Joshua Hochschild
Mount St. Mary's University, Philosophy, Faculty Member
Argues that traditional Catholic understanding of transubstantiation is obscured by modern metaphysics' neglect of the category of substance, and by modern semantic assumptions about how words signify.
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In a living body, the substantial form, the essence, and the soul play very similar, but non-identical, metaphysical roles. This article explores the similarities and differences to clarify basic points of Thomistic metaphysics.
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Ockham is usually considered the first to hold a proper theory of mental language, but Aquinas is willing to call the concept, or the act of intellect by which something is understood, a verbum mentis or “mental word.” This essay explores... more
Ockham is usually considered the first to hold a proper theory of mental language, but Aquinas is willing to call the concept, or the act of intellect by which something is understood, a verbum mentis or “mental word.” This essay explores the sense in which Aquinas regarded concepts as language-like. It argues that Aquinas's understanding of concepts and their objects meant that his application of syntactic and semantic analysis to them did not and could not lead in the direction of theories of mental language as it was conceived by nominalist philosophers.
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The common view that Aquinas changed his mind about analogy (before and after De Veritate 2.11) is unwarranted. Dialectical context, and clarifications about the logic of analogy and the implications of proportionality, reveal... more
The common view that Aquinas changed his mind about analogy (before and after De Veritate 2.11) is unwarranted. Dialectical context, and clarifications about the logic of analogy and the implications of proportionality, reveal consistency in Aquinas's teaching on the analogy of divine names.
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A response to John O'Callaghan's argument that "verbum mentis" is a strictly theological, as opposed to philosophical, notion in Aquinas. (The main arguments of this paper were later developed further in the paper, "Mental Language in... more
A response to John O'Callaghan's argument that "verbum mentis" is a strictly theological, as opposed to philosophical, notion in Aquinas. (The main arguments of this paper were later developed further in the paper, "Mental Language in Aquinas?")
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Uses Anthony Kenny's puzzlement over Aquinas's distinction between an individual and its essence to clarify basic principles of Thomistic metaphysics.
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Considers the use of Cajetan in an early modern dispute about theological language, and its implications for the relevance of semantics to philosophical and theological understanding.
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Defends Cajetan's use of semantic distinctions in his explication of theological theses and arguments in Aquinas's Summa Theologiae.
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The influence of Cajetan’s De Nominum Analogia is due largely to its first three chapters, which introduce Cajetan’s three modes of analogy: analogy of inequality, analogy of attribution, and analogy of proportionality. Interpreters... more
The influence of Cajetan’s De Nominum Analogia is due largely to its first three chapters, which introduce Cajetan’s three modes of analogy: analogy of inequality, analogy of attribution, and analogy of proportionality. Interpreters typically ignore the final eight chapters, which describe further features of analogy of proportionality. This article explains this neglect as a symptom of a failure to appreciate Cajetan’s particular semantic concerns, taken independently from the question of systematizing the thought of Aquinas. After an exegesis of the neglected chapters, which describe the semantics of analogy through the three levels of cognition (simple apprehension, composition and division, and discursive reasoning), the article concludes with observations about the relationship between Cajetan and Aquinas and the philosophical and historical significance of Cajetan’s approach to the semantics of analogy.
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Cajetan’s analogy theory is usually evaluated in terms of its fidelity to the teachings of Aquinas. But what if Cajetan was trying to answer questions Aquinas himself did not raise, and so could not help to answer? Cajetan’s De Nominum... more
Cajetan’s analogy theory is usually evaluated in terms of its fidelity to the teachings of Aquinas. But what if Cajetan was trying to answer questions Aquinas himself did not raise, and so could not help to answer? Cajetan’s De Nominum Analogia can be interpreted as intending to solve a particular semantic problem: to characterize the unity of the analogical concept, so as to defend the possibility of a non-univocal term’s mediating syllogistic reasoning. Aquinas offers various semantic characterizations of analogy, saying it involves, for instance: signification per prius et posterius; or a ratio propria which is only found in one analogate; or diverse modi significandi with a common res significata. Examined in turn, it is clear that none of Aquinas’s rules for analogy solve the semantic problem described. Cajetan thus cannot be reasonably expected to have intended his analogy treatise primarily as an interpretation or systematization of Aquinas’s teaching on analogy.
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Corrects a common misreading of nominalism and realism as views about the existence of universals, instead characterizing them as views about how words signify.
