International Catholic University
Philosophy no longer an umbrella term
If the sciences speak of this being or that, will not talk of being amount to a different and distinctive science . . . that which characterizes philosophy?
But doesn't the philosopher say things about physical things?
This seems prompted by the rise of the sciences and the apparent need of philosophy to describe itself in independence of them
Maritain -- from the Degrees of Knowledge to Existence and the Existent
"For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize . . . " -- Aristotle
Ens primum cognitum and ens inquantum ens
We say in the first lecture that metaphysics is wisdom and as such is unlikely to be available to us at the starting point simply in virtue of the fact that we grasp being. Of course it is being we know -- what else is there -- but it is physical being, that grasped by our senses.
Until shown otherwise to be and to be material are one and the same
Until and unless we have grounds for holding that there are things which exist apart from, differently from, physical things, natural philosophy is philosophy; the highest science and thus wisdom.
Physical things -- they have come to be as the result of a change
The matter of substantial change, known on an analogy with the subject of incidental change
Matter is the principle of change
Are there any beings which do not have matter as a component?
"If physics is all, then what's a metaphor?" -- Monica Quill
If in the course of doing natural philosophy, we acquired a certainty that not everything exists does so in the way physical things do, questions about being as such could be raised
Thomas teaches that there are two such moments in natural philosophy
Whatever is moved is moved by another
There cannot be an infinite series of moved movers.
There must be a first unmoved mover,
This proof is not self-evidently true; for that matter, the meaning of the premises is anything but self-evident. This is the culminating proof of Aristotle's Metaphysics.
If it works, the first mover of the things that make up the physical world is not another physical object . . . something immaterial
"I desire to know but two things, God and the soul." -- Saint Augustine
For Plato, the human soul was almost self-evidently a more than physical object . . . it existed prior to its imprisonment in the body and thus continued after death . . .
From physical objects to living being
the soul is the form of the living body
The signet ring and the wax . . . Aristotle's sense of the unity of soul and body to make one substance seems to preclude any separate existence of the soul
To come to see
A kind of becoming: the reception of a form . . . red
But to see red is not for another instance of redness to come to exist . . . the eye does not become red by dint of seeing red . . . or if it does, the becoming is not like the ripening of an apple
This is the first instance of a reception of form different from the reception of form in matter . . . an immaterial reception, that is
Intellection -- grasp of a kind . . . of redness, say
Agent intellect
Passive intellect -- the concept as form
If thinking is a process that does not involve matter or a material organ, the soul that has this capacity can exist apart from matter.
Two proofs within natural science that the objects of natural science do not exhaust reality