Proofs of the Existence of God
The question whether God exists, although not in itself an issue for a faithful Muslim, Christian, or Jew, continually attracted the interest of religious thinkers throughout the Middle Ages. Fueled by metaphysical, epistemological, and logical considerat
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Pain SIMO KNUUTTILA Faculty of Theology University of Helsinki Helsinki Finland
Abstract The Latin word dolor, as it is used in medieval philosophy, can refer to simple physical pain or to an emotion of the sensory soul. According to Thomas Aquinas, physical pain is an unpleasant experience of something repugnant to the body; emotional pain of the sensory part of the soul is a reaction to an experience of something taking place against sensory appetite. This analysis was introduced by Plato and was often repeated in ancient sources of medieval philosophy. While medieval thinkers usually regarded physical pain as supervenient on immediate bodily sensations, some of them followed Avicenna in arguing that physical pleasure and pain are also felt directly and should be added to the touch qualities. Avicenna distinguished between 15 sorts of bodily pain. Latin authors usually located the experience of physical pleasure and pain in the sensory moving power which was also the seat of the emotions. This was in line with the Aristotelian view that nature had provided all animals with the sense of touch in order to keep them away from what is harmful – pain immediately triggered avoidance. The most common Latin word for physical pain in medieval philosophy is dolor. This term, like the corresponding
Greek word (lupe¯), can refer to simple physical pain or to an emotion of the sensory soul. Thomas Aquinas (Summa theologiae II-1, 35.7) describes external physical pain and internal emotional pain as follows: external pain is caused by something repugnant to the body and internal pain is caused by what is repugnant to sensory appetite. External pain follows an external perception, particularly that of touch, and internal pain follows an act of imagination or reason. The distinction between physical and emotional pain was traditional. It was introduced by Plato, who argued that there are bodily motions which are not perceived and others that are; of the latter some are perceived neutrally, some are perceived as pleasant, and others as unpleasant. Pleasures and distresses which do not simply arise from the body and are associated with desires and evaluations form the feeling component of all emotions (Phil. 33d, 43b-c, 47d-e; Tim. 64d). There are similar distinctions in Aristotle and in the Stoics, who taught the extirpation of emotions as misguided judgments, but separated these from bodily feelings. The central idea of the traditional analysis is the distinction between pain as an unpleasant experience of a noxious state of some part of the body and this state as the cause and the object of the experience. While the experience takes place in the soul, this involves a bodily localization of where it hurts. This distinction is formulated in a famous passage from the Peripatetic Strato of Lampsacus: ‘‘It is not in the foot that we feel hurt when we stub it, nor in the head when we crack it, nor in the finger when we cut it . . . we suppose the hurt from the wound is not where it is sensed, but where it originated, as the soul is dr
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