Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.

Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.

The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.

To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at to mystic institute.org.

We're launching a free new Aquinas 101 digital platform.

Dive into the world of St. Thomas Aquinas with a customized learning environment,

certificates of achievement, interactive elements,

and a redesigned digital Summa Theologiae featuring a side-by-side Latin to English translation.

To be notified when the platform goes live, sign up at go.comisticinstitute.org slash new Aquinas 101.

That's go.comistic institute.org slash new Aquinas 101.

Just before I get started, just a few points of terminology, because I realize people are from

very different backgrounds here, a distinction between validity and soundness, because I'm going to

be talking about arguments, and sometimes I'm going to be talking about arguments,

and sometimes I'm going to be saying that an argument is valid, and by saying it's valid,

I don't mean that it is necessarily a good argument. I just mean that it's an argument where

the conclusion follows from the premises. One or more of the premises might be false.

So ballot doesn't mean the way it often does on the street, just good.

I've used the word sound for an argument that is valid and has true premises.

Okay.

This talk is going to deal a lot with questions about whether certain phrases, like the ones

I have in quotation marks over there, God's act of creating

alpha, God's wills alpha, what those phrases designate, what they refer to in reality.

...