THERE are several answers in Aquinas to the question, what is the ground of the world's intelligibility. The fullest- answer is contained by the account of creation and expressed in the doctrine of divine Ideas. I would like to trace the lines of that doctrine in Aquinas's corpus as a means of showing how an account of creation at once clarifies and inverts the analysis of natural intelligibility.

By using religion to get at the core concepts of Michel Foucault's thinking, this book offers a strong alternative to the way that the philosopher's work is read across the humanities. Foucault was famously interested in Christianity as both the rival to ancient ethics and the parent of modern discipline and was always alert to the hypocrisy and the violence in churches. Yet many readers have ignored how central religion is to his thought, particularly with regard to human bodies and (...) how they are shaped. The point is not to turn Foucault into some sort of believer or to extract from him a fixed thesis about religion as such. Rather, it is to see how Foucault engages religious _rhetoric_ page after page—even when religion is not his main topic. When readers follow his allusions, they can see why he finds in religion not only an object of critique, but a perennial provocation to think about how speech works on bodies—and how bodies resist. Arguing that Foucault conducts experiments in writing to frustrate academic expectations about history and theory, Mark Jordan gives equal weight to the performative and theatrical aspects of Foucault's writing or lecturing. How does Foucault stage possibilities of self-transformation? How are his books or lectures akin to the rituals and liturgies that he dissects in them? _Convulsing Bodies_ follows its own game of hide-and-seek with the agents of totalizing systems (not least in the academy) and gives us a Foucault who plays with his audiences as he plays for them—or teaches them. (shrink)

This book is an interpretation of the moral teaching of Thomas Aquinas's Summa of Theology. It argues that teaching on the virtues can only be understood by turning to the patterns of divine teaching in the incarnation and the sacraments. It presents this not only as Thomas's great originality in the Summa but also as his contribution to Christian thought in the present.

How far is Thomas Aquinas available for current discussions in political philosophy? While there are certainly things to be learned from him about our political preoccupations, the pedagogy of his moral teaching typically resists our familiar questions. This holds even when the question is put in terms that Thomas should recognize—say, as a question about the virtues appropriate for a democracy. Thomas not only gives different meanings to these terms, he moves political topics away from the center of theological attention (...) and so organizes them very differently. A reader can notice these differences at many points but perhaps especially in the attention that Thomas gives in the Summa to the gifts of the Holy Spirit. His account of these gifts qualifies significantly what he says of virtue and suggests large limits on human agency, whether in ethics or in politics. (shrink)

Foucault’s History of Sexuality 1 cannot be understood without sustained attention to its ironies, which are written into every level from diction to structure. The little book does not intend to deliver a theory, queer or otherwise. It means rather to display and then to frustrate the desire for theory—especially when it comes to sexuality.

This is the second volume of an "essay in existential philosophy." The first, published in 1977, was intended to "do justice to certain experiential givens of immediate experience" which, once subjected to "severe" testing, could be established as "scientific hypotheses at the level of an existential critique of knowledge". The second volume now means to provide "an ensemble of ideal base intuitions, expressible as a 'system', of which each constitutes the concrete taking of a position before a certain state of (...) things in the existential domain". Its method is to work from descriptions of "the existent in the domain of action" in order to find "kernels of convergence, centers of autonomy, that is structures," and so to be able to ask, finally, about the ground of these in a transcendent act of being. (shrink)

