Commentary

Ideas Are Not Defeated By Better Ideas – Part I: Engagement

It is common to hear the sentiment parroted in center-left and center-right political discourse: good ideas naturally overcome bad ones. It’s such an intuitive assumption among the 115 IQ types that it’s taken for granted. Bad ideas are ejected from common parlance by means of poor results or otherwise according to some presumed but not always articulated series of debates. People who disagree with what is right, they believe, will eventually change their beliefs when confronted with enough evidence.

In some fields of study, this is true. Increasingly, however, it is not. And when it comes to the political field in liberal democracies, it has never been the case to begin with. The liberal system is one that at once asserts a so-called free market while at the same time undermining its very foundation with favoratism. Although a liberal society claims to respect a totally secular rule of law, this same society equates secularism with unbiased objectivity; in doing so, it obscures the fact that modern secularism can only exist when positioned over and against any sort of religious belief. Worse, some religious ideologies, rather than fight this, have found it simpler to wear the secular framework like a glove in order to punish or undermine their rivals and foes. The secular order, far from being the free and open public square that the unsatisfying truce at Westphalia demanded, is more like a cloak beneath which religious tensions continue to hide their daggers.

Some of this is relevant when considering what the white liberal means when referring to a free marketplace of ideas. Religious tensions have been papered over with ethnic and ideological conflicts, pushed to a breaking point in the early twentieth-century and then exacerbated in that century’s second half. Our interest here, however, is not the history of ideas in general or in abstract, but a study of what makes individuals so keen on the ideas they latch onto in the first place. Once this has been ascertained, we can move on to critique the liberal’s argument in toto and answer the questions: is a free market of ideas even possible, and secondly, if not, what is it that actually defeats bad ideas?

This entails approaching the subject from two angles. The first approach is interior, in which we try to understand a model of mind and will under which the liberal operates, and then, whether this model is appropriate. Doing so will tell us how the liberal engages with ideas, which will inform how he understands communication and cooperative discourse. The second approach is a step removed: the exterior; we must investigate the social framework that governs a mass of people. This will entail a strong focus on what social conditioning is and the media’s role in it. Part two of this series will be occupied with that. The third and final post will be summarizing, briefly, the portrait of the liberal as understood in these two posts, and then recognizing its erroneous presumptions as they are highlighted by Christian history.

Cursory View: The Free Market of Ideas

Presumably, in a society that values freedom of speech as much as it values freedom of association, one could expect the best and brightest to rise to the top. Such a meritocratic system would be founded on, and thus reward, ingenuity, free thinking, creativity, and those capable of supplying the best solutions to the worst problems. Good ideas, offered by smarter people, form the cream; bad ideas, the dregs.

We must pause here for a short note. Ours is not such a society, and it hasn’t been for longer than most of us have even been alive. The giveaway is in the first sentence of that paragraph: “a society that values freedom of speech as much as it values freedom of association.” What rights Americans had to freely associate with one another, supposedly enshrined in our founding documents as their very first article, was abolished in the 1960s as a result of the Civil Rights bills. That the race riots, perpetrated by racial agitators like Martin Luther King, Jr, came after associative freedom was canned, and that it was canned in the name of that same equality these racial agitators demanded, is a topic for another time.

It’s important to admit that ours is not a society of the freedom it claims to espouse before entering into any analysis or critique of that society. We’re not talking about ourselves, here. Anyone who tries to cast contemporary America, or even the West considered more broadly, as one that embodies such concepts of freedom and liberty is already speaking from an outdated playbook. Either they truly do not know what freedom is, or they’re trying to sell you something.

The question of why our society is not that society is a question that will be answered more thoroughly in the second part of this piece, when we get to what the liberal model fully entails and why it has to lie about itself in order to exist. We’ll get there.

Nonetheless, like its economic predecessor from which it took its name, the very idea of a marketplace of ideas is in error. Advocates presume that the veracity of differing ideas will self-regulate when in conflict. The most true ideas, they expect, will then be adopted by either the majority of the people in that society, or at the very least, by most of the elites who guide it; whether they believe the latter or the former depends on how nuanced their understanding of their own liberalism is. The same rationale is applied to ideas regarding what is beautiful, as well as what is good: a democratization of our transcendental values.

