The Third Way | Prof. Thomas Osborne

The Thomistic Institute

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4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 18 January 2021

⏱️ 38 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given on December 5, 2020 as part of "The Five Ways: A Symposium on Aquinas’s Proofs for the Existence of God" at St. Bernard Abbey in Cullman, AL.

The hand out for this talk can be found here tinyurl.com/y7lr4uzd

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Speaker Bio:

Thomas M. Osborne, Jr. (Ph.D., Duke 2001), is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy, and a member of the Center for Thomistic Studies, University of St. Thomas (Houston). He has written many articles on medieval and late-scholastic philosophy and other topics, and is the author of Love of Self and Love of God in Thirteenth-Century Ethics (2005), Human Action in Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and WIlliam of Ockham (2014), and Aquinas's Ethics (2020).

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Thomistic Institute.
0:03.3	For more talks like this, visit us at tamisticinstitute.org.
0:10.9	So the talk is on the third way of St. Thomas Aquinas.
0:15.9	In the past hundred years, it's one of the most disputed over ways in the scholarly literature.
0:23.2	People disagree over what kind of argument it is, how it's related to other arguments
0:27.9	of Thomas Aquinas, and even given agreement about what kind of argument it is, people
0:35.0	disagree over whether it's a valid argument, whether the premises ground
0:40.4	the conclusion. And so what was said earlier about the five ways applies here. You don't have to
0:49.9	believe that they work to be Catholic. Okay. Monsignor Whipple thinks that there's a
0:59.0	serious error in the third way. He's an authority on Thomas Aquinas' metaphysics.
1:04.0	I used to think that there was an error in the third way myself for many years. But it's helpful and interesting. Okay?
1:14.1	All right. So what is this third way? The first way focused on motion. There's motion in the world
1:21.1	to move back, to go back to a first mover, or movers or whatever.
1:32.4	The second way, efficient causes.
1:36.7	So we see efficient causes in the world, a particular kind of action in the world.
1:43.3	Third way, we start with kinds of substances, substances that do something. They are subject to corruption and they're also
1:47.0	generated or they have something done to them to make them. Okay? So it's an argument based on
1:55.5	kinds of things in the world, something about substances. Now, with all these other arguments, it proves something,
2:06.4	namely in this case, a necessary substance that has no cause of its necessity. It's, in my view,
2:15.7	even though we don't prove much about the existence of God in this question, too, we don't prove much about his essence, that is, or what he isn't.
2:26.0	We do prove some properties or predicates that belong to God and only to God.
2:34.1	So there's a way in which they all prove to the same thing, namely God,
	...

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