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An excerpt from my new book, Affective Knowledge in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas Despite the stark difference Aquinas articulates between his own Aristotelian account of the mode of knowing and that of the Platonic tradition, he maintains with the same insistence that what is known is the reality itself. While knowledge is possessed according to the mode of the knower—and in our case the knower is a hylomorphic composite—it is a genuine possession of that intellectual reali

An excerpt from my new book, Affective Knowledge in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas In the opening chapters of the commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Aquinas makes clear that the ground of all human knowing is sensation, which mediates the external world to our intellects. I see a four-legged creature. Its lugubrious brown eyes stare intently up at me. Its tail wags furiously. An elongated tongue dripping saliva dilates from its mouth. Such a portrait can only be apprehe

Dionysius has a ubiquitous presence in Aquinas’s corpus. The Areopagite is directly referenced in nearly 2,200 texts. Citations of Dionysius exceed those of every other author apart from Augustine and Aristotle. Moreover, the influence of Dionysius goes far beyond explicit citation. Dionysius was a substratal influence on Aquinas— contributing to much of his theological posture. Dionysius served as the vital tributary mediating the Christian Platonism that inundates Aquinas’s

An excerpt from my new book, Affective Knowledge in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas The word “knowledge” has a broad semantic range—it describes epistemic realities that are quite diverse. Knowledge can mean information, for instance, the knowledge of analytical geometry or of communal life in medieval Italy. Knowledge also describes a skill, for example, the knowledge of bread-making or clock-repair. I remain distinct from both knowledge possessed as information or as a skill

Welcome to my academic website! Here you can access my published works and media presentations. On the Marginalia section of the site I...