Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral: Aquinas on Inanimate vs. Animate Nature | Fr. Thomas Davenport, O.P.

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4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 7 October 2022

⏱️ 66 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given at the Fourth Annual Thomistic Philosophy and Natural Science Symposium entitled, Complexity, Simplicity and Emergence, on July 14, 2022 at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website: www.thomisticinstitute.org About the speaker: Fr. Thomas Davenport, O.P. is a Dominican friar, physicist, and philosopher. He joined the faculty of philosophy at the Angelicum in Rome in 2020, where he co-leads the Project for Science and Religion. Before joining the Dominican order he studied physics at the California Institute of Technology before going on to earn his doctorate in physics from Stanford University studying theoretical particle physics. The focus of his scientific research is writing and testing simulations for high energy particle colliders like the LHC at CERN. After joining the Dominicans in 2010, he studied philosophy and theology in preparation for his ordination to the priesthood in 2017. In addition, he earned a Licentiate in Philosophy from the Catholic University of America, focusing on the philosophy of science and natural philosophy. For two years he was an Assistant Professor of Physics at Providence College in Providence, RI, where he taught physics and restarted a research program in particle physics. He has written and spoken in a number of forums on the relationship between faith and science including contributions to the Thomistic Evolution project and organizing conferences on science and philosophy for the Thomistic Institute in Washington, DC.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Thomistic Institute. For more talks like this, visit us at
0:05.3	Tamistic Institute.org. Sometimes Tomas tend to focus so much on the physics, because it is
0:14.4	hugely important. So this is the work in which Aristotle lays out his general principle for how nature works in the most general way.
0:23.6	You know, what are the ways, like, how do we talk about any, like, how do we talk about
0:27.6	a change in such a way that it will apply to any change we encounter?
0:31.6	How do we talk about substances or accidents in a way that it will apply to any substance
0:36.6	or accident we encounter.
0:38.3	How do we talk about the general ideas around time and place?
0:42.8	And, you know, it talks about the infinite and the void, continuous, all these sort of general
0:47.7	principles.
0:48.7	And that's hugely important.
0:50.1	And if you get that wrong, you've got to be careful there.
0:52.7	But as Aristotle himself and Aquinas and Albert strongly emphasize, you're not done with natural philosophy when you do, you don't understand natural philosophy when you finish Aristotle's physics.
1:06.3	You're just getting started.
1:07.8	And until you work it down to its details, it's an incomplete project.
1:11.8	So the attempt here is to at least motivate that. So this is, and just, this is only just part
1:18.2	one, right? I haven't even gotten the stuff on animals. So this is all these works on animals
1:22.2	in actual fact, I'm not going to touch on all this, but I will talk about what I am going to
1:26.7	talk about a little bit. So in fine, timistic fashion, I'm not going to touch on all this, but I will talk about what I am. I'm going to talk about a little bit there.
1:27.9	So in fine, domestic passion, I want to lay out what are the final causes of this talk?
1:33.3	What am I hoping to get across here?
1:35.2	One, I want to explain in some detail how St. Thomas Aquinas would have understood the major divisions of nature in his own way.
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