Author: Daniel Shields

I have just finished a complete draft of my book Nature and Nature’s God: The Scientific and Philosophical Validity of Aquinas’ Proof of an Unmoved Mover. An updated table of contents is available at my writings page.

In the book I give the most in-depth exposition of Aquinas’ First Way ever written. I connect the argument to the other motion proofs in the Summa contra Gentiles, as well as the Third Way, and devote a whole chapter to the Fifth Way as well. In the second part of the book I tour the history of science, showing how physics has never conflicted with Aquinas’ argument, but rather supports it. Thomists do not need to reject inertia, but embrace thermodynamics.

I have posted a new translation of William Ockham’s Questions on the Books of Aristotle’s Physics, q. 132-34. I have translated the complete text. These questions deal with essentially ordered causes:

Q. 132: Whether in essentially ordered causes the second cause depends on the first cause.

Q. 133: Whether in essentially ordered causes the superior cause is more perfect

Q. 134: Whether essentially ordered causes are necessarily simultaneously required for producing the effect in respect to which they are essentially ordered causes

The next two questions, not translated by me, are whether a first efficient cause can be proved from production, and whether a first efficient cause can be proved from conservation. Portions of all five of these questions are translated in Ockham, Philosophical Writings, trans. Philotheus Boehner, O.F.M., rev. Stephen F. Brown (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1990), and presented as Ockham’s proof for God’s existence.

Like nearly every professor in America, I have had to transition to online teaching the past few weeks. I have never taught online before, but it is going well. I am using a combination of recorded video lectures with a digital whiteboard and a live video call session each week. Online teaching is definitely inferior to real, in-person interaction. But I thank God that online teaching is a possibility, for otherwise all classes would have to be cancelled.

This past week I covered Scotus’ proof for God’s existence in my Medieval Proofs for God’s Existence elective. After a break for Holy Week, we will turn to Ockham, and then finish the semester by spending a great deal of time on Suarez. Earlier this semester we spent a great deal of time on Aquinas’ proofs. We began the semester with Moses Maimonides, including his account of the kalam proofs.

In November the American Catholic Philosophical Association held its yearly conference, this time on the theme “Philosophy of Nature.” It was a delightful and stimulating event on a timely topic. I delivered two presentations: brief comments supporting Thomas McLaughlin’s paper defending a Thomistic notion of natural place in light of modern science, and longer comments, appreciative yet critical, on Larry Masek’s very valuable book Intention, Character, and Double Effect (Notre Dame, 2018).