Sublime

For a superb presentation of Aristotelian premises and logic in the context of religious philosophy, there is no better presentation than Norbert M. Samuelson, Revelation and the God of Israel

The principles of definition, the law of contradiction, the fallacy of arguing in a circle, the distinction between the essence and accidents of a thing or notion, between means and ends, between causes and conditions; also the division of the mind into the rational, concupiscent, and irascible elements, or of pleasures and desires into necessary a

It was William of Occam who propounded the fateful doctrine of nominalism, which denies that universals have a real existence.

John supported free will, and this might have passed uncensured; but what roused indignation was the purely philosophic character of his argument. Not that he professed to controvert anything accepted in theology, but that he maintained the equal, or even superior, authority of a philosophy independent of revelation. He contended that reason and re

Locke, as we saw, believed pleasure to be the good, and this was the prevalent view among empiricists throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their opponents, on the contrary, despised pleasure as ignoble, and had various systems of ethics which seemed more exalted. Hobbes valued power, and Spinoza, up to a point, agreed with Hobbes.

Denys Turner writes, “In showing God to exist reason shows that we no longer know what ‘exists’ means.”

It is the highest thing. Jesus agrees, proclaiming himself at John 14:6 to be the way, the truth and the life.

But what exactly does “intrinsic goodness” mean? The most famous attempt to define an intrinsically good rule was made by Immanuel Kant, a contemporary of Clausewitz and Napoleon. Kant argued that an intrinsically good rule is any rule that I would like to make universal. According to this view, a person about to murder someone should stop and go t