Hello, I'm Dr. Anadale. I teach philosophy at Mount Saint Mary's University in Emmitsburg. Maryland.
Our text for today is the beginning of Thomas Aquinas’ Commentary on the Sentences.
First, a word about the work’s format.
Thomas begins each section of his Commentary, called an Article, by stating a problem under
discussion, usually as a yes or no question.
Then he gives arguments, reasons for giving one answer to the question, either yes or
no, usually the obvious or common-sense answer, the one that would occur to us first when
we first heard the question.
And then he gives us a section called On the Contrary, where he gives arguments for the
opposite answer.
So Thomas begins by stating a question and then always by stating arguments on both sides
of the issue, so we have a full sense of the different issues involved in answering the
question that we're dealing with.
Then Thomas gives his solution.
This often will come in the form of some kind of philosophical distinction or attention
to detail which will allow us to uncover Thomas' answer to the question.
After he gives his answer to the question, drawing on some new distinction, he will then
go back, in the Ad sections at the end of the Article, to refute the arguments which
he began with.
He shows why we should no longer regard those arguments as persuasive.
The question in Article 1 is: Is another discipline beyond the natural disciplines necessary for men?
Thomas is arguing that philosophy by itself is not sufficient to give us human happiness,
ultimate human happiness.
Happiness, he wants to argue, will require another doctrine, namely theology, which goes
beyond what natural human reason is capable of.
So the issue with the yes or no answer to this question is whether the philosophical
life is complete and whether it accounts for the highest happiness that human beings are
capable of.
This is what Plato and Aristotle thought, but Thomas as a Christian philosopher will
argue that the Greek and pagan view is incomplete, that the happiness we can get through philosophy,
through understanding the truth, is only partial as a constituent of total human happiness,
and that to understand the full reality of what human flourishing and human happiness
consists in, we need to turn to another science, namely theology, to explain our relationship
to God.
Thomas then gives five arguments.
He gives three arguments for answering no to this question, no other discipline beyond
the natural disciplines of philosophy and science are required for human beings.
And he also gives two On the Contrary arguments in favor of the yes answer.
These are arguments that are fairly easy to reconstruct in premise-premise-conclusion
form, so my first study question for you is just that: rewrite each of these five arguments
in premise and conclusion form.
Identify the conclusion that Thomas comes to.
Look for indicator words, and identify the evidence which he gives as a reason, a good
reason, for believing each of the conclusions that he establishes.
Thomas' solution to the question of whether another discipline beyond philosophy is required
in order to explain human flourishing hinges on his making a distinction between two types
of contemplation.
So this is my second study question for you: what are these two types of contemplation
and how are they different from each other?
Then we can take a look at how Thomas uses this distinction, two types of contemplation,
type 1 and type 2, to explain the seeming plausibility of the five arguments that he's
presented previously and to give, in his Ad responses at the end of the Article, his refutation
of those previous arguments, showing why they no longer hold force.
That's my introduction to Article 1 of Thomas's Commentary on the Sentences.
Thanks for watching today; goodbye.
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