In this Book

  • The Creative Retrieval of Saint Thomas Aquinas: Essays in Thomistic Philosophy, New and Old
  • Book
  • W. Norris Clarke, SJ
  • 2009
  • Published by: Fordham University Press
summary

W. Norris Clarke has chosen the fifteen essays in this collection, five of which appear here for the first time, as the most significant of the more than seventy he has written over the course of a long career.

Clarke is known for his development of a Thomistic personalism. To be a person, according to Saint Thomas, is to take conscious self-possession of one's own being, to be master of oneself. But our incarnate mode of being human involves living in a body whose life unfolds across time, and is inevitably dispersed across time. If we wish to know fully who we are, we need to assimilate and integrate this dispersal, so that our lives become a coherent story. In addition to the existentialist thought of Etienne Gilson and others, Clarke draws on the Neoplatonic dimension of participation. Existence as act and participation have been the central pillars of his metaphysical thought, especially in its unique manifestation in the human person.

The essays collected here cover a wide range of philosophical, ethical, religious, and aesthetic topics. Through them sounds a very personal voice, one that has inspired generations of students and scholars.

Table of Contents

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  1. Cover
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  1. Title Page, Copyright Page
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  1. Contents
  2. pp. v-vi
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  1. Preface
  2. p. vii
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  1. Part 1: Reprinted Articles
  2. pp. 1-170
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  1. Chapter 1: Twenty-Fourth Award of the Aquinas Medal, by the American Catholic Philosophical Association, to W. Norris Clarke, SJ
  2. pp. 3-15
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  1. Chapter 2: Interpersonal Dialogue: Key to Realism
  2. pp. 16-26
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  1. Chapter 3: Causality and Time
  2. pp. 27-38
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  1. Chapter 4: System: A New Category of Being?
  2. pp. 39-47
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  1. Chapter 5: A Curious Blind Spot in the Anglo-American Tradition of Antitheistic Argument
  2. pp. 48-65
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  1. Chapter 6: The Problem of the Reality and Multiplicity of Divine Ideas in Christian Neoplatonism
  2. pp. 66-88
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  1. Chapter 7: Is the Ethical Eudaimonism of Saint Thomas Too Self-Centered?
  2. pp. 89-94
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  1. Chapter 8: Conscience and the Person
  2. pp. 95-108
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  1. Chapter 9: Democracy, Ethics, Religion: An Intrinsic Connection
  2. pp. 109-116
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  1. Chapter 10: What Cannot Be Said in Saint Thomas’s Essence-Existence Doctrine
  2. pp. 117-131
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  1. Chapter 11: Living on the Edge: The Human Person as ‘‘Frontier Being’’ and Microcosm
  2. pp. 132-151
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  1. Chapter 12: The Metaphysics of Religious Art: Reflections on a Text of Saint Thomas
  2. pp. 152-170
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  1. Part II: New Articles
  2. p. 171
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  1. Chapter 13: The Immediate Creation of the Human Soul by God and Some Contemporary Challenges
  2. pp. 173-190
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  1. Chapter 14: The Creative Imagination: Unique Expression of Our Soul-Body Unity
  2. pp. 191-208
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  1. Chapter 15: The Creative Imagination as Treated in Western Thought
  2. pp. 209-225
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  1. Chapter 16: The Integration of Personalism and Thomistic Metaphysics in Twenty-First-Century Thomism
  2. pp. 226-231
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  1. Notes
  2. pp. 233-259
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  1. Name Index
  2. pp. 261-266
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  1. Subject Index
  2. pp. 267-271
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