Aquinas Quotes

“One famous implication of this doctrine is that though we distinguish in thought between God’s eternity, power, goodness, intellect, will, and so forth, in God himself there is no distinction between any of the divine attributes. God’s eternity is his power, which is his goodness, which is his intellect, which is his will, and so on. Indeed, God himself just is his power, his goodness, and so on, just as he just is his existence, and just is his essence.”
― Edward Feser, Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide

“Unlike everything else that exists, he just is his own existence, and just is his own essence, for these are identical. For this reason, there can also be no distinction between genus and difference in God, since being, the only candidate genus for something whose essence and existence are identical is (as we saw in chapter 2) no genus at all, and since for there to be a member of a genus, it must have an act of existence which differs from the essence it shares (at least potentially) with other members of the genus, and, again, there is no distinction between essence and existence in God. Hence, again, “it is clear that God is nowise composite, but is altogether simple” (ST I.3.7).”
― Edward Feser, Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide

“That God is very remote indeed from the things of our experience is nowhere clearer than in Aquinas’s account of divine simplicity, which is perhaps the most controversial aspect of his teaching on the divine attributes. For Aquinas, God is “simple” in the sense of being in no way composed of parts (ST I.3).”
― Edward Feser, Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide

“For example, given that we depend on other people for our well-being and they depend on us, we have certain obligations towards each other; given that we have certain potentials the realization of which is good for us, potentials which require a certain amount of effort to realize, we have a duty to make that effort; and so forth.”
― Edward Feser, Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide

“Third, as Brian Davies has emphasized, much discussion of the problem of evil seems to presuppose that God is a kind of moral agent who has certain duties which (so it is alleged) he has failed to live up to. But this way of thinking simply makes no sense given Aquinas’s conception of God.”
― Edward Feser, Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide

“attributes. For Aquinas, God is “simple” in the sense of being in no way composed of parts (ST I.3).”
― Edward Feser, Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide

“4 Psychology As I have emphasized throughout this book, understanding Aquinas requires “thinking outside the box” of the basic metaphysical assumptions (concerning cause, effect, substance, essence, etc.) that contemporary philosophers tend to take for granted. This is nowhere more true than where Aquinas’s philosophy of mind is concerned. Indeed, to speak of Aquinas’s “philosophy of mind” is already misleading. For Aquinas does not approach the issues dealt with in this modern philosophical sub-discipline in terms of their relevance to solving the so-called “mind–body problem.” No such problem existed in Aquinas’s day, and for him the important distinction was in any case not between mind and body, but rather between soul and body. Even that is potentially misleading, however, for Aquinas does not mean by “soul” what contemporary philosophers”
― Edward Feser, Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide

“a distinction between events to motivate the claim that cause and effect might come apart.”
― Edward Feser, Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide

“at the end of the day, human beings are products of nature, and if humans have purposes, then at some level purposefulness must arise from nature and therefore be inherent in nature … Might purpose be a genuine property of nature right down to the cellular or even the subcellular level? (p. 121–2)”
― Edward Feser, Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide

“Having redefined “success” as the achievement of dramatic technological progress and in general the manipulation of nature to achieve human ends, they essentially won a game the Scholastics were not trying to play in the first place.”
― Edward Feser, Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide

“Change just is the realization of some potentiality; or as Aquinas puts it, “motion is the actuality of a being in potency”
― Edward Feser, Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide

“978–1–78074–006–5”
― Edward Feser, Aquinas