Aquinas' Third Way of Proving a God: Logic or Love?
Cosponsored by the Medieval Studies Workshop
Thomas Aquinas’ famous five ways of proving the existence of a God continue to intrigue and perplex his readers. The most troublesome is perhaps the third—the one based on the possible and the necessary—to which all sorts of objections can be heard: logical, scientific, theological, phenomenological, even Thomistic. Contrary to the usual assumption, however, the kind of possibility and necessity that the third way regards does not seem to be the logical kind. In a sense, it has more to do with love than with logic. This reading puts the problems that the third way faces, and also the God that it affirms, in a rather different light.
Fr. Brock will also be leading a summer seminar for graduate students in Rome this summer on “Metaphysics and the Soul in Thomas Aquinas.”
