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to mystic institute.org. Thank you so much. It is a great pleasure and privilege to be with you all today.

And I'm looking forward to speaking about an area of specialization for me. I am primarily a metaphysician,

which I believe will become very

evident in the course of this talk. But today, the question that was posed to me by Father Ambrose

for reflection was whether or not the sun or light could be a universal cause in contemporary

science, as it was for those in the Aristotelian tradition.

Now, I will confess that while the causes and universals warm my to mystic metaphysicians'

heart and I live in Southern California, the sun is not something to which I had thus far devoted much philosophical consideration, nor am I a scientist. So even though I have a visual

presentation, I am reading a prepared paper. But, like most things, it quickly proved to be quite

interesting. Not so much in itself, although it was intriguing to see, to what extent Thomas's

understanding of the sun tracks what we now know,

but certainly in how the Sun was used to illustrate a number of foundational philosophical

principles and concepts, including of paramount importance, universal causality. Although Thomas

devotes little attention directly to the Sun, and I'll qualify that in a little bit,

he frequently employed it as an example to illustrate other central concerns. Recognizing as he did,

that human learning progresses from what is better known to what is less known, the sun was an

outstanding example for him inasm much as it was, well,

obvious. It's also a recurring example of an issue that is central to the entirety of

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