The Engaged Thomist

The value of Individuality in society and government’s role in regulating it has been a prominent issue of modernity. A thinker who thought that individuality played a central role in the well-being of society was John Stuart Mill (Macleod 2016). Mill thought that society should foster an environment where Individuality could flourish as he believed that the primary engine of progress in society was individual ingenuity. This coheres with his Utilitarianism as he believes that individuality will bring about the greatest good for the greatest number of people through the innovations that individuals produce. Central to his conception of Individuality is that the mark of individuality is when a member of society can be noticed standing out from the customs and habits of society (Macleod 2016).  I think that Mill’s advocacy of Individuality is misplaced as his account of Individuality does not understand the extent to which Individuality is conditioned; this fact will be supported by ...

The existence of God is a perennial question in philosophy and has been debated for centuries. There have been many kinds of arguments for God’s existence including the ontological, cosmological, and teleological arguments among others (Taliaferro 2019). In his famous Meditations , Descartes offers a peculiar argument for God’s existence which bears a resemblance to ontological arguments, but is in fact an attempted causal proof of God’s existence (Descartes et al. 12-19 1996). This argument, like ontological arguments, starts from the very concept of God, but, unlike ontological arguments, argues that this concept of God must be caused by God Himself given a basic principle of proportionate causality. It is a, seemingly, clever argument. Despite its cleverness, the argument was not without its critics. One of the most famous criticisms of Descartes’ argument came from Thomas Hobbes who argued that the argument failed in virtue of the fact that one cannot comprehend the concept of God ...

The Incarnation is the central doctrine of Christianity. While every Christian assents to this doctrine, there has been a centuries-long debate over a question surrounding it: is the Incarnation a necessary or contingent event? This may seem like a very abstract and esoteric debate, but your answer to this question deeply impacts your theology and your view on the centrality of Christ. I think that the Incarnation is modally necessary, that is, in every possible world where there is a creation, there is an Incarnation. Here, I hope to provide a purely philosophical argument for the Incarnation: 1. The end of Creation is God. This simply results from the metaphysics of Creation. Essentially, God is perfect and so is both the Good itself and has a perfect will. Given this, God wills Himself of absolute necessity and so the end of His act is Himself. However, God can also will things apart from Himself, not as an end, but as a non-necessary means by which He wills the end of His act: Hims...

While Spinoza’s radical monism may seem implausible to many philosophers, both during his lifetime and in the present day, Spinoza was undoubtedly rational in adhering to such a, seemingly, strange view. A central part of why Spinoza held to his monism is his belief that substances cannot produce other substances. His argument for this view is rather interesting. Spinoza asserts that substances cannot produce other substances in Proposition IV; here is his argument: “ It is impossible that there should be . . . two substances with an identical attribute, i.e. which have anything common to them both (Prop. ii.), and, therefore (Prop. iii.), one cannot be the cause of the other, neither can one be produced by the other,” ( Ethics , Prop. VI). Proposition III is essential for understanding Spinoza’s argument: “Things which have nothing in common cannot be one the cause of the other,” ( Ethics , Prop. III). His reasoning for this is that the effect must have its being in the cause in some ...