Expositions of the text: Aquinas's Aristotelian commentaries

Medieval Philosophy and Theology

Volumn 5, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 39-62

  Jenkins, John ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 42649140045     PISSN: 10570608     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/medievalpt1996513     Document Type: Article

References (36)

1. and Martin Grabmann, Mittelalterliches Geislesleben: Abhandlungen sur Geschichte der Scholastik und Mystik (Munich: Hueber, 1926), pp. 266-313
2. More recent contributions include Marie-Dominique Chenu, O.P., Toward Understanding Saint Thomas, trans. A.-M. Landry, O.P., and D. Hughes, O.P. (Chicago: Regnery, 1964), pp. 203-32
3. Georges Ducoin, S.J., "Saint Thomas Commentateur d'Aristote," Récherchés de Philosophie I (1955): 85-107
4. R. P. Ioannes Issac, O.P., "Saint Thomas Interprete Des Oeuvres D'Aristote," in Scholastica Ratione Historico-Critica Instauranda (Rome: Bibliotheca Pontificii Athenaei Antoniani, 1951), pp. 353-63
5. Etienne Gilson, whose remarks are brief but influential, in History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (London: Sheed & Ward, 1955), p. 367
6. and in Elements of Christian Philosophy (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959), p. 282
7. James A. Weisheipl, O.P., Friar Thomas D'Aquino: His Life, Thought, and Work (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1974), pp. 272-285
8. Joseph Owens, C.Ss.R., "Aquinas as Aristotelian Commentator," in St. Thomas Aquinas 1274-1974: Commemorative Studies (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1974), pp. 213-38
9. René Antoine Gauthier, O.P., "Saint Thomas et L'Ethique a Nicomaque," in Sentencia libri politicorum. Tabula libri ethicorum, Leonine Edition of Thomas's Opera Omnia 48 (Rome, 1882-), i-xxv
10. Ludwig Hödl, "Philosophis-che Ethik und Moral-Theologie in der Summa fratris Thomae," in Thomas von Aquin (Berlin: Zimmermann, 1988), pp. 23-42
11. Mark D. Jordan, Thomas Aquinas's Disclaimers in the Aristotelian Commentaries," in Philosophy and the God of Abraham: Essays in Memory of fames A. Weisheipl, O.P., ed. R. James Long (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1991), p. 104
12. and in The Alleged Aristotelianism of Thomas Aquinas, Etienne Gilson Series 15 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1992)
13. Francis Cheneval and Ruedi Imbach, in the einleitung to Prologe zu den Aristoteleskommentaren (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1993), pp. xiii-lx
14. Issac, "Saint Thomas," p. 355. Although others may not have asserted this view as starkly as Issac, it is not uncommon to find in the literature writers citing, without futher comment, passages in the Aristotelian commentaries when they are trying to discover Aquinas's own views on some philosophical issue. Such a procedure implicitly endorses Issac's position
15. Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy, p. 367
16. Jordan, "Thomas Aquinas's Disclaimers," p. 104
17. Jordan, "St. Thomas's Disclaimers", p. 105). Still, even if we grant Gauthier's and Jordan's point, because Aquinas wrote the commentaries not for his peers but for students, he naturally would have paid special attention to those places where Aristotle's doctrine seemed to conflict with Christian doctrine and take care that his students would not have been led to heretical views. When we turn to the relevant passages in the commentaries, we do find evidence of this concern
18. Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 1074b22. Aquinas's own translation of this line uses the disjunction aut rather than vel. The former, but not the latter, tends to imply that only one of the disjuncts is true
19. Chenu, Understanding Saint Thomas, p. 207
20. See also Ducoin, "Saint Thomas," who takes a similar position
21. On how Abelard's work is traditional and how innovative, see Jean Jolivet, Arts du Langage et Théologie chez Abélard, Etudes de Philosophic Médiévale Series (Paris: Vrin, 1982), especially pp. 238-51
22. Peter Abelard, Sic et Non: A Critical Edition, ed. Blanche B. Boyer and Richard McKeon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976-77), p. 103
23. On this see Weisheipl, Thomas D'Aquino, pp. 124ff
24. and Gorden Leff, Paris and Oxford in the 13th and 14th Centuries: An Institutional and Intellectual History (New York: Wiley, 1968), pp. 167-77
25. See also J. D. G. Evans, Aristotle's Concept of Dialectic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), especially chap. 3
26. and Owen, Tithenai ta Phainomena."
27. Thomas Aquinas In symbolum apostolorum, prologus, 864, in Opuscula theologica, vol. II (Rome: Marietti, 1954)
28. For a fuller exposition of Aquinas's views on nominal definitions and for a more detailed argument that Aquinas espoused what we call externalism below, see my "Aquinas on the Veracity of the Intellect," The Journal of Philosophy, 88 (November 1991): 623-32
29. and "Good and the Object of Natural Inclinations in St. Thomas Aquinas," Medieval Philosophy and Theology, 3 (1993): 62-96
30. Among the most important articles are Hilary Putnam, "The Meaning of 'Meaning'," in Mind, Language, and Reality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975)
31. Tyler Burge, "Individualism and the Mental," ed. P. French, T. Vehling, and H. Wettstein, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. 4 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979), pp. 73-121
32. "Other Bodies," in Thought and Object, ed. Andrew Woodfield (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 97-120
33. and "Intellectual Norms and Foundations of Mind," Journal of Philosophy 83 (1986): 697-720
34. Colin McGinn, The Structure of Content, " in Thought and Object, pp. 207-68
35. Antoine Lavoisier, of course, was the one who separated this newly identified gas from phlogiston theory and gave it the name principe oxigine, which he later shortened to oxygène. Although he claimed to have discovered oxygen, his claim is not recognized. See J. R. Partington, A Short History of Chemistry (London: Macmil-lan, 1957), p. 129
36. Jordan, Alleged Arislotelianism of Thomas Aquinas, p. 41