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Thursday, September 25, 2008

Form, unity, end, all that stuff

I really got to clear up what is from waht. I proposed a conceptual point of view - initially in my most recent draft - laying out categories of "form" (and being and various kinds of being/perfection and ways in which various levels of form achieve their perfection), "good", "unity", and intensio as a category that is wider than action and passion and yet can be traced to a form that is impelled as a unity, by its unity, in one sense, and wanting to "add" to itself (not in a quantifiable sense - i'm trying to say "perfection" in a way that is compatible with the language of unity - it is compatible, I wanted to be more imagistic).
At any rate - I work with Aquinas and other thinkers as a clump - whatever is of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, German Idealists, I take it all and kind of synthesize - its a conversation where everybody is saying good things - we take what's best - what's not so great we kind of brush aside. And Aquinas did quite a bit of this himself, too, you see when he talks about people's differences being only "of words" or "the sound of words" - he found "actual" agreements where perhaps not many people would (between Stoics and Aristotelians, for example, on "passion"). At any rate. if I'm going to find any sources for pointing out what I want it may be helpful to find insights into the "platonism" in aquinas.

Where do I go more for the "unity" of form - form as something that gives a dynamism that is longing for its own perfection? Aristotle himself was a Platonist - Plato's pupil, we cannot forget - he was a reviser of Platonism and his Platonic sources are seldom realized.

Aquinas himself talks about Platonism - sometimes about the "error" of hte platonists when it comes to cognition - but he also talks "whatever is good and beautiful" or whatever the words are - talking Augustine - and the whole idea of unity-source/procession/return is from what I hear neoplatonic - I have to confess I am very familiar with "neoplatonics" the way that philosophers are familiar with "unmoved mover" - I see their effects but know nothing about them. I am very sympathetic to Plato and from what I hear sympathetic to the neoplatonists too - I was trying to get at the "unity" of form and "intensio" coming from that. There's got to be texts - it doesn't matter whether finding Platonic/Aristotelian sources for that, or commentators on what Aquinas did with form.

But then again I am doing an exegesis of the text - and the particular text I have chosen and the way I am going about it - I haven't done a LOT of research, but it seems to me that I am taking a very different approach to using Aquinas than what is done on anthropology. I am not concerned per se with morality - I'm only in the prima secundae - I'm interested in the existential - the experiential, and the redemptive - but I appreciate his foundation of the existential - his descriptiveness - and I source that in a rich vision or discourse on the overall intensio of the human being, which in a way makes sense in his theological context, and comes together neatly with his own most, most general description - God as source, the progress of the rational creature towards him, and Christ, the way to do that since God as man.

Where are the scholars who unite these factors together? I got to go to Ottawa U or somewhere where they have the Philosopher's Index. With all the literature on Aquinas, surely I am missing loads of help.

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