Aquinas’ Fourth Way: Humility vs. Skepticism in Theological Reasoning | Prof. Joshua Hochschild

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Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Thomism, Society & Culture, Religion & Spirituality, Catholicism, Philosophy, Christianity

4.8 • 873 Ratings

🗓️ 16 December 2022

⏱️ 43 minutes

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Summary

This talk was given on October 13, 2022, at the University of Edinburgh. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at thomsiticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Joshua Hochschild is Professor of Philosophy and Director of Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Mount St. Mary’s University, where he also served six years as the inaugural Dean of the College of Liberal Arts. His primary research is in medieval logic, metaphysics, and ethics, with broad interest in liberal education and the continuing relevance of the Catholic intellectual tradition. He is the author of The Semantics of Analogy: Rereading Cajetan’s De Nominum Analogia (2010), translator of Claude Panaccio’s Mental Language: From Plato to William of Ockham (2017), and co-author of A Mind at Peace: Reclaiming an Ordered Soul in the Age of Distraction (2017). His writing has appeared in First Things, Commonweal, Modern Age and the Wall Street Journal. For 2020-21 he served as President of the American Catholic Philosophical Association.

Transcript

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0:59.4	Thank you for your generosity, and may God bless you this Advent and Christmas season.
1:10.4	Aquinas's fourth way, humility versus skepticism in theological reasoning.
1:15.6	When Thomas Aquinas proves that God exists, he doesn't think it's a big deal.
1:22.6	To him, the proof is intellectually easy, historically uncontroversial, and even something of a compromise.
1:31.4	It was a plain matter of empirical fact for him that the existence of God can be proven,
1:37.9	indeed a matter of historical fact that it had been proven. Aquinas found the best philosophy, the best of philosophy in the Greek
1:46.3	tradition to chart a middle path between treating God's existence as, on the one hand, perfectly
1:53.0	self-evident and conceptually inescapable, and so not in need of proof, and on the other hand,
2:00.0	as something entirely mysterious and exceeding human
2:03.2	reason and so not capable of proof. Aquinas had an ambitious project of natural theology,
2:09.4	in which there were highly significant moves for reason to make in pursuing a greater share
2:14.0	of knowledge of God, a project with crucial space for rational uncertainty
2:19.0	about the divine nature. But proving the existence of God was for him a simple entry-level exercise.
	...

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