The criticism that I've heard of Russell and Whitehead is this: that they tried to show that mathematics was about, not just relations of ideas, but relations of purely logical ideas and nothing else.  In particular, I've seen R&W criticised for trying to assimulate the idea of infinity to logic.  Critics argue that the idea of infinity (as used in mathematics) is irreducibly mathematical and can't be reduced to pure logic.

Hume could evade this criticism, because, for him, the ideas in "relations of ideas" aren't restricted to logical ideas.

I also am having trouble grasping "perverted faculty" arguments.  I think that my difficulty centers around the term "faculty".

What exactly is a "faculty" in A-T?  Are the terms "power" and "capacity" synonymous with "faculty" in this context?  Where exactly should I situate faculties in my "A-T metaphysical mental model"?

More generally, there are several subtleties of "faculty-speak" that I don't yet grasp.  For example, I was taken aback with Scott wrote,

Scott wrote:

Objectively, it is the "reproductive faculty" that is being used in (male) masturbation, and it can't very well be otherwise if the outcome is ejaculation.

Now, I get that the reproductive organs are being used.  I get that these organs are being used in a way that frustrates their purpose, which is to play their part in reproduction.  But in what sense is the reproductive faculty being used?  Certainly, the owner did not in fact reproduce.  I suppose that I assumed that a faculty, to be used, must be used successfully.  Analogously, you can't use your faculty of sight with a blindfold on.  You can only try to use that faculty, but your attempt will fail, so that, in the end, the faculty remains unused.  At least, that's how I'm inclined to use the language in that case.

Could someone recommend a text that gives the A-T position on the metaphysics of faculties in general (not just in the context of their perversion)?

Well, if you're not, the Catechism trumps him anyway

I don't think that my reading of Aquinas contradicts the Catechism (as I read it).  But that's only because I wasn't reading a very particular meaning into the word "guilt".  My understanding of what Aquinas meant by the word was too vague to be easily contradicted.

You mention the distinction between individual and corporate guilt.  This raises the question for me of just what either of these kinds of guilt are.  For example, when a father commits a crime, and his son inherits corporate guilt, is this guilt a feature of the son himself, or is it just a relational fact about how other people perceive him (e.g., as somehow "stained" by his father's crime)?  If no one knew that the son was related to the father, would he still share in corporate guilt in any objective sense?

(It probably goes without saying, but I'm looking for answers from the perspective of scholasticism.)

I've been reading Summa Theologica, First Part of the Second Part, Question 81, Article 1: "Whether the first sin of our first parent is contracted by his descendants, by way of origin?" (http://www.newadvent.org/summa/2081.htm)

In an effort to test my understanding, I'm trying to rephrase Aquinas's position in terms of von Neumann machines.  This is probably a little kooky.  I'm wondering if it is at all on the right track.  (I have no emotional attachment to this, so feel free to tear it to shreds.)

The picture that I'm getting is something like the following:  Human Nature is like a computer program.  Adam was like a von Neumann machine that ran the first instance of this program, and who built subsequent instances.  A soul is a particular instantiation of this program in an individual machine.  Original sin came