The Engaged Thomist

A central debate in the liberal tradition is over whether negative or positive liberty should be prioritized. In this tradition, negative liberty is often conceived as “ the absence of coercion by other agents,” while positive liberty is a “conception of liberty, according to which one was free when one acted according to one’s true will,” (Courtland et al. 2022). In his influential 1958 lecture, Isaiah Berlin defended the notion of negative liberty and argued that it was the best notion of liberty for political bodies to actively defend. Berlin believed that positive liberty was a perfectly legitimate ideal, but that it should be seen as one value among others in society rather than something that the whole of society should be oriented towards (Berlin 2002). Responding to Berlin, Charles Taylor argued in “What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty” that the negative notion of liberty does not work on several grounds. This paper will defend two of Taylor’s insights using some commonly held no...

In his second Meditation, Descartes elucidates the famous wax argument. In this argument, Descartes asks the reader to imagine that there is a ball of wax and then he goes on to list the properties that this ball would have such as “ its color, its figure” and “its size,” ( Meditations II). He then asks the reader to imagine that wax is placed near a fire; he writes: “while I speak and approach the fire . . . the color alters, the figure is destroyed, the size increases, it becomes liquid, it heats, scarcely can one handle it,” ( Meditations II). Descartes then uses this to point out how the change to the wax means that the wax, at a fundamental level, “could certainly be nothing of all that the senses brought to my notice, since all these things which fall under taste, smell, sight, touch, and hearing, are found to be changed, and yet the same wax remains,” ( Meditations II). Descartes then uses this to point out that what one can know about the essence of the wax is knowledge that...

I recently had a discussion with an atheist about the problem of evil and it was a very helpful discussion for me. I wanted to share some of the fruits of that discussion. The first part of our discussion dealt with the incompatibility challenge between some of the Divine attributes and the existence of evil. The argument went something like this: God is said to be omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent. If God is not omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, then He does not exist. If God exists, given the above definition, then He would prevent all evil from obtaining if it were within His power to do so. God can prevent all evil since He is omnipotent. Yet, there is evil. So God does not exist. This is the classic argument. I denied premise 3 as I do not think that God is a moral agent and so does not have a moral obligation to prevent any evil from obtaining. The fact that He is not a moral agent does not, however, entail that God can cause evil to obtain as evil in itself is...

God is an infinite being and His infinity is tied to His being uncreated. The reason why God is an infinite being is because He is pure existence and so has no limit on His being which would make Him finite. Furthermore, His being pure existence is the explanation of why He is uncreated is the absolute necessity of God is explained in virtue of the fact that He is pure existence and so cannot fail to exist; given this, since God’s absolute necessity is the explanation of why He is uncreated, the fundamental reason why He is uncreated is because He is pure existence itself. Since this is the case, in order to be uncreated, a thing must be existence itself. To go a bit deeper, to be existence itself is to have one’s existence be identical to one’s essence, which means that if one’s essence is distinct one’s existence, which is to say that one has their existence derivative, they would not be existence and so would, necessarily, be created. This entails that whatever is God wills apart fr...