Saturday, June 21, 2025

Shields on Aquinas on the Unmoved Mover

My review of Daniel Shields’ important recent book Nature and Nature’s God: A Philosophical and Scientific Defense of Aquinas’s Unmoved Mover Argument appears in the July 2025 issue of The Thomist.

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4 comments:

  1. AnonymousJune 21, 2025 at 8:45 PM

    The book is published by the Catholic University of America Press, which publishes many excellent books on Thomistic philosophy.

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  2. CaptainCHJune 25, 2025 at 4:16 PM

    What do you think of Daniel’s comments about you on his blog saying that you may have mischaracterized act and potency? Specifically, about how parts of a substance are in potency to the whole. Here is what he said:

    https://danielshields.info/2024/02/19/feser-on-potency-and-act/

    https://danielshields.info/2024/03/10/further-thoughts-on-act-and-potency/

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    Replies
    1. BillJuly 14, 2025 at 10:28 AM

      It seems to me that Shields may be misreading Feser. Ed isn’t denying the subjective potency for continued existence. He agrees with Aquinas that a thing cannot be in act and potency in the same respect. What he appears to deny is the presence of objective potency—the potential to become something one is not yet—once that potential has been actualized. Subjective potency, by contrast, is the principle of receptivity that remains even after actualization. Do you happen to have the exact passage where Ed is said to make the claim in question?

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    2. CaptainCHAugust 14, 2025 at 8:49 PM

      @Bill

      I do find Daniel’s usage of the terminology of ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ potency to be a bit odd. In all of the manuals I’ve read (admittedly not a lot, but still a decent amount of material), an objective potency is simply a logical possibility, and it has nothing to do with being opposed to act per se. And a subjective potency is a potency that exists in a real subject and not just as a mere possibility.

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