As follows any sort of liberal reasoning, then, the greater the variety of the ideas, and the more numerous the people who have them, the better result that this cauldron-like marketplace will churn out. Perhaps a great machine is a better analogy: the more data that we can put into it should mean that we get a better model of reality to pop out at the other end.

But a marketplace isn’t a machine, and neither are people, and neither is real life. In the West, we were granted, or perhaps, we stole, total rational autonomy some centuries ago. By the mid-1960s, our great marketplace of ideas resulted in French intellectuals penning pedophilia apologia while candidates for the title of Great American Poet were high profile NAMBLA members. At the same time, it could be argued that we also went to the moon, as if daring to dream big did at least pay off in some respects. But while the most egregious aspects of the sexual revolution have persisted in getting worse, our space program stalled out in the seventies. Now, children are getting assigned HRT before puberty, and we don’t even have a space shuttle.

Like the rest of liberalism, its proponents’ fail to account for sin. Moral relativity, even if not quite so openly expressed, manifests in their naturalistic presumption that good things just sort of happen, and that bad things, being irrational, aren’t things that anyone would consciously will. “The arc of the universe bends toward justice,” their heroes proclaim, even as these same heroes may be rape enabling communists. That the universe—and in fact, creation—groans under the weight of the Fall, and that this horrible groaning carries historical, political, and social implications seems to elude them.

Here again we have to pause, however. It is not necessarily unreasonable to assume that men act according to their best interests. This belief isn’t specific to liberalism. In a general sense, St. Thomas Aquinas even held to this: men always act in the pursuit of some perceived good. St. Thomas also held to the primacy of the intellect over the will—that we decide to do things based on what we know, more or less—is something that probably resonates, if dimly, with our the common liberal’s sensibilities. Consider:

The object of the will is the end and the good in universal. Consequently there can be no will in those things that lack reason and intellect, since they cannot apprehend the universal; but they have a natural appetite or a sensitive appetite, determinate to some particular good. Now it is clear that particular causes are moved by a universal cause: thus the governor of a city, who intends the common good, moves, by his command, all the particular departments of the city. Consequently all things that lack reason are, of necessity, moved to their particular ends by some rational will which extends to the universal good, namely the Divine will.1

The will seeks the good, according to St. Thomas, and the intellect determines what is good so that the will may act accordingly. If the will, ultimately, does not pursue the good, then it is not a defect in the character of the will so much as an error in the intellect’s ability to discern the good in the first place. Sin affects the intellect, darkens it, which thereby cripples any ability of the will to jump at what is true, good, or beautiful. At least, so says St. Thomas.

This all seems in line what what any contemporary liberal might believe on the subject, though most would be unable to so succinctly articulate it. Also, blurring the lines of what the intellect actually is, and dully equating it with simply knowing stuff, is one of the things that led to the formation of the contemporary liberal identity. Exercising one’s intellect just means thinking through things with the available data on hand. Knowing things plays into this, but if one can’t coordinate that data or has a blunted means of understanding how any of it is relevant to a given situation, then it doesn’t really mean anything. Medievals never confused being smart with being good; moderns certainly have.

Always remember that the liberal ideal is the formation of a secular utopia on earth. Marketplaces of ideas, bathed in the placid naïveté of the sort who hail from elite institutions, presumes man’s fundamental goodness. Too often do they equate this with mere intelligence. Smarter people should be better people, they reason, since since smarter people recognize how virtue plays into everyone’s mutual self-interest. Although virtue should be considered its own reward, the grim utilitarianism behind such altruism tends to be their motivation. And for most liberals, this is the extent of their moral framework: it isn’t grounded in anything concrete; rather, it is vaguely constructed with ideas about what smart people are probably supposed to do out of self interest. In practice, it comes across as the dulled impulses of minds guided by a pastiche of platitudes.

Engaging With Ideas: Will & Intellect

A good-hearted liberal might look at the totalitarian societies of living memory, such as North Korea, the Soviet Union, or contemporary Germany and conclude that obviously, bad ideas triumphed because good ideas were openly suppressed. Good ideas such as not using centralized planning in deciding agricultural decisions were suppressed, they might say, in favor of upholding Soviet dogma and strengthening a bureaucracy in Moscow—at the expense of a few million lives. If only those good ideas weren’t suppressed, then those lives might have been saved.

