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Record W2604320821 · doi:10.1353/tho.2004.0042

Being & Some 20thCentury Thomists by John F. X. Knasas

2004· article· en· W2604320821 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Oliva Blanchette

Bibliographic record

VenueThe Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review · 2004
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicMedieval Philosophy and Theology
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPhilosophyEpistemologyPostmodernismRevelationAppealIntelligibility (philosophy)RubricSkepticismTheologySociologyLaw

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

148 BOOK REVIEWS Ultimately, I cannot see how what goes under Rowland's rubric of "postmodern" and "Augustinian" coheres with what goes under the rubric of "Thomism." It is therefore no accident that she never tries to explain what she means by the term: it cannot be given a credible definition in the light of the "postmodern" and"Augustinian" assumptions driving this book. While it would take more space than I have here to explain why this is so, I would say that it has something to do with another famous Greek term that Rowland neglects to consider: physis. One can grant to de Lubac (as Gilson did) that the Thomist tradition went wrong in its parsing of the nature-grace distinction while at the same time maintaining the importance of that distinction and the intelligibility of nature as the terminus of God's first gift in creation. One can also grant that culture has a profound influence on nature without collapsing the latter into the former. If nature is intelligible apart from grace and culture, then it can indeed serve as a starting point for an account of the human good that does not make explicit appeal to revelation and so can serve as a way to talk about that good to those who are not inside the circle. The simple fact that separates Thomas from us-he lived in a culture permeated by Catholic Christianity and we do not-means that we need some moral language that allows us a voice in the secular domain. Such language is not a substitute for evangelization and critique, both of which need to go on, but it is in the meantime a way of talking to strangers that can promote the common human good (including human rights) this side of the coming of the kingdom. The Catholic University ofAmerica Washington, D.C. BRIAN]. SHANLEY, O.P. Being & Some 20'h Century Thomists. By JOHN F. X. KNASAS. Bronx, N.Y.: Fordham University Press, 2003. Pp. 335. $65.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-82322248 -9. Being and Thomism are two very elusive ideas. Knasas's book tries to pin them both down in no uncertain terms and, one might add, in function of one another. Thomism is taken primarily as a unique philosophy of being in a realistic sense and this realistic sense is taken to mean one thing only in the approach to the question of being: namely, that which is derived only from sense experience. Being & Some 20'h Century Thomists comes as a response to other accounts of Thomism and its evolution in the twentieth century, such as that of Gerald McCool's From Unity to Plurality (also published by Fordham University Press, in 1992). In fact, it could be viewed as a response of the Toronto school, or more precisely the Joseph Owens school, to the transcendental Thomism BOOK REVIEWS 149 propounded by Joseph Donceel of Fordham. The argument of the book, to put it perhaps too succinctly, is to show that versions of Thomism other than that of Joseph Owens, especially those labeled as idealist but also some thought to be realist, fail the test of realism in their approach to the question of being and therefore fail the test of Thomism as found in the writings of St. Thomas. "Generally speaking," we are told in the introduction, "Existential Thomism is a posteriori. It is built from extra-mental reality as presented in the data of sensible experience. It is specified by the perception of a basic intelligibility, or commonality, in those real things of sensation" (xvii). The problem for the author is that this Existential Thomism, as he conceives it, is only a species of Neo-Thomism, which must be distinguished from and defended against other species because it is the only one that really works as an elaboration of the ratio entis. In chapter 1 Knasas gives his own version of the Neo-Thomist revival contra that of the man he calls "the dean of the twentieth-century Thomist narrative, Gerald McCool, S.J."(29) Knasas names most of those one would think of as part of this revival and then divides them into what he calls three...

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow), Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.902
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.002

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.

Opus teacher head0.033
GPT teacher head0.268
Teacher spread0.235 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.

Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

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Citations0
Published2004
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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Same venueThe Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly ReviewSame topicMedieval Philosophy and TheologyFrench-language works237,207