The Texture of Being: Essays in First Philosophy
Overview
In this volume, Schmitz brings his encyclopedic knowledge of the Western philosophical tradition to bear in a wide-ranging series of essays grouped under three headings: Being, Man, and God. He brings disparate philosophical traditions into conversation, such as classical Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics, the modern critical rationalism of Kant, the idealist synthesis of Hegel, the postmodern deconstructionism of Derrida and Foucault, and the personalist phenomenology of Scheler, Von Hildebrand, and Wojtyla.
Top Highlights
“A principle, on the other hand, is an origin. Indeed, even if the totality is taken—not as a fact achieved, but as a goal (telos) to be achieved—then qua principle, it is taken in its character of firstness and not as a result. It is this insight that led the scholastics to pronounce the final cause the ‘first of all causes.’ And it is just this difference that must be recognized between the Aristotelian principle of originating actuality (energeia and entelecheia), on the one hand, and the modern concept of resultant actuality (Wirklichkeit, the facts or states of affairs), on the other.” (Page 14)
“The nature of distinctness had already begun to harden as early as the late thirteenth century, in part perhaps through a tendency in Platonism to make formal difference primary. In William of Ockham a radical nominalism implied in principle the impossibility of the Aristotelian metaphysical analysis as it was developed by St. Thomas. For mandatory for such an analysis is the possibility of an analogical diversity among the ontological principles, and even within them (as was indicated above). That is to say, the character of unity must be such that it can tolerate a diversity whose principles exist together in a real composite, so that one can speak of a ‘real composition,’ of a complexity belonging to the thing and not merely constructed by the mind.” (Page 31)
“Equality is not only an affair among individuals; it is also an ontological parity within each individual. This intrinsic, constitutive equality is, in its origins, not only a moral demand. Rather, the moral sanction is grounded in and rises out of an ontological necessity: there can be no what without a this, no commonality without singularity, and conversely. The equality of integrity constitutive of each individual grounds the moral sanction, on the one hand, against irresponsible singular behavior and, on the other, against repressive collective conformity.” (Page 237)
- Title: The Texture of Being: Essays in First Philosophy
- Author: Kenneth L. Schmitz
- Series: Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy
- Volume: 46
- Publisher: Catholic University of America
- Print Publication Date: 2007
- Logos Release Date: 2014
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Logos Research Edition
- Subjects: Metaphysics; Philosophical theology; Catholic Church › Doctrines
- ISBNs: 9780813214689, 0813214688, 9780813216539, 9780813227603, 0813216532, 0813227607
- Resource ID: LLS:TXTRBNGFPHLSPHY
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-03-25T21:04:29Z