Hopefully this illustration, among any number of others that could be used, depicts their obvious error. Whether ‘good ideas’ triumph over ‘bad’ ones is not an ideological or a theoretical conundrum. It’s an historical problem. Men are influenced by ideas, but the ideas do not decide the history; men do, in cooperation with some element of providence. Men frequently make bad decisions. The only question at play, at least with regard to their motivations, is whether or not they act in good faith.

We have to look at this element before we approach the historical problem: acting in good faith. How much, if at all, does a man’s motivation play into the morality of his action, and secondary to this, can we even determine what his motivation even is with any certainty? The answer to both of these is “somewhat”, though that may come across as unsatisfactory.

St. Thomas might suggest that, although men are known to lie and commit great evils, they are doing so always according to a perceived good. Our interest here is how this applies to those who commit great evil. For St. Thomas, men pursue what they hold to be good even if this results in evil actions. That there is disagreement over what is good does not indicate that there are different ultimate goods, but rather that some people might just be wrong:

But to the thing in which [the aspect of last end] is realized, all men are not agreed as to their last end: since some desire riches as their consummate good; some, pleasure; others, something else. Thus to every taste the sweet is pleasant; but to some, the sweetness of wine is most pleasant, to others, the sweetness of honey, or something similar. Yet that sweet is absolutely the best of all pleasant things, in which he who has the best taste takes the most pleasure. In like manner that good is most complete which the man with well disposed affections desires for his last end.2

To reduce this to what may appear absurdity: if you dislike good things, you just don’t know enough. Sound familiar? Even in such cases as those who deprive themselves of the good, St. Thomas asserts that this principle remains true:

Those who sin turn from that in which their last end really consists: but they do not turn away from the intention of the last end, which intention they mistakenly seek in other objects.3

So St. Thomas’s system could be used, if inappropriately, to attribute irrational behavior to a rational cause: a man pursuing ends contrary to the good would do so according to the first intention—the pursuit of the good. Sometimes, as with mortal sin, this seems to be the case. The road to hell is paved with the best intentions, and all that. And yet, the conclusion remains strikingly dissatisfying: where, exactly, is the decision actually being made? St. Thomas’ model gives the impression that decisions are movements of the intellect, with the will simply being the element that carries out what has already been decided. But what then is meant by having freedom of will?

Fortunately, he answers this, but first we have to more fully address how St. Thomas’ model considers the relationship between the will and the intellect to begin with. Earlier in the Summa, St. Thomas spends several questions exploring this exact subject.

If we consider the will as regards the common nature of its object, which is good, and the intellect as a thing and special power; then the intellect itself, and its act, and its object, which is truth, each of which is some species of good, are contained under the common notion of good. And in this way the will is higher than the intellect, and can move it. From this we can easily understand why these powers include one another in their acts, because the intellect understands that the will wills, and the will wills the intellect to understand. In the same way good is contained in truth, inasmuch as it is an understood truth, and truth in good, inasmuch as it is a desired good.4

For St. Thomas, the will and the intellect affect each other; the intellect must apprehend sensory information, and the will makes a decision based on this information, and the intellect thus also apprehends that decision—which the will has willed also to occur. This is perhaps better understood as making a conscious choice to do something: a self-reflexive understanding of one’s own actions and agency.

This self-reflection however has a beginning point—or, if working backwards, a terminus—in the intellect. “We must stop at the intellect preceding all the rest,” he says,

For every movement of the will must be preceded by apprehension, whereas every apprehension is not preceded by an act of the will; but the principle of counseling and understanding is an intellectual principle higher than our intellect—namely, God—as also Aristotle says.5

This is important to remember when he explains what he considers free will to be:

man acts from judgment, because by his apprehensive power he judges that something should be avoided or sought. But because this judgment, in the case of some particular act, is not from a natural instinct, but from some act of comparison in the reason, therefore he acts from free judgment and retains the power of being inclined to various things. For reason in contingent matters may follow opposite courses, as we see in dialectic syllogisms and rhetorical arguments. Now particular operations are contingent, and therefore in such matters the judgment of reason may follow opposite courses, and is not determinate to one. And foreasmuch as man is rational is it necessary that man have free-will.6

And so we can see how St. Thomas’ model arrives where we began: the will is constrained by inclinations “to various things” and decisions apprehended in “some act of comparison in the reason”. This is what is meant by St. Thomas’ model defending the primacy of the intellect. This is also our jumping off point.

