Walter Redmond

There is a problem with the English translation of words that Edith Stein used in the context of logic and truth-theory. Stein lived in the same logical world as her friend from Gottingen days, Alexander Pfander, whose Logik she read and criticized. I shall provide a template of truth-theory that philosophers of many stripes (and semioticians) would recognize. Then I shall relate the views of Pfander and Stein to this template and suggest how their technical terms may be rendered.

... Existentia igitur harum structurarum multiplicium est vere mirabilis, et inverisimile est quod nudo “casui” debeatur sive quod ... Una conjunctio virium valde inverisimilis (scilicet: legalitas physicavitae sustentandae capax) mirissima est postulatque fundamentum, scilicet: “ens cujus ...

Etude du traitement de l'inference dans l'ouvrage de logique publie en 1554 par le moine Alonso Gutierrez de la Vera Cruz. Comparant la logique extensionnelle des logiciens mexicains du XVI e siecle avec les procedures logiques actuelles, l'A. mesure le role de la relation d'identite et examine les differents types d'inference dans le cadre de la semantique des propositions obliques.

Edith Stein, an outstanding representative of the Catholic intellectual renaissance of the first half of the last century, was a “charter” member of the phenomenological school around Edmund Husserl and made key contributions to the renewed study of St. Thomas Aquinas. From a Jewish background, she entered the Catholic church and then the Carmelite order; when asked why she became a Catholic she would reply in Latin “secretum meum mihi”. I suggest, using her characteristic concepts such as “being objective” and “undergoing”, why she wished to “fuse” phenomenology and Thomism as well as how she defined the moral “weight” of daily circumstances and how she combined epistemology with Carmelite mysticism. Then with the help of St. John of the Cross, I offer an explanation of her “secret”. Finally I describe her history of recent philosophy.

I describe a “logic of creating” inspired by the “existential” argument of the existence of God in St. Thomas Aquinas’s De Ente et Essentia. suggest a modal reading of his reasoning based upon states-of-affairs said to be actual, contingent, necessary and the like. I take “creating” as teasing actuality out of possibility. After explaining the modal logic that I am assuming and relating it to Christian understandings of meaning and being, I present my modal interpretation, contrasting it with the views of three modern philosophers. In an appendix I will analyze the text of St. Thomas’s existential proof.

The entelechy ... is living power, as if something of the creating breath were left behind in it. (1) EDITH STEIN EDITH STEIN (St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross, 1891-1942) sketched out her thoughts on evolution in the sixth and final chapter of Potenz und Akt, the postdoctoral thesis she wrote in 1931 as part of her application for a lectureship in the University of Freiburg im Breisgau. (2) Today our theological problem with evolution is that divine guidance seems redundant since mutations occur at random. In Stein's time scientists had yet to understand the workings of genetic material, but she did indeed address this "on purpose or by chance" question. (3) Her answer was strongly teleological (she often used the word "telos"), but "creationism" was not her worry. The Catholic Church at the time was more concerned about human origins than about evolution as such. (4) Stein of course respected the positions of the Church, but refers to them in only three footnotes (291, 308, 324). Her teleology is the Thomistic analogy of being (analogia entis) set in a temporal framework: the ascending levels of creation--the " hierarchy of formed matter" (matter, plants, animals, human beings)--become stages in evolution. In her philosophy of science Stein is similar to other thinkers of her time who suggested counters to a mechanistic view of life: the entelechy of Hans Driesch (also prominent in Stein's theory), Henri Bergson's Elan vital, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's hominisation, and the "Trieb" of Stein's friend, Hedwig Conrad-Martius. (5) Indeed, Stein worked out her thoughts on evolution "in contrast to the Metaphysische Gesprache by Conrad-Martius." (6) What Stein said of Conrad-Martius was true of herself in a way: she seems to be cautiously "feeling her way forward." She was juggling not only philosophy and science but two quite different philosophical approaches: the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and the scholasticism of St. Thomas Aquinas. Within phenomenology itself, her "formal" philosophical analysis alternates with "material" or "empirical" scientific description. As a phenomenologist, she focuses on "possible worlds," conceivable "in principle"; but she must also address scientific theory that accounts for "our own sphere" (22). (7) At times it is unclear which of the possibilities she thinks is actual. This interplay between the "ontic" and the "empirical" may be one reason why she titled her work "potency and act." After recounting the origin of Potency and Act and summarizing Conrad-Martius's cosmology, I shall explain Stein's views on taxonomy and on the evolution of living things as well as of human beings and their communities as she developed them in this work. Then I shall describe her criticism of Conrad-Martius and offer a final reflection. Potency and Act Stein's philosophical development falls into two stages. She did her early work as a phenomenologist, but after becoming a Catholic she began to pursue her "proper mission," her "life's task": merging phenomenology and Scholasticism, in particular the philosophy of Aquinas. (8) She was not content to "contrast" the two philosophies; she wanted to "fuse" them into her own "philosophical system." (9) She was searching for a "perennial philosophy," "something beyond ages and peoples, common to all who honestly seek the truth." (10) Potency and Act is the second of three works in which Stein carried out her program. (11) The first was a "play" in which Husserl and Aquinas appear on stage together. At the suggestion of Martin Heidegger she revised it for the journal of phenomenology where it appeared in 1919. (12) Potency and Act was written in 1931 but published for the first time in 1998. The third was her major work, Finite and Eternal Being, written in 1935 and also published posthumously in 1950. After teaching for a number of years at the college of the Dominican sisters in Speyer (1922-29) and lecturing widely in Germany and abroad, Stein applied for a teaching position at the University of Freiburg. …

El presente texto, es una version escrita de la disertacion que diera Walter Redmond el 25 de octubre de 1998, en el local del Instituto Riva Aguero, con motivo de la presentacion de su libro, La logica en el Virreinato del Peru , (Lima, 1998, FCE-IRA-PUC, 417 pp.). El texto que ahora reproducimos, es una gentileza del autor. Todos conocemos las notables cualidades literarias que apasionaron a Juan Espinosa Medrano (el Lunarejo). De hecho su fama fundamental descansa en la celebre defensa apasionada que el realizara del poeta Luis de Gongora, pero pocos conocen su obra logico-filosofica, en la que desarrolla una defensa tambien ardiente de la Philosophia thomistica , contra la accion desvastadora de los «zorms modernos» , que en su opinion, no solo amenazaban en el siglo XVII dicha tradicion filosofica, sino que conducia a los filosofos europeos a desconocer las excelencias de la intelectualidad indiana. El autor intenta en el presente articulo -mediante una original actualizacion imaginaria- explorar las implicancias presentes de dicho debate del siglo XVII. Los trabajos de investigacion que Walter Redmond ha venido desarrollando infatigablemente a lo largo de los ultimos veinte anos sobre la filosofia colonial peruana, constituyen uno de los mas serios aportes para la comprension de nuestra biografia intelectual. Sirva esta pequena publicacion como una oportunidad para expresar nuestro reconocimiento -aunque sea tardio y seguramente insuficiente- a uno de sus mas prestigiosos investigadores.

Cet article donne une analyse thematique de la problematique de la liberte humaine et du determinisme telle qui a ete debattue dans la seconde scolastique du Siecle d'Or espagnol. Reposant sur la doctrine elaboree par Thomas d'Aquin, leurs analyses de la causalite physique, de l'omniscience divine, du libre arbitre... trouvent un echo dans les reflexions de la philosophie analytique contemporaine et se laissent formuler sous forme logique.