Nancy, Levinas, and Deleuze; feminism, in the work of (...) Donna Haraway; an alternative Catholic theory to be found in Karl Rahner; and the "Radical Orthodoxy" of John Milbank. (shrink)

Graham McAleer's Erich Przywara and Postmodern Natural Law is the first work to present in an accessible way the thinking of Erich Przywara (1889-1972) for an English-speaking audience. Przywara's work remains little known to a broad Catholic audience, but it had a major impact on many of the most celebrated theologians of the twentieth century, including Hans Urs von Balthasar, Karl Rahner, Edith Stein, and Karl Barth. Przywara's ground-breaking text Analogia Entis (The analogy of being) brought theological metaphysics into the (...) modern era. While the concept of "analogy of being" is typically understood in static terms, McAleer explores how Przywara transformed it into something dynamic. McAleer shows the extension of Przywara's thought into a range of disciplines: from a new theory of natural law to an explanation of how misunderstanding the analogy of being lies at the foundation of the puzzles of modernity and postmodernity. He demonstrates, through Przywara's conceptual framework, how contemporary moral problems, such as those surrounding robots, Islam and sumptuary laws, Nazism (including fascism and race), embryos, migration, and body modification, among others, are shaped by the failure of Western thought to address metaphysical quandaries. McAleer updates Przywara for a new audience searching for solutions to the failing humanism of the current age. This book will be of interest to intellectuals and scholars in a wide range of disciplines within philosophy or theology, and will appeal especially to those interested in systematic and moral theology. (shrink)

The stated goal of Donna Haraway's “Cyborg feminism” is to liberate sensuality from violence. In examining her book alongside that of Jesuit Toletus it becomes clear that both argue that sensuality is a place of metaphysical violence. The first two sections of the essay demonstrate this, and, in addition that Toletus' commentary on Aquinas is hardly accurate. This fact will help justify the claim that the Jesuit tradition includes a rather particular theory of sensuality, the origin of which is perhaps (...) Giles of Rome. A third section shows how the Jesuit Gaston Fessard rediscovered Aquinas' own theory of sensuality through a thoroughgoing critique of Hegelian and Marxist dialectic. The essay concludes that Haraway would do well to adopt Aquinas' non‐violent theory of sensuality as her own. (shrink)

L'essai concerne le philosophe-théologien, Giles de Rome, de la fin du treizième siècle. Bien qu'il fut un disciple de Thomas d'Aquin, sa théorie de la sensualité est très différente de la sienne. Dans sa discussion de la maîtrise de soi, Giles utilise des métaphores politiques pour exprimer comment la raison contrôle les appétits des sens. Ces métaphores sont toutes d'un caractère violent. Ici, Giles se trouve en compagnie de Platon, Descartes, Kant, et plus récemment du Jésuite Karl Rahner. Aquinas, au (...) contraire, développe un modèle de contrôle de soi basé sur un langage politique de persuasion. La préoccupation centrale de l'article consiste à montrer que ces images politiques contrastées mettent en lumière des conceptions métaphysiques très différentes de la structure de la personne humaine. A cause de sa métaphysique, Giles est très proche de poser la violence dans la structure même de la personne: une position commune à l'âge moderne, mais très différente de celle de Thomas d'Aquin. (shrink)

Being born into a family structure—being born of a mother—is key to being human. It is, for Jacques Lacan, essential to the formation of human desire. It is also part of the structure of analogy in the Thomistic thought of Erich Przywara. AI may well increase exponentially in sophistication, and even achieve human-like qualities; but it will only ever form an imaginary mirroring of genuine human persons—an imitation that is in fact morbid and dehumanising. Taking Lacan and Przywara at a (...) point of convergence on this topic offers important insight into human exceptionalism. (shrink)