I am fairly new to medieval philosophy, and was wondering if anyone here has had more exposure and can assist me with the following:
Having just finished an examination of Ghent’s ‘Summa Quaestionum Ordinarium’ with reference to other pieces by Augustine including ‘Against the Academics’ and ‘City of God’ and ‘On Free Choice’, I am left with some problems that Scotus’ reply to Ghent does not clear up for me. Hopefully some of the more learned posters here can help me out.
I’m wondering if Ghent postulates how exactly it is that one is illuminated divinely. I notice Aristotles abstractions and the later appeal to god ‘slipping concepts into the mind of humans’ but nothing on his own opinion.
Secondly, would Ghent postulate that a newborn baby is capable of utilising the three acts of intellect abd subsequently gaining divine illumination, and if not, is this evidence of the theories falsifiability?
perhaps its safe to say:
well, we just don’t know.
good luck out there. i’ve been to ghent, but alas, i’ve never read ghent. maybe if you pose the question in such a way that we need not have read ghent in order to get into a discussion with you. i’ve read augustine…so maybe this can be reworked?
thanks
Medieval philosophy is such an unfairly neglected period of our discipline.
Unfortunately the questions are based in the specific text as my problem here is more of understanding his specific logic and was hoping someone else might have cracked it before me.
It turns out Henry postulates that DI comes from ‘seeing directly’ the divine essence of god. Apparantly that is supposed to be sufficient enough an explanation, so there you have it.
It works for him either way as he doesn’t actually provide a theory that is falsifiable, much like Adler, Freud and Marx after him.
