Forester, <i>bricoleur</i> and country bumpkin: rethinking knowledge and habit in Aquinas's ethics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The ways that Thomism has historically thought about knowledge and habit in Thomas Aquinas's ethics have become increasingly destabilised. This article briefly documents this destabilisation before considering three images that have emerged in recent engagements with the ethics of Aquinas on moral knowledge and action. The three images are brought to bear on a discussion of what Aquinas may have meant by calling synderesis a ‘natural habit’. The first image is John Milbank's and Catherine Pickstock's image of God as country bumpkin and it follows Aquinas's own description of the way God knows particulars out of divine simplicity. They argue that human knowledge of particulars comes from participation in the mind of God. This is participation in eternal law from which natural law is derived and so natural law cannot constitute a separate, sufficient system of moral knowledge. With the second image, the bricoleur , Jeffrey Stout argues that system-building was far from the kind of work that Aquinas was about, despite appearances that have disguised how freely Aquinas himself made use of the moral resources at his disposal. The third image, the forester, is deployed by Charles Pinches intentionally to improve on some of the problems with Stout's image. The Christian moral agent develops habits of mind that both aid in right perception, and hence right knowledge, and depend on right perception for right action. A discussion of this apparent paradox reveals something of the complexity of theoretical knowledge and practical skills that are involved in moral reasoning for Aquinas.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".