/lit/ - Literature

>>23324837
St. Thomas Aquinas

>completes philosophy

When Aquinas speaks of the "esse" (existence) of a being, is it something whose scope must be constrained to that very being (like essence/essentia)? Or must any close examination of a particular thing's esse result in a survey of the esse of all beings, e.g. the totality of existence, or even Being itself?

Allow me to introduce a short primer on existence. The question of existence centers on what we can say about beings that goes beyond essence. Essence is not the only reason for why things are the way they are, so existence has to be "larger" than that. For example, it is true that you are reading this post. But why are you reading this post? Is it due to your essence (e.g. your form of a human being, instantiated in the matter of the particular human being you are?). Obviously not, or else everybody would be reading my post, too. So when we look into a thing's existence, we're looking into its causes, as nothing is ever purely self-caused (except God).

It's worth noting that all things in existence must first brought into existence and then continuously sustained in existence in order to exist. A good example is music. To exist, a piece of music must begin with the first note played, continues as long as there is somebody or something playing, and ends as soon as the last note is played. But music is not self-caused. It doesn't just exist because of what it is. It must be brought into existence by something else. Another good example is life. Living organisms are self-caused in some sense, as once they are brought to life, they can continue to live on their own power due to their essence for quite some time. However, no living organism was able to bring itself into existence solely due to their own essence.

All of the previous examples shows that, for most things, there is a difference between esse and essentia, between existence and essence. The "sphere" of existence "engulfs" the "sphere" of essence. So, if you want an existential account of, let's say, a particular person, you first have to start with 1) what not only what that person did in their lifetime (self-caused), and 2) what affected him in his lifetime (outside causes), but also 3) the causal chain that led to both 1) & 2). You could always cut it off at some point for practical purposes, since we cannot give an infinite account of somebody's life, but we would have to recognize that it is an incomplete account, and perhaps wildly so.

>Aristotelians, Scholastics, etc., defined knowledge as a "likeness" between mind and reality
that makes sense when it comes to "knowing that" (e.g. animals, mathematical formulas, God, etc.), but how can that make sense when it comes to "knowing how"? there is no reality to "match" the mind with.