We begin our journey in developing a notion of creational thinking by giving an account of physical objects in hylomorphic terms and describe how by abstraction human understanding distinguishes such an object in terms of the sensible and the intelligible. In the course of laying out such an account, we will be expanding upon our […]
Tag: Thomas Aquinas
Mathematical Understanding as Seen Within a Framework of Beauty (part 4)
Following upon my previous posts, where I began to explore the possibility of framing mathematical understanding within the Thomistic modes of beauty proportio and claritas, I now consider the third mode of beauty, that of integritas. This mode brings beauty in mathematical understanding to its fulfillment and serves to complete and unite the other two […]
Mathematical Understanding as Seen Within a Framework of Beauty (part 3)
In the first two parts of this series, I began outlining how mathematics and mathematical understanding can be framed within the Thomistic modes of beauty: proportio, claritas, and integritas. In particular, I defined mathematics as the science whose subject-matter is measurable orders: objects understood as parts united into whole, having a distinction of same or […]
Mathematical Understanding as Seen Within a Framework of Beauty (part 2)
In part 1 of this series, I began to explore how mathematical reasoning can be understood within a Thomistic framework of beauty as expressed in the modes proportio, claritas, and integritas. In that post, I arrived at an initial description of the subject-matter of mathematics as pertaining to quantitative being understood as parts ordered into […]
Mathematical Understanding as Seen Within a Framework of Beauty (part 1)
In a previous series of posts (part 1 being here: https://thinkingbeautifully.org/form-beauty-and-euclids-elements-part-1/) I began to describe how mathematics could be understood as an endeavor of human discovery and invention by showing how form and the pursuit of beauty underlies successes in such efforts. In particular, I focused on the opening of Book I of Euclid’s Elements […]
Beauty, Form, and Euclid’s Elements Part 3
In the previous posts to this series, https://thinkingbeautifully.org/form-beauty-and-euclids-elements-part-2/ I set out to articulate a perspective on the opening of Euclid’s Elements as arising by abstraction of forms that arise from sensible perceptions of things experienced in the real world. I aimed to make the case that certain ones of his Definitions and the forms his Postulates […]
Introducing Brendan Sammon (Interview Review)
“Beauty is that which allows desire to turn into knowledge. All human beings are desiring something. Which means, of course, that love is very much bound up with the act of knowing. That goes against what we’re typically conditioned to think: if I’m supposed to know something, I can’t love it; I have to bracket […]
Aquinas on Beauty (Book Review)
“Aquinas’s account of beauty respects both the objective and the subjective aspects that are involved in the aesthetic experience, since both objects (e.g. things, actions, people, etc.) and subjects (perceivers of such things) are necessary for the human experience of beauty to occur. At the end of the day, Aquinas’s account of beauty is best […]