AS THE subtlest part of his see-saw strategy in the Cratylus, Socrates recites several dozen comic etymologies. One of their explicit lessons is that the founders of language were Heracliteans who concealed the ontology of flux in common names. Socrates gives the etymologies, he says, to illustrate the Heraclitean Cratylus's pronouncement that names are natural. The etymologies are bait for Cratylus, of course; they are meant to lure him into a defense of his dogma. But they are more than a (...) stratagem. The Socratic etymologies raise the question whether philosophy can escape the history of its language--a history perhaps of concealed ontology or the tyranny of sense-experience or the myths of one's forefathers. Philosophy as articulate falls under forces, multiple and hardly known, which shape linguistic meaning. A question for Socrates, which I would like to make my own, is the question whether metaphysical inquiry can appropriate the history of the languages in which it must subsist. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Spheres of Philosophical Inquiry and the Historiography of Medieval Philosophy by John InglisMark D. JordanJohn Inglis. Spheres of Philosophical Inquiry and the Historiography of Medieval Philosophy. Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, volume 81. Leiden, Boston, Köln: Brill, 1998. Pp. x + 324. Cloth, $99.50.Modern philosophers have shown themselves quite unphilosophical about the academic history of their own discipline. Content with grand stories that move from Plato to themselves, (...) they have treated institutional histories, recent histories, and bibliographical histories as unworthy of attention. John Inglis sets out to change all that for the study of medieval philosophy. He demonstrates by the book’s end that we have failed to recognize our historiographical procedures as conventions—with very particular histories of their own.The first part of the book traces the genealogy of the dominant (one might say, hegemonic) model in recent studies of medieval philosophy. The genealogy is prefaced with two chapters that show how various were the motives for reconstructions of medieval thought before 1850 in authors such as Billuart, Goudin, and Brucker or Hegel, Ritter, and Hauréau. These chapters might be dismissed by contemporary scholars as so much antiquarianism. There can be no dismissing the relevance to contemporary work of Inglis’s main genealogy, which runs with surprising directness from Joseph Kleutgen (1811–1883) and Albert Stöckl (1823–1895) to Norman Kretzmann and Anthony Kenny.It adds to the piquancy of Inglis’s argument that most specialists in medieval philosophy will not even recognize the names of Kleutgen and Stöckl, much less feel kinship with them. But Inglis shows convincingly what Kleutgen and Stöckl did to make the study of medieval philosophy possible in modern universities. Kleutgen mapped the medieval texts onto a system of “spheres,” of fields or topics, recognizable to professors of philosophy. This means that he necessarily privileged epistemology, as he necessarily connected a medieval thinker’s views across the “spheres” into a system—or a failed attempt at one. Kleutgen then emphasized the reason/revelation dichotomy and an allegiance to what he understood as the system of Thomas Aquinas. Put these elements together and you have a surprisingly familiar story. It remained for Stöckl to write it up as an erudite and monumental narration.Inglis follows this „Kleutgen-Stöckl model” through a number of more familiar authors, including De Wulf, Gilson, Boehner, Weinberg, and the editors of the Cambridge [End Page 530] History of Later Medieval Philosophy. Of course, in reducing the genealogy to a list of famous names I ignore two of its great virtues. The first is the detail with which it retells the institutional circumstances and the forgotten intermediaries of the scholarly tradition. Behind the genealogy, around its borders, there stands Inglis’s enormous effort of original research, much of it archival. The genealogy’s second virtue is the dialectical subtlety with which it locates continuities under contradictions. Gilson is usually touted as the antithesis of De Wulf, and Kretzmann of Gilson. Inglis makes such antitheses seem superficial by comparing them with an abiding if tacit agreement about how medieval texts can be appropriated within modern philosophy. To seal the comparison, Inglis suggests in the book’s second part what a real antithesis to the Kleutgen-Stöckl model might be. He reconstructs, in his last two chapters, Thomas’s accounts of human knowledge and of theology’s relations to philosophy in opposition to that model’s prescriptions.No review can represent—or even adequately praise—the enormous learnedness of this book. Moreover, since the book already discusses so much, it must seem ungrateful to suggest that it ought to discuss anything else. Let me end then rather by posing two questions beyond the book’s end. First, does Inglis’s genealogy mean to suggest that the Kleutgen-Stöckl model is now chiefly received in English-speaking philosophy departments? I wonder, for example, how far Inglis might judge Alain de Libera’s Penser au Moyen Age (Paris: Éds. de Seuil, 1991) an alternative to that model. Certainly de Libera shows more self-consciousness about the culturally determined history behind our historiography. His emphasis on the thirteenth-century recovery... (shrink)

Arguments that Aquinas’s literal commentaries on Aristotle present his own philosophy are often proxies for larger claims about the relation of philosophy to theology. While trying to secure a place for Thomas in philosophic conversation, such arguments impose modern notions of an autonomous and apodictic philosophy, with fixed genres of declarative speech. The result is neither a plausiblereading of the Thomistic corpus nor a helpful exemplar for contemporary Catholic philosophy.

The first defenses of Aquinas's doctrine after his death, particularly those five polemical works known as the correctoria, are usually read as illustrations of the intellectual forces of the late thirteenth century. The correctoria are used to show the struggle between “Augustinianism” and “Aristotelianism,” between Franciscans and Dominicans, between anti-Thomists and Thomists. It is true that they are anti-Augustinian, after a fashion. They come from Dominican hands, and they defend Thomas. But it is important to see why they reject the (...) views of the self-proclaimed Augustinians and which Thomism they defend. Beyond any question of partisanship, the correctoria deserve to be read as original works of speculative self-consciousness. The Augustinianism they contest is one of philosophical literalism in method and doctrine; the Thomism they defend is one of analogical plurality and methodological restraint. The authors of the correctoria speak substantively about what Thomas achieved for the method of philosophical discourse and say pointedly why it is that his achievement offends their adversaries. (shrink)

To compose a Christian book on exemplary Christian living, Ambrose appropriates and criticizes Cicero's book on "duties," "De officiis." In many passages within the moral part of his "Summa of Theology," Thomas Aquinas incorporates quotations from both Cicero and Ambrose. Comparison of the three texts raises issues about the relation of genres to terms, arguments, rules, and ideals in religious teaching. Genre becomes a useful category for analyzing religious rhetoric only when it is conceived as a set of persuasive or (...) pedagogical relations below a text's surface disposition. (shrink)

Thomas Aquinas’s explanation of the (then new) doctrine of sacramental character can seem a crudely mechanical view of the causality of rites of church membership. It explains in fact the capacity and horizon for moral action in salvation history. Participation in the priesthood of Christ enables the believer to inhabit the pedagogy through which history is brought back to Trinitarian life. This sort of account, which is for Thomas the indispensable ground of moral theology, sounds archaic to many contemporary Christian (...) readers who nonetheless want to excerpt from Thomas particular ethical conclusions. They fail to appreciate the challenge posed by change in the deep categories of moral performance—a change nowhere more consequential or invisible than in contemporary debates over sexuality. (shrink)