This study investigates the origin of the Aristotelian doctrine of the identity of the knower and the known in the context of the system of Thomas Aquinas. The author takes the view that this doctrine is central to Aquinas’ theory of knowledge and specific to his theory of intentional forms species. The aim is to present and motivate an interpretation of the identity of knower and known as numerical identity, while calling into question the traditional understanding of this identity as formal.
Although the Mayr’s definition of species is commonly accepted for eukaryotic organisms, bacteria do not meet those established criteria. Thus, a special approach is necessary to elaborate the definition resistant to such limitations as for example the lack of sexual reproduction or horizontal gene transfers. One of the most problematic taxa in microbiology is the Bacillus cereus group composed of several closely related bacteria. Thus, on the basis of this model, doubts concerning bacterial taxonomy are discussed in the light of actual, molecular data.
A few Polish movies are quite peculiar from the point of view of the genre. In their style and construction, they are based on the formula of the western pattern. It is worth pointing out that these films are quite good. There is some evidence that the formula of the Wild West story possesses a some timeless and universal vigor. In my essay I have analyzed Polish westerns such as Ogniomistrz Kaleń by Ewa and Czesław Petelscy (1961), Jerzy Passendorfer’s Zerwany most (1962), Bohdan Poręba’s Droga na zachód (1961), Aleksander Ścibor-Rylski’s Wilcze echa (1968), Edward Skórzewski’s and Jerzy Hoffman’s Prawo i pięść 1964), Waldemar Podgórski’s Południk zero (1970), and the famous picture Róża, by Wojciech Smarzowski (2011). All theseworks display some elements of western staffage, but mostimportantly they contain the genre’s characteristics and its deep structures, that is liminal space (Frontier), uncertain time of chaos, some fundamental values in danger, the passive attitude of society, an anti-hero and, of course, the PROTAGONIST — a lonely, heroic, tragic individual, representing the world of ideals.
An analysis of the structure of grammatical texts in relation to the doctrine of grammatical accidents and its terminology is presented in the article. It describes nominal species and figura accidents from late-ancient Artes grammaticae, which, after long historical development, formed the basis for the word-formation discipline as we understand it today. Special attention is paid to the position of species and figura accidents in the De nomine chapter of the part of the grammars devoted to Etymologia and to the way they changed over time. Alongside species and figura, additional accidents (motio first and foremost), which later enriched the species-figura basis, are taken into account. The focus lies in the period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, when vernacular grammars (including grammars of Czech, Slovakized Czech, and Slovak) reflected the changes in the structure of Latin grammars. Within the given topic, typical features of representative grammatical texts are also identified: e.g., the features of Melanchthonian grammar, the Ramean ones, and the impact of Scaliger. The end of the eighteenth century, as demonstrated in the article, appears to be the crucial stage in the history of the establishment of word-formation as a self-contained linguistic discipline in the grammatography of Upper Hungary. At that time (specifically in 1791), Anton Bernolak, following in the footsteps of Rosa’s (1672) and particularly Doležal’s (1746) grammars, finally identified wordformation as an independent research area in his systematic treatise entitled Etymologia vocum Slavicarum.
An understanding of the philosophical genus contributes to the perfection of the act of the philosophical habit of the human soul because reality is constituted by a multitude of overlapping genera. Because genera are constituted by a multitude of species unequally related to their generic aim, St. Thomas’s teaching on virtual quantity facilitates an understanding of the diversity of being. Analogy is an act of judgment that expresses an unequally proportionate relationship between beings. Like genus, analogy has to do with a multitude of beings unequally related to a primary subject; as such, analogy is the language of philosophy. To see ‘a city come into being in speech’ in Book II of The Republic is to be trained to observe the relation between real beings, to make correct judgments about those relationships, and to thereby be properly oriented toward reality.
The main question of my paper—inspired by Aby Warburg’s notion of Pathosformeln and his reading of Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animal— is how animals can represent pathos of human experience in a way, which humanistic, purely anthropocentric forms of expression can no longer account for. In order to present my argument I would like to analyse three examples from literature. Rainer Maria Rilke’s Malte, Thomas Bernhard’s Distortion and W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz. In all three cases animal are necessary to express human pathos but the intensity of this expression seems to go far beyond the limits of the traditional human-animal division.
Dr. Brian T. Carl published a paper, “Thomas Aquinas on the Proportionate Causes of Living Species,” in which he defends a thesis that the principle of proportionate cause, as understood by Aquinas, cannot be used to contradict the modern theory of biological evolution. This rejoinder explores thoroughly Carl’s argument, specifically his idea that spontaneous generation serves as a model to explain causality in biological evolution. It is shown that Aquinas indeed accepts proportionate causes in spontaneous generation, but this fact cannot be extrapolated to modern evolutionary theories. The origin of new species after creation was completed is not a straightforward thesis in Aquinas; rather Thomas sees it as a possible exception, which contradicts the evolutionary origin of the vast majority of species. Additionally, Carl misses the major point that in Aquinas the origin of new species belongs to the work of creation rather than the natural operation of secondary causes.
