Divine Simplicity and Identity | Prof. Jeffrey Brower

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 7 August 2024

⏱️ 35 minutes

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Summary

Professor Jeffrey Brower explores the traditional doctrine of divine simplicity, which states that God is identical to His attributes. He examines the historical context, including perspectives from Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas, and addresses the standard objection raised by contemporary analytic philosophers. Brower proposes a "truth maker" interpretation of divine simplicity as an alternative to the problematic "property" account, arguing that this approach avoids category mistakes while maintaining coherence with traditional understandings.

This lecture was given on June 1, 2024, at Mount Saint Mary College.

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About the Speaker:

Jeffrey E. Brower is Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University, where he serves as the faculty advisor for the Thomistic Institute. He specializes in medieval philosophy, metaphysics, and philosophical theology and especially enjoys working at the intersection of all three areas. He is the author of Aquinas’s Ontology of the Material World: Change, Hylomorphism, and Material Objects (Oxford University Press, 2014) and a contributor to The Oxford Handbook on Aquinas (Oxford University Press, 2012). His recent articles include “Aquinas on the Individuation of Substances,” Oxford Studies in Medieval Philosophy (2017) and “Aquinas on the Problem of Universals,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (2016).

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.
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1:22.3	slash Rome. Okay, as the title for my talk suggests, I've been asked to speak to you about the topic of
1:30.4	divine simplicity and identity, more precisely about the question of how can God be identical
1:36.6	to his properties? This question raises what is perhaps the standard objection to the doctrine
1:42.5	of divine simplicity from contemporary
1:44.5	analytic philosophers. And I don't think it's hard to see why. The doctrine of divine
1:50.1	simplicity requires that God is absolutely simple and hence devoid of any complexity whatsoever.
1:56.8	And on the traditional understanding of this doctrine, it excludes not only the complexity associated with the possession of ordinary material parts or even temporal parts, but it also excludes the complexity associated with the possession of distinct properties or attributes.
2:12.9	And here I would direct you to the second item under A on the handout, where I indicate that on the traditional understanding,
2:20.8	there is no distinction between God and his nature, existence, goodness, power, or wisdom.
2:28.1	On the contrary, God is identical to each of these things, as well as to anything else that can be truly predicated of him,
	...

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