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Thomas Aquinas(1225–1274)
 arrival of the Aristotelian corpus in Latin
translation reopened
 the question of the relation between faith and
reason,
 calling into question the modus vivendi (mode
of living)that had obtained for centuries.
 Naples - had his first extended contact with the
new learning.
 Thomas defended the mendicant orders
 countered both the Averroistic interpretations
of Aristotle and the Franciscan tendency to
reject Greek philosophy
 Rome to Paris to confront controversy variously
called Latin Averroism and Heterodox
Aristotelianism.
 best known work, the Summa theologiae,
 Thomas theological discourse begins with what
God has revealed about Himself and His action
in creating and redeeming the world.
 Philosophical discourse begins with knowledge
of the world.
 If it speaks of God what it says is conditioned by
what is known of the world.
 Religion with science
 Access to truth whenever using reason (God’s
greatest gift)
 Aquinas proposed that world can be explored
through reason and not just faith.
 Proposed that Universe and all its dynamics
operate through 2 different kinds of law:
(Secular) Natural Law, (Religious) Eternal Law.
 Knowledge can and should come from multiple
sources: from intuition but also from
rationality, from science but also from
revelation, from pagans and also from monks
 Aquina’s 5 Arguments for Existence of God:
1. Argument from Motion(Cosmological
Arguments 1-4)
We currently live in a world in which things are moving.
Movement is caused by movers. Everything that’s
moving must have been set into motion by something
else that was moving. Something must have started
motion in the first place.(otherwise you be stuck in a
philosophical quandary known as an infinite regress.)
Infinite regress- in a chain of reasoning, the evidence for
each point along the chain relies on the existence of
something that came before it. Which in turn relies on
something even further back, and so on with no starting
point.
*Objects are in motion everything in motion was put in
by something els, there can’t be an infinite regress of
movers(unmoved mover—God)
2. Argument from Causation
Some things are caused. Anything that’s caused had to
be caused by something else(since nothing causes itself)
There can’t be an infinite regress of causes, so there
must have been afirst causer, itself uncaused, that is
God.
3. Argument from Contingency
Necessary Being- A being that has always existed, that
always will exist, and that can’t not exist.
Contingent Being- Any being that could have not
existed
We can’t have a world where everything is contingent,
because then- by definition it could easily have never
existed.
*There are contingent things. Contingent things can
cause other contingent things, but there can’t only be
contingent things. Because that would mean that
there’s an infinite regress of contingency and a
possibility that nothing might have existed. An infinite
regress is impossible. So there must be atleast one
necessary thing and that is God
4. Argument from Degrees
Properties come in degrees. In order for there to be
degrees of perfection, there must be something perfect
against which everything else is measured. God is
pinnacle of perfection.
5. Teleological Argument(Intelligent Design)
-William Paley gave us Argument by Analogy
The watch maker analogy- watch was designed by an
intelligent creator with a particular end in mind.
Teleological- goal-oriented or purposeful
World->World-Maker
There must be a designer of or body and etc.

St. Ausgustine
-Christian Philosopher
 Lived in the 4th-5th century A.D.
 Served Bishop for 35 years
 Augustine did not live in a “medieval” Christian
world.
 Platonism in particular remained a decisive
ingredient of his thought. He is therefore best
read as a Christian philosopher of late antiquity
shaped by and in constant dialogue with the
classical tradition.
 Ancient Rome many things in common w/ the
modern West, esp U.S.
 most of his learned upper-class
contemporaries, shaped by the classical Latin
authors, poets and philosophers whom he
studied in the schools of grammar and rhetoric
long before he encountered the Bible and
Christian writers.
 Romans believed in two things particular.
 1. Earthly Happiness – The builders of the Pont
du Gard and Collosseum had faith in
technology, in the power of humans to master
themselves and in their ability to control nature
and plot for their own happiness and
satisfaction. The Romans were keen
practitioners of what we would now call Self-
help. Training their audiences to grater success
and effectiveness. In their eyes the human
animal was something eminently open to being
perfected.
 2. A Just social order- For long period the
Roman trusted that their society was marked by
justice. People of ambition and intelligence
could make it to the top. The army was trusted
to be meritocratic. The capacity to make money
was held to reflect both practical ability and
also a degree of inner virtue. Therefore showing
off one’s wealth was deemed honourable and a
point of pride, and fame was considered wholly
respectable ideal
 Augustine disagreed furiously with both of
these assumptions. In his masterpiece “The City
of God”, he dissected each of these two points,
that human life could be perfected and the
societies were just.
 It was Augustine who came up with the idea of
Original Sin
 He proposed that all humans, not merely this or
that or that unfortunate example, were crooked
because all of us are unwilling heirs to the sins
of Adam.
 Our sinful nature gives rise to what Augustine
called Libido Dominandi- a desire to
dominate,which is evident in a brutal,
blinkered, merciless way we treat others in the
world around us , We cannot properly love, fore
we are constantly undermined by our egoism
and our pride.
 Our powers of reasoning and understanding are
fragile in the extreme.
 Lust haunts our days and nights. We fail to
understand ourselves. We chase phantoms. We
are beset by anxieties
 “Have wished with amazing folly, to be happy
here on earth and eto achieve bliss by their own
efforts”
 We are creatures fated to intuit virtue and love,
but never quite being able to secure them for
ourselves. Our relationships, careers and
countries are necessarily not as we’d want them
to be.
 Augustinian pessimism takes off some of the
pressure e might feel when we slowly come to
terms with the imperfect nature of pretty much
everything we do and are.
 We shouldn’t rage or feel we’ve been
persecuted or singled out for undue
punishment. It’s simply the human condition,
the legacy of what we might as well even if we
don’t believe in Augustinian’s theoly call
Original Sin
 God didn’t give good people wealth and power
and nor did he necessarily condemn those who
lacked them.
 Augustine distinguished between what he
called Two Cities: The city of Men and The City
of God.
 The latter was an ideal of the future, a heavenly
paradise where the good would finally
dominate. Where power would be properly
aligned to justice and where virtue would reign.
 But men could never build such city alone and
should never believe themselves capable of
doing so.
 In Augustine’s formulation, true justice has no
existence, save in that republic whose founder
and ruler is Christ .
 Inherited the notion “love of wisdom”
 He is convinced that the true philosopher is a
lover of God because true wisdom is, in the last
resort,identical with God .
 He thinks Christianity is the true philosophy.
 that true philosophy and true (cultic) religion
are identical
 At the same time, Augustine sharply criticizes
the “philosophy of this world” censured in the
New Testament that distracts from Christ
 he main error he faults the philosophers with is
arrogance or pride (superbia), a reproach that
does not weigh lightly given that arrogance is, in
Augustine’s view, the root of all sins.
 Out of arrogance the philosophers presume to
be able to reach happiness through their own
virtue
 In his first works Augustine epitomizes his own
philosophical program with the phrase “to know
God and the soul”
 and promises to pursue it with the means
provided by Platonic philosophy as long as these
are not in conflict with the authority of biblical
revelation
 Cicero is Augustine’s main source for the
Hellenistic philosophies, notably Academic
skepticism and Stoicism.