The names of plants are presented as an example of the way in which terminological items are treated in the Academic Dictionary of Contemporary Czech (ASSČ). The general principles applied are accuracy and comprehensibility of explanation, while specific rules include the proper choice of the genus proximum and theparaphrasing of botanical terms necessary for the description of the plant. The treatment of the genus and the treatment of the species differ in the position of the botanical name in the entry. We also discuss the treatment of polysemic lexemes of this semantic group, as well as the treatment of plant families. The principles are illustrated using examples of completed entries.
Parmenides was not a metaphysician (he was a materialist), so there is no such thing as Parmenidean metaphysics. Plato’s Parmenides, however, offers metaphysical insights otherwise overlooked by readers unfamiliar to what St. Thomas Aquinas offers concerning the One and the Many. This article highlights some of these insights and will interest students of St. Thomas. It might also acquaint students of Plato to a more perfect metaphysics, and it could even corrode the beliefs of others who maintain that there is no such thing as metaphysics. The fact that none of the sciences may dispense with the first science is brought heavily to bear upon the reader of the Parmenides, who finds it otherwise impossible to resolve any of the difficulties attendant upon reconciling the One and the Many. The many apparent contradictions between the One and the Many displayed in Plato’s Parmenides really cannot be solved without sound metaphysics, and sound metaphysics cannot proceed unaided by St. Thomas and his inheritors. Go to Thomas to understand Plato’s Parmenides.
The author makes an attempt to show why (1) Darwin’s teaching in The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection and The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex cannot be “scientific” in a modern, classical, or any, sense and that, consequently, in them, (2) Darwin did not scientifically prove the reality of evolution of species. He claims that, while the question of the origin of genera and species is principally and primarily a metaphysical problem, Darwin’s ignorance of the nature of philosophy and metaphysics and the complexity of the problem of the nature of genera and species caused him mistakenly to frame this metaphysical problem as one of physics, more precisely as one of biology, which Darwin reduced to a natural history of living, physical beings.
Авторы широко комментированного отчета IPBES от 2019 года предупреждают, что около миллиона видов, живущих в настоящее время на земле, скоро вымрут. Однако в дискуссиях, ведущихся как в СМИ, так и среди профессионалов поднимается другая проблема – мы не знаем, сколько видов обитает на земле. Согласно обширным исследованиям и статистическому моделированию существует не менее шести миллионов видов, которые еще не описаны или не названы. Термин «описанный вид» означает, что животное или растение получили уникальное научное название, подтверждающее его идентичность и родство с другими живущими существами. Таким образом, остается вопрос о том, как мы оцениваем виды, которые еще не названы, не известны или не обнаружены. Наиболее распространенной практикой является оценка только тех существ, которые непосредственно связаны с человеческим существованием, однако встречаются размышления о том, что мы должны ценить животных также ради их существования, за их внутреннюю ценность. В связи с этим необходимо пересмотреть такие антропоцентрические понятия как «вредитель» и «инвазивный вид».
PL
Autorzy szeroko nagłośnionego raportu IPBES z 2019 roku ostrzegają, że liczba gatunków, które wyginęły na Ziemi, wkrótce przekroczy milion. W debatach prowadzonych zarówno w mediach, jak i wśród profesjonalistów porusza się jednak jeszcze inny problem – nie wiemy mianowicie, ile w ogóle gatunków żyje na Ziemi. Na podstawie wyników szeroko zakrojonych badań i modelowania statystycznego szacuje się, że istnieje jeszcze co najmniej sześć milionów gatunków, które nie zostały opisane ani nazwane. Termin „opisany gatunek” oznacza, że zwierzę lub roślina otrzymały niepowtarzalną nazwę naukową, która potwierdza jego/jej tożsamość i pokrewieństwo z innymi organizmami. Powstaje zatem pytanie, czy, a jeśli tak, to jak cenimy gatunki, które nie zostały jeszcze odkryte ani tym bardziej nazwane. Najczęstszą praktyką jest docenianie tylko tych stworzeń, które są bezpośrednio związane z ludzką egzystencją, coraz częściej jednak pojawiają się refleksje, że powinniśmy cenić zwierzęta ze względu na ich istnienie, ich wartość samą w sobie, a nie tylko ze względu na ich wartość dla człowieka. W związku z tym należy ponownie rozważyć antropocentryczne koncepcje takich pojęć jak „szkodnik” czy „gatunek inwazyjny”.
