[Serious] Thomism: Then & Now

[emjay]

For anyone who's interested (and to bookmark for my own future reference ) I found an interesting YouTube channel that covers Aquinas' arguments as well as some criticisms of them. It's evidently the course material for A-Level Religious Studies (where for context, A-Levels are UK education usually for 16-18 year olds, after secondary school, usually prior to going to university). The channel is called "The Cogito", and I've watched several of the videos now and IMO they are very clearly explained and unpacked/dissected. So I'll just list, as links, the relevant videos here:

Aquinas' First Cosmological Argument (The First Way)

Aquinas' Second Cosmological Argument (The Second Way)

Aquinas' Third Cosmological Argument (The Third Way)

Criticisms of the Cosmological Argument

Note: It does not appear have a video for the Fourth Way.

Aquinas' Design Argument (The Fifth Way)

Hume's criticisms of the Design Arguments. Note: This last one also covers Paley's Design Argument, for which there is a separate video for anyone interested, but that's not really relevant to this discussion.

[vulcanlogician]

I'll check those out, emjay. Thanks man.

[emjay]

(The following post quoted from "The Plato Thread" HERE. Just posting my reply in this thread instead because I wanted to talk about Aristotle here not Plato, and therefore didn't want to go off-topic in the other thread.)

I clearly see the value of understanding Plato on his own terms...At the same time, when I read ancient and Medieval philosophy, my modern personal sensibilities want to constantly reinterpret what is in the text with what seems relevant to my life at the moment. ...

I have to say I've always been curious how much you apply classical thinking as-is (or maybe more accurately, as-was) to your everyday life, not just intellectual philosophical/theological discussions, and it looks like this post of yours addresses that question a little bit... but specifically I was thinking of Aristotle's four causes, and to what extent you think about everyday modern problems in those terms? From the sorts of examples I've seen of it so far, it seems a very rough/broad way of answering a question and like I said elsewhere, still a bit confusing on some issues, particularly Final Causes.

For instance now I'm aware of this type of thinking, it's still not the most intuitive way of thinking about/framing modern questions... for me...but just curious if it is for you? Say my game is bugging out, I could roughly think about it in these terms... thinking of the four causes as four ways of asking 'why'... I could think of it in terms of material causes (ie some physical problem with my machine), formal causes (some problem with the design), efficient causes (perhaps bad programming), but then the final causes in this sense are still confusing... depending on whether you're looking at is as a goal or just an effect/outcome... ie the outcome of bad programming is producing bad programs, but the goal of any programmer, regardless of skill, is producing good programs.