/lit/ - Literature

Summa Technologiae>

btw i heard that "every magician hopes to cheat Hell in the end - and as several did who are now nicely ensconced on the calendar of authentic saints." true?

>>14126474
It's 3000 pages. You haven't read it, nor has anyone else here.

>>14126491
Not the entire thing, I mean in general.

>>14126474
Read a decent amount for catholic political theory course and did my senior thesis partly on Aristotle and Aquinas. Im no expert, but I think its absolutely fantastic. Dry, but well written.

>>14126474
I've always admired how much he steelmans his opponents' arguments. It's such a farcry from the culture we have nowadays where your opponent's beliefs can easily be "debunked" in a snappy, funny one liner. Thomas makes it clear the he is in the right, but never under-represents the opponents' arguments.
For Example:
> Objection 1: It would seem that the body of the first man was not made of the slime of the earth. For it is an act of greater power to make something out of nothing than out of something; because "not being" is farther off from actual existence than "being in potentiality." But since man is the most honorable of God's lower creatures, it was fitting that in the production of man's body, the power of God should be most clearly shown. Therefore it should not have been made of the slime of the earth, but out of nothing.
And then counters with
>Reply to Objection 1: The power of the Divine Creator was manifested in man's body when its matter was produced by creation. But it was fitting that the human body should be made of the four elements, that man might have something in common with the inferior bodies, as being something between spiritual and corporeal substances.

It's just a very refreshing, very straightforward approach that I very much appreciate.

>>14126491
Timothy McDermott's abridgement is only about 500 pages and is a good place to start.

Go back
https://youtu.be/aLDalKSJ18I

>>14126522
Medieval philosophy existed within a shared framework (Bible + Aristotle) which set the basic assumptions of the debate. Most medieval philosophers were also celibate monks who probably happened to be of a much better character than wordly men. With the Renaissance the Scholastic framework is abandoned, everything is called into question (Sextus Empiricus is translated and widely circulated), there is no longer room for courtesy and every debate becomes a shit-flinging fest of ad hominem attacks.

>>14126522
it doesnt work like that. im not going to frickin lay out the argument my opponent is making. they're wrong, end of story. the amount of human rights violations, suppression of women, clear and blatant homophobia, and just how stupid the whole thing is is like self frickin evident. it speaks for itself. if you endorse that shit, you're in the past, and need to be called out. hitchens is at least seventy times more intelligent than some christian dude in the 1200s, and he was able to DEMOLISH christianity, theism, and everything in a fraction of a fraction of the amount of pages.

allow me to quote Christopher Hitchens, which dismantles aquinas, your post, and every christian in this thread

> “The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.”

explains "aquinas" to a tea.

>>14126558
> “The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.”
If they believed to be certain they wouldn't need Faith. Nor would they need a bazillion attempted proofs of God's existence. Don't confuse the work of medieval scholars with the bastardized versions of Christianity used by Machiavellian kings and popes to serve their own purposes.

>>14126558
good b8 now go away

>>14126558
I said
>It's such a farcry from the culture we have nowadays where your opponent's beliefs can easily be "debunked" in a snappy, funny one liner
Then, suddenly, the atheist disagrees with me.
>Wait for it...
>Wait for it...
>Wait for it...
>allow me to quote Christopher Hitchens, which dismantles aquinas, your post, and every christian in this thread
There it is.

>>14126474
Its ok

>>14126474
I randomly read about the nature of angels and found it intriguing. So abstract. Wish there were more art dealing with this sort of disembodied intelligence without any appetite or spatiotemporal existence rather than staid depictions of angry demons.

>>14126577
yep and it was.

>>14126474

Catholics deliberately make bad arguments in order to destroy Christianity because they are Atheists.

>>14126558
hello pious pseudo-christian. time for you to read nietzsche's geneaology of morality.

>>14126616
If you're going to make up shit, at try to cite a source for it or use an example so you don't immediately out yourself as a guy who never leaves his room without his tinfoil hat.

>>14126627

I leave your mom without my tinfoil hat.

>>14126491
I read only the parts of Thomas theories proper and skipped the endless objection/response autism. You distill the book to a third of its length and 99% of the actual content, and there are no sharp breaks in subject which makes reading much more fluid. Took me one and a half month taking my time.

>>14126544
The renaissance didn't do much here. Only montaigne remains of that time, and he was clearly outside scholarly debate. Scholasticism remained strong even after the time of Suarez and really declined only in the late 17th century. Even Descartes kept the old style in the series of responses to objections. But then you have people like Gassendi, Locke, etc that ruined everything.

>>14126484
Undoubtedly John Paul 2 canonized 480 saints, more than had been canonized in the past 600 years

>>14126558
2/5 too obvious, no one this sensitive would survive for 5 minutes on an imageboard

t. certified bait inspector

>>14126474
You know that time C.S. Lewis made a bad-faith attempt to prove the existence of God using logic? Well, Aquinas is the same thing but glossier.

>>14127112
What's his argument and why is it wrong?

>>14127280
Not that guy but I recall Lewis' argument going something like this:
>If my brain had formed randomly from chemicals, it wouldn't be able to perceive itself. Ergo, Christ is King

>>14126474
Great work, people forget it's just a huge reference book for beginning students of theology at the time, while his Contra Gentiles is for defending against heresy when the Dominican orders were moving all around Europe. Seminarians spend 2 years studying it even today

>>14128310
order* sorry, am not hanglish apparently

>>14127339
It’s honestly brainlet tier to be a Cartesian Catholic. I don’t get why the French seem to be the only ones who can understand the value medieval theological debates and engage with them. Maybe their closer proximity to Latin or the fact that they were the most important vernacular language for the church through that period