EN
A widely publicized IPBES report from 2019 warns that close to one million species currently on Earth will soon be extinct. In addition to debates in the media and among professionals about the factual value of that number, a larger problem remains-we do not know how many species are on Earth. According to extensive studies and statistical modelling, there are at least six million species in existence that have not yet been described. The term “described species” means that the animal or plant has received a unique scientific name that confirms its identity and relation to other organisms. A question thus remains about how we value species that are not yet named, known, or discovered. The most common practice is to value only creatures that are directly related to human existence, yet there is growing concern that we should value animals for the sake of their existence, for their intrinsic value. In this respect, the anthropocentric concepts of “pest” and “invasive species” need to be re-considered.
The chief aim of this article is to show that St. Thomas Aquinas’s Fourth Way of demonstrating God’s existence can only be made precisely intelligible by comprehending it as a real, generic whole in light of its specific organizational principles. Considered as a real, generic whole, this argument is one from effect to cause (from a real order of more or less perfectly existing generic, specific, and individual beings [habens esse] more or less perfectly possessing generic, specific, and individual ways of being within qualitatively different, hierarchical, orders of existence to a first cause of this order of perfections). In addition, this article maintains that, to comprehend this complicated argument, readers mush be familiar with philosophical principles that St. Thomas repeatedly uses throughout his major works, but with which most of his contemporary students tend to be unfamiliar. Consequently, a secondary aim of this paper is to introduce readers unfamiliar with them to some of these principle so that they may be able better to comprehend what St. Thomas is saying in this demonstration and in other teachings of his as well.
In this article the author discusses Dennis F. Polis’ defense of the compatibility of biological evolution and Thomistic metaphysics. Some of Polis’ methodological and metaphysical arguments are examined and it is explained why they are unfaithful to the Thomistic tradition of metaphysics. There is a discussion of why metaphysics can, within certain parameters, critique the science of evolutionary biology, as well as a discussion of the role of metaphysics in the hierarchy of the sciences. The relationship between biological species to the notion of species in philosophy, including related metaphysical topics, such as essences and Divine ideas in God, is discussed. It is determined that Polis’ view suffers from a kind of relativism and nominalism that is incompatible with the moderate realism of Aquinas. Some of Aquinas’ key existential insights in metaphysics are discussed in this context as well. In addition to being corrective, this essay helps point the way to a better defense of the compatibility of biological evolution and Thomistic metaphysics.
Modern dispute about the understanding of culture and nature is rich in tradition and dates back to ancient Greek sophists. However, in the modern era we observe a radicalization of positions. This is caused by superficial understanding of both the nature and culture, what matters is the narrow empiricism or extreme idealism. In addition, there is the absence of a human problem in this dispute, which is supported by anthropology practiced today within the framework of specialized and narrow detailed disciplines without the possibility of synthesis. An off er to solve this dispute, having sometimes the nature of the conflict, is a subjective nature of culture, allowing to reconcile man’s relationship with nature and everything that cannot be brought only to this dimension. The best evidence of this solution proves to be a Christian personalism, which does not overlook any of the essential dimensions of human existence. Besides the complex structure of the human being - what best describes the concept of a person – it applies both to the material and the spiritual world, providing thus a foundation in resolving the dispute over the understanding of culture and human nature. The ultimate criterion remains the event of the Incarnation, which is appropriate to claim an objective criterion of reality - “I am the truth” (Jn 14,6), shedding light on the human understanding; his secret and mystery. The value of culture is evaluated from the point of view of the objective truth, which also remains a key reference within the meaning of nature and its relationship to human activity.
This paper is written to articulate in a summary form 14 evidently-known essential and personalistic principles from the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas needed, especially by Pope Francis, to understand a third period of neo-Thomism we are now in: Born-again, or Ragamuffin, Thomism. It maintains that, without application of these principles to the Church’s “new evangelization,” this movement will fail. With that failure the Church will be unable to halt the cultural suicide in which the West is presently engaged.
This article argues that, strictly speaking, from its inception with the ancient Greeks and for all time, philosophy and science are identical and consist in an essential relationship between a specific type of understanding of the human person as possessed of an intellectual soul capable of being habituated and a psychologically-independent composite whole, or organization. It maintains, further, that absence of either one of the extremes of this essential relationship cannot be philosophy/science and, if mistaken for such and applied to the workings of cultural institutions, will generate anarchy within human culture and make leadership excellence impossible to achieve. Finally, it argues that only a return to this “common sense” understanding of philosophy can generate the leadership excellence that can save the West from its current state of cultural and civilizational anarchy.
Since most pressing today on a global scale is to be able to unite religion, philosophy, and science into parts of a coherent civilizational whole, and since the ability to unite a multitude into parts of a coherent whole essentially requires understanding the natures of the things and the way they can or cannot be essentially related, this paper chiefly considers precisely why the modern world has been unable to effect this union. In so doing, it argues that the chief cause of this inability to unite these cultural natures has been because the contemporary world, and the West especially, has lost its understanding of philosophy and science and has intentionally divorced from essential connection to wisdom. Finally, it proposes a common sense way properly to understand these natures, reunite them to wisdom, and revive Western and global civilization.
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