When considering how men behave in orderly life, when pursuing the good already, St. Thomas’ position makes complete sense. But when considering evil, when considering what drives men into not merely committing sin, but embracing sin, shunning the good, and glorifying that death which Adam invited by his transgression, the model seems incomplete. Could we use it to psychologize and rationalize the behavior of those evil characters who seem almost certainly to have given themselves over to possession by the devil? Could we analyze the Jeffery Dahmers and Ed Geins, the Jimmy Savilles and Walter Breens, et cetera?

We could, and indeed, many have. But all the same, St. Thomas might dismiss the behavior of these characters as fundamentally irrational. Certainly today we’d do our best to consider them mentally ill—we know Breen was a diagnosed schizophrenic, but Saville? Or any number of other high profile child predators? This is not to say that mental illness doesn’t exist, but rather, at what point is mental illness—irrational behavior—merely a cover for evil? St. Augustine spoke of pursuing evil for its own sake before his conversion; St. Thomas seems to claim this to be impossible.

This is a nuanced problem, because it’s reasonable to presume that a vast majority of unrepentant sinners are such for the very reasons that St. Thomas presents. The will, generally speaking, does seem to pursue what is presumed to be its most advantageous good, depending on how ‘advantageous’ is defined. That seem to many put an immediate sense of advantage ahead of, say, the long goal of eternal salvation, is self-evident in daily life. Ourselves, too, are no stranger to this.

Writing a little under half a century after St. Thomas, Blessed John Duns Scotus approaches this issue from the opposite angle. Known as something of a radical voluntarist, Bl. Scotus follows in the tradition of maintaining the primacy of will over the intellect. Sts. Augustine and, more notably for Scotus, Anselm defended this position, with the latter having elucidated a double-affection within the will toward two distinct but not incompatible ends. Bl. Scotus explains:

The affection for justice is nobler than the affection for the advantageous, understanding by “justice” not only acquired or infused justice, but also innate justice which I the will’s congenital liberty by reason of which it is able to will some good not oriented to self. According to the affection for what is advantageous, however, nothing can be willed save with reference to self. And this we would possess if only an intellectual appetite with no liberty followed upon intellectual knowledge, as sense appetite follows sense cognition.7

By splitting the will’s priorities in two, Bl. Scotus is able to express what in St. Thomas’ model is only generally assumed: that there are universal goods man should strive for, but which for various reasons—not all of them sinful—man does not always strive for them. We know, thanks to revelation and mystical theology, that man’s ultimate end is to please God. And we know, thanks to philosophy and natural theology, that related to this, man’s end entails living virtuously—or put more blandly, being a good person. What Bl. Scotus expresses is a way for a man to systematize his priorities, and then act accordingly.

Blessed Scotus’ model maintains the will’s “innate freedom”, which Fr. Alan Wolter explains is “a liberty that frees it from the need to seek self-perfection as its primary goal, or as a supreme value.”8 Here he explains the affectation for justice (affectio iustitiae):

the will is able to love God for his own sake as a supreme value. But it also inclines the will to love other lesser goods “honestly” or in accord with right reason, namely, in terms of their intrinsic worth rather than in terms of how they perfect one’s individual person or nature.9

In other words, speaking with regard to our own purposes here, a man can hold to particular ideas independent of the immediate relevancy of those ideas to his life. And, more importantly, he can consider the ultimate good for its own sake without necessarily bringing himself and his own priorities into that picture. How he chooses to act according to this is then a decision he is liable for.

It’s important here to understand what Scotus is referring to when he’s approaching the will and the intellect. The intellect, for Scotus, is determinate of itself; it cannot but ‘act’ in a certain manner due to how it is structured and the things that act upon it. Although an imperfect analogy, one could consider it something like a sophisticated machine that follows given predicates. On this, St. Thomas’ framework probably would see little disagreement. Here we must quote at length in order to understand what the Subtle Doctor means with regard to potencies:

The primary distinction of active potencies stems from the radically different way in which they elicit their respective operations. For if we can somehow distinguish them because one acts in regard to this, another in regard to that, such a distinction is not so immediate [i.e., radical or basic]. For a power or potency is related to the object in regard to which it acts only by means of some operation it elicits in one way or another, and there is only a twofold generic way an operation proper to a potency can be elicited. For either [1], the potency of itself is determined to act, so that so far as itself is concerned, it cannot fail to act when not impeded from without; or [2] it is not of itself so determined, but can perform either this act or its opposite, or can either act or not act at all. A potency of the first sort is commonly called “nature,” whereas one of the second sort is called “will.” Hence, the primary division of active potencies is into nature and will.10

The key part of this passage is its second half. Either a potency is determined in itself, by which is meant that it cannot but act as it does in order to reach some conclusion, exterior obstacles notwithstanding; “or it is not of itself so determined,” as Scotus says, and has a freedom of choice in how or what conclusions to reach. Bl. Scotus attributes the first aspect to nature, to which he corresponds the intellect, and the latter to the will. The will remains free to choose what the intellect presents to it.

