Medieval Aristotelian Natural Science

Nice introduction to (Aristotelian) natural science in the medieval periode here.https://t.co/nPbZEZl2Sx https://t.co/2UL58h771E

— Pieter Beullens (@LatinAristotle) July 30, 2020

The Medieval Mind and Academic Bias - with Rachel Fulton Brown

Rachel Fulton Brown Interview

Rachel Fulton Brown on Great Books

ABBC: What’s the point of reading “Great Books”? The lesson of the Middle Ages by Rachel Fulton Brown

The Patristic View of Sex or Marital Relations

Was there a consensus?

James Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe
Google Books

Mentioned here by someone who is not particularly orthodox, iirc.

Still, is some sort of revision necessary, not for the basic precepts regarding our sexual powers, but with respect to our attitudees and understanding of the virtues pertaining to those powers and marital relations?

The conjugal act: as God originally intended or a concession to the Fall?

Infants and children may need sensible signs of affection and touch by parents for their emotional/mental health and to flourish, and this may be true of adults to an extent that we may not realize. Would we say that this is merely concupiscence, our desire to touch and to be touched? In so far as it is non-rational, maybe some would. (Concupiscence is not just a condition of the sexual appetite but of the appetite for nutrition as well, and what else? Hunger, indeed.) A consequence of the fall, an increased animality or manifestation of the "sensitive" aspect of the soul? Maybe, maybe not. But a real feature of human beings in this world, nonetheless. So why wouldn't it be the case with how men and women, or husbands and wives relate to one another? Is something to be condemned or criticized or merely permitted because it is "too" carnal, or not "spiritual" enough? What if there is a natural teleology to certain acts of touch that we may be tempted to dismiss because we think we shouldn't need them?

The Human Dignity Canard

Aristotelian-Thomism in the Modern World by S. Adam Seagrave

We may, nevertheless, recognize a grain of truth in the moderns’ appreciation of the moral status of the individual human being. That appreciation coheres well with Christian moral theology but not with pre-modern moral and political philosophy. The moderns’ mistaken rejection of the unchanging objective contexts within which the individual exists led, in the thought of a select few, to a more profound understanding of human dignity than is available in any of the pre-moderns—including Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. Locke’s nuanced and complex understanding of natural rights, in particular, provides an important philosophical elaboration on the Biblical account of humankind’s creation “in the image and likeness” of God. In tomorrow's article, I will examine this concept in greater depth.

Do we need a concept of dignity in order to have a full account of human flourishing and man's ultimate end? Or to explain the basis of charity or justice? I don't think so.

Medieval Political Philosophy

Post by NovAntiqua.

website

A review by David Abulafia of ‘Inventing the Individual’, by Larry Siedentop

Tonight at the DSPT

The 22nd Annual Aquinas Lecture
Albert the Great and the New Aristotelianism: A Turning Point in the Western Intellectual Tradition by Dr. Michael Tkacz

The lecture will probably be recorded and then uploaded to the DSPT website.

Response to Michael Tkacz's Critique of ID

Medievalists.net: Adelard of Bath and Roger Bacon: early English natural philosophers and scientists

The Medieval Appropriation of Aristotle

1. The medieval schoolmen studied Aristotle, that is clear. What was their purpose in doing so? Was it only for the sake of their theology? Or did they wish to learn philosophy as philosophy?

2. Did they respect the integrity and reasoning of the science, as it was laid out by Aristotle in his lectures? How seriously did they take Aristotle's treatment of the sciences? Was the predominant attitude to use Aristotle only in so far as he bolstered their theological arguments, but without looking at how his arguments fit into the rest of his sciences, as he laid them out? (If he contradicted the Faith he was corrected with a response and/or not employed.) Was their theology so important that they lost sight of the philosophical argumentation?

I have to say that from what I have read of St. Bonaventure, this characterization appears to be true for him. But what of the Franciscans who came after him, or the secular masters? One can appropriate Aristotle without learning well from him, and the early medievals may have been disadvantaged in comparison with their successors.

3. The medievals had inherited certain ways of understanding material creation, but much of this apparatus was not Divinely revealed but given by their non-Christian predecessors, for example the neo-Platonists. Still, are the Augustinian and Aristotelian accounts of the soul so opposed that they cannot be reconciled? With regards to understanding Aristotle's physics as preparation for metaphysics -- was there a problem there as well? Did some jump into metaphysics without acquiring physics first? It seems to me that the later medievals took his physics more seriously.

4. What about Aristotelian logic? I have been unable to investigate the medieval appropriation of logic and its development (especially in relation to metaphysics) I'll have to pick up a copy of Medieval Logic: An Outline of Its Development from 1250 to c. 1400 by Philotheus Boehner. Can differences between Aquinas and Scotus (or Ockham) be reduced or at least partially linked to different understandings/interpretations of Aristotle?

If you think community is so important, then why aren't you living in accordance with what you teach?

More thoughts on the topic of this post.

What about the scholastics? Is their witness diminished because so many of them did not labor where they came from, but were instead teaching at "international" centers of learning? They can be defended because they had been excused from family and communal duties because they had been set aside for God and His work.

I also note that it seems that the treatment of community and its origins in their political treatises and commentaries on Aristotle is short, if not "dry"short if not "dry" because the nature of communal life and how it came to be was not at issue in that day; it was simply taken for granted. Could they have imagined the various social and technological changes that have made modern atomistic living possible? As Fr. Cessario pointed out in class one time, the reason why the medievals didn't write much on the community is because they were living it. It is a more developed topic for us and the subject for so much spilled ink precisely because we don't have it.

I think it is correct to say that the teachers at the medieval universities were all clergy, secular priests or religious. When did lay masters first appear at the European universities, and when did they become a significant minority? How did they live up to their duties to family and community? What institutions were there, other than the state, for forming the laity? How much resistance was there to the centralizers of modern Europe, and was any of it found outside the nobility? Was there a lack of training among the elites in political science, or was alienation from the masses a greater factor? That is, the elites fought against centralization in order to maintain power and status, not to protect the communal life of those subordinate to them.

First Things: Inevitable Scholasticism
A review of Introduction to Scholastic Theology
Thomas Joseph White

Doctor Subtilis (link via The Smith)

From the current issue of Humanitas: Phillip W. Gray, Political Theology and the Theology of Politics: Carl Schmitt and Medieval Political Thought