Einstein and Aquinas: A Rapprochement: A Rapprochement

ISBN-13: 9789024700813 / Angielski / Miękka / 1970 / 123 str.

J. F. Kiley; W. E. Carlo

Opis

Now how would things be intelligible if they did not proceed from an intelligence? In the last analy sis a Primal Intelligence must exist, which is itself Intellection and Intelligibility in pure act, and which is the first principle of intelligibility and essences of things, and causes order to exist in them, as well as an infinitely complex network of regular relationships, whose fundamental mysterious unity our reason dreams of rediscovering in its own way. Such an approach to God's existence is a variant of Thomas Aquinas' fifth way. Its impact was secretly present in Einstein's famous saying: "God does not play dice," which, no doubt, used the word God in a merely figurative sense, and meant only: "nature does not result from a throw of the dice," yet the very fact implicitly postulated the existence of the divine Intellect. Jacques Maritain God's creation is the insistence on the dependence of "epistemology" on ontology; man's acknow ledgement of creation is an insistence on the episte mological recovery of ontology."

Spis treści

I. The Epistemology of Albert Einstein.- Section A. The Inductive Beginnings of Scientific Investigation.- Section B. The Formation of Primary Concepts according to Einstein. Their Invention.- Section C. The Deductive Process. The Rules of Naturalness and Simplicity.- Section D. The Epistemological Elements of the Special Theory of Relativity. Confirmation of the Theory.- II. A Metaphysical Analysis of Einstein’s View of Reality.- Section A. The Notion of Reality in Albert Einstein.- Section B. The Problem of the Reality of Relations.- Section C. The Grasp of Reality in Mathematico-physical Investigation.- III. The Metaphysical Foundations Of Einstein’s Epistemology.- Section A. The Foundations of Inductive Beginnings.- Section B. The Roots of the Formation of the Primary Concepts.- Section C. Judgment and Reasoning as Related to Scientific Postulation.- Section D. The Confirmation of the Theorems and the Nature of Scientific Proof.- Conclusions.- Appendix. A note on the Discovery of Being.