Thomas Aquinas and the "Conditions Of Possibility" of a Natural Science: the Efficiency of Second Causes
Abstract
In Summa contra gentiles III 69, Thomas Aquinas engages in a polemic with a group of authors that have in common the fact that they “subtract their proper actions from natural things”, and among which we find some Muslim theologians (Mutakallims), Avicebron and Avicenna. In all of them we recognize a general tendency to attribute every causal power to God, to the extent that no margin of action at all is left to corporeal beings. The general principle underlying these doctrines is that what is active is spiritual and immaterial; correlatively, what is corporeal and material is regarded as rather passive. Among the inconveniences or difficulties derived from these doctrines, Aquinas points out some arguments that depart from the regularity of the world of experience and from the features of our knowledge of nature. In this theological polemic against Occasionalism and Neoplatonism, Aquinas elaborates a discourse on the “conditions of possibility” of the natural science –that is to say, the Aristotelian physics–. All this shows that Thomas tries to draw, by means of a philosophical synthesis of different sources, a creationist metaphysics compatible with the Aristotelian philosophy of nature.Downloads
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