So how would this happen in practice? A few pages later, he explains how the will moves the intellect such that a choice results in exterior action:

The intellect in particular does not have the character of an active potency properly speaking, according to Aristotle in Bk. VII, ch. 7. […] It is rational only in the qualified sense that it is a precondition for the act of a rational potency. A determining will follows, but not in such a way that this potency of the will is determined of itself to one alternative and hence the combination of intellect and will together has to do with one effect…. Rather the will, which is undetermined as regards its own act, elicits its act, and through its elicited act it determines the intellect insofar as the latter has a causal bearing on some external happening. Hence Aristotle says: “I call this desire prohaeresis, i.e., choice.” But he does not call it “will,” that is to say, a potency.11

The will chooses whether to entertain an idea within its intellect or not, and then from there chooses what to do with the idea as the intellect works its way through that idea. The will is never not at work, even when it is choosing not to act upon a given situation or given information. Ensuring the freedom of the will simply acknowledges what is intuitively recognized: that predicating the will on causes prior to itself undermines the sense of agency we all recognize that we have. Things may affect the will, and some things may affect it to a degree that even inhibits its freedom—mortal sin, for instance—but the will, according to Bl. Scotus, is not just the gas pedal that the intellect leans on when making a decision.

Voluntarism is not without its discontents, however. Bl. Scotus’s framework is one that suggests that “the will … has alternatives, i.e., it is not intrinsically determined to this action or its opposite, or for that matter to acting or not acting at all.” As he expresses clearly,

Just as any immediate effect is related to its immediate cause primarily and per se, without benefit of any mediating cause—otherwise one could go on ad infinitum looking for reasons—so an active cause [as opposed to a material or other “cause”] seems to be immediately related to the action it elicits. One can give no other reason why why it elicits its action in this way except that it is this sort of cause. Yet this is precisely what one is asking a reason for.12

The will simply wills, and in the pursuit of determining how a particular person wills a particular way, one cannot lose sight of that fundamental agency. The rationalizing of wills so presented under St. Thomas’ system, by contrast, comes across as something of an attempt to explain what isn’t always explainable. Moreover, it also comes across as an attempt to present a method with which to browse another’s interior considerations, which goes past, perhaps, what we are actually able to reasonably consider.

Colleen McCulsky, of Saint Louis University, presents such a line of reasoning. As she explains in an article regarding the will and the intellect in the middle ages, she presents a simplified objection to Bl. Scotus’ position:

Because there is no tight connection between intellect and will on Scotus’s account, the will is never determined by the judgment of intellect. Therefore, it is always possible for the will either to will in accordance with the intellect’s judgment or against it. This situation raises the question: why does the agent choose as she does? It can’t be because the intellect made a particular judgment, for the will is not determined by that judgment. Scotus argues that there is no further explanation for the will’s choice; the will simply chooses. But then the will’s choice and the agent’s subsequent action become very mysterious. Thus, Scotus loses a rational grounding for understanding why an agent acts as she does.

“The will simply chooses,” she reiterates. But is this really grounds for an objection? One can know what is good both in a general sense pertaining to the situation (in a matter of justice) and with regard to one’s own well-being (in a matter of self-interest), and yet, nonetheless, decide against proper conduct. That one can even entertain such a position indicates that this position can be chosen. Granted, choosing such a thing would mean abandoning reason, as he is going against not only what is good in justice, but even what he has determined by himself to be rationally good. But the question to answer is whether or not he is doing so to appease some private error. St. Thomas would, of course, say that he is. Bl. Scotus, sed contra, would simply say that this isn’t necessarily the case, and then offer no greater explanation.