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Beginning with the refreshing observation of the sheer ugliness of the word "globalization" ("an adjective, converted into a barbaric verb, then forced into service as a still more barbaric noun"), Hochschild observes that this... more
Beginning with the refreshing observation of the sheer ugliness of the word "globalization" ("an adjective, converted into a barbaric verb, then forced into service as a still more barbaric noun"), Hochschild observes that this misbegotten word labels a poorly defined concept. Despite its vagueness, it "suggests a trend toward increased economic and political interdependence, which at once fosters and is fostered by cultural homogenization." Hochschild goes on to examine the effects of this trend on local communities and insists that any effort to evaluate globalization requires a return to a "political teleology," reflection on the ends of politics given the ends of human being.
[Abstract credit: from Mars Hill audio reprint]
[Abstract credit: from Mars Hill audio reprint]
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Corrects classical liberal "limited government" interpretations of "the principle of subsidiarity" from Catholic social teaching by arguing for affinity between the principle and the tradition of American agrarian thought. Appeared... more
Corrects classical liberal "limited government" interpretations of "the principle of subsidiarity" from Catholic social teaching by arguing for affinity between the principle and the tradition of American agrarian thought.
Appeared in:
Dale McConkey and Peter Augustine Lawler, eds., Faith, Morality, and Civil Society (Lexington Books, 2003), pp. 41-68
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Faith and Reason 27 (2002): 117-155.
Appeared in:
Dale McConkey and Peter Augustine Lawler, eds., Faith, Morality, and Civil Society (Lexington Books, 2003), pp. 41-68
and
Faith and Reason 27 (2002): 117-155.
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Considers the role of Aristotelian virtue epistemology in Newman's thought, especially in A Grammar of of Assent, The Idea of a University, and Newman's critique of liberalism.
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Poses questions about the relationship between human nature and human dignity, and points to the limits of metaphysics apart from practical reason, in response to Patrick Lee and Robert George's account of "The Nature and Basis of Human... more
Poses questions about the relationship between human nature and human dignity, and points to the limits of metaphysics apart from practical reason, in response to Patrick Lee and Robert George's account of "The Nature and Basis of Human Dignity". (Originally delievered at a conference in 2007.)
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Not an academic article, but a philosophical essay on Sartre, Aquinas, and the ethics of attention.
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University of Notre Dame Press, 2010
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Sophia Institute Press, 2017. Coauthored with Christopher Blum.
Not an academic book, but informed by Thomistic psychology with special attention to the interior senses and their relation to intellectual virtue.
Not an academic book, but informed by Thomistic psychology with special attention to the interior senses and their relation to intellectual virtue.
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Review of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's INCERTO series (Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, The Bed of Procrustes, Antifragile, Skin in the Game). Connects Taleb's updated Stoicism, including it's engagement with behavioral economics, with... more
Review of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's INCERTO series (Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, The Bed of Procrustes, Antifragile, Skin in the Game). Connects Taleb's updated Stoicism, including it's engagement with behavioral economics, with virtue ethics and political philosophy, especially Wendell Berry, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Boethius.
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Review of: John M. Rist, What is Truth? From the Academy to the Vatican (Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), Journal of the History of Philosophy 48:2 (2010): 253-254.
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Review of: Jack Zupko, John Buridan: Portrait of a Fourteenth-Century Arts Master (University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), in Journal of the History of Philosophy 42:2 (April 2004): 219-220. Copyright © 2004. Reprinted with permission by... more
Review of: Jack Zupko, John Buridan: Portrait of a Fourteenth-Century Arts Master (University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), in Journal of the History of Philosophy 42:2 (April 2004): 219-220.
Copyright © 2004. Reprinted with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press.
Copyright © 2004. Reprinted with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press.
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The question of the meaning of life is a late modern development which replaced a very different question of philosophical anthropology. (Developed as a lecture and series of blog posts; comments welcome.)
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This paper makes two main arguments. First, that to understand analogy in Aquinas, one must distinguish two logically distinct concepts Aquinas inherited from Aristotle: one a kind of likeness between things, the other a kind of relation... more
This paper makes two main arguments. First, that to understand analogy in Aquinas, one must distinguish two logically distinct concepts Aquinas inherited from Aristotle: one a kind of likeness between things, the other a kind of relation between linguistic functions. Second, that analogy (in both senses) plays a relatively small role in Aquinas's treatment of divine naming, compared to the realist semantic framework in which questions about divine naming are formulated and resolved, and on which the coherence of the doctrine of divine simplicity -- which gives rise to the questions of divine naming in the first place -- depends.