This objection from arbitrariness comes across less as a problem to be solved in abstract, but rather one to be approached in practice. For one thing, the notion that Bl Scotus totally divorces intellect from will is false; the intellect still plays the largest role in how the will eventually acts. But that action remains the decision made by the will. Scotus acknowledges a certain mystery to the will’s relationship with the world, with God, and with the providential unfolding of history. Objections like the one above read less like an objection and more like dissatisfaction with this fundamental mystery, unwilling to recognize that both irrational and sinful behaviors aren’t always the misguided pursuit of a good. Some people, to put it in more colloquial terms, might just be bad.

Engaging with Ideas: Praxis

St. Thomas’ position, reasonable as it seems, asserts too much certainty in the private considerations of one’s interior life. His impulse to reduce the will to a functional slave of the intellect presents us with a certainty that contemporary liberal discourse seems to mimic: if only you were more disciplined, or more knowledgeable, or smarter, then you wouldn’t behave the way that you do. In St. Thomas’ framework, this is because of a lucidly reasoned effort to explain common behavior within a coherent philosophy of mind. The contemporary liberal, however, takes this effort and uses it to project their own interests against it. If we can deny freedom of will, we can deny responsibility, and if we can do that, we can deny our own guilt.

Remember that the contemporary liberal, embroiled in the grey malaise of liberation ideology—particularly that of the sexual revolution—orients his action within a framework of platitudes and spur-of-the-moment principles. His only priority is to look out for number one, himself, and everything number one finds pleasing. To keep that priority at the center of their system, they approach morality with the duct tape and bailing wire of being nice and polite, discerning between friends and enemies, and maximizing pleasure.

The above excursion into Scholasticism may seem out of place in a piece dedicated to understanding why the common views held by white liberal managerial class are so backwards. Your average liberal is not a Thomist or Scotist; very few of them have read any philosophy to speak of, much less medieval Scholastics, and most if not all will draw their moral and political thought back to the likes of Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Voltaire. That’s if they’re able to identify any thinkers at all.

We should use the general frameworks of agency above in order to understand not just how liberals operate in general, but also to understand how they view the world. The first is necessary to navigate the nightmare planet they’ve left us with, and the second is necessary to prevent us from falling into the traps that have exacerbated the crises of the last centuries. Both of these are necessary in understanding why they buy into both the need for and the existence of a free market of ideas: this one issue is essentially the liberal mentality distilled into a single belief.

Put simply, if there is no such thing as a free market of ideas, then there is no such thing as liberalism. If there is no such thing as liberalism, the liberal has to meet face to face with his own immorality. Liberalism begins where the securities of virtue are untethered, liturgy is cast aside, and all guiding posts for proper moral behavior are removed. By ignoring tradition writ large and casting aside religiosity, the liberal insulates himself both from the flow of history as well as the immediate moral relevancy of his own beliefs. Think of it as a man donning a blindfold and stepping into a busy highway, who remains sputtering denials on the way to the hospital: no, I couldn’t have been hit by that car, I didn’t even see it!

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. As we continue forward, consider the relationship between the will and the intellect. When we encounter ideas, how do we engage with them? And not just ideas that are most immediately relevant to us—if I’m hungry, should I get food; if I get food, what should I eat; if I eat, what order should I eat in; et cetera—but also ideas in abstract, and how these abstractions come to affect this more practical reasoning ability. Our political beliefs and our pragmatic actions both stem from certain moral operating principles. In what way do we have a choice in what we believe? And also consider in what sense the liberal understands freedom of will—if, really, he believes in it at all.


1St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-I, Q1, A3, Reply 3

2Ibid, II-I, Q1, A7.

3Ibid, Reply 1.

4Ibid, I, Q82, A4, Reply 1

5Ibid, Reply 3.

6Ibid, I, Q83, A1.

7John Duns Soctus, Ordinatio III, suppl., dist. 46, excerpt from Alan Wolter, Duns Scotus on the Will and Morality (Catholic University Press, Washington: 1997) 153.

8Wolter, 39.

9Ibid, 40.

10Scotus, Questions on the Metaphysics IV, Q 15, A1a, from Wolter 193.

11Ibid, A2b, from Wolter, 142.

12Ibid, A1a, from Wolter, 139.


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Merri

Merri lives with his wife and kids in the USA. He writes on topics ranging from the Catholic Faith, secular politics, and cultural critique. Contact him through The Pillarist or on Twitter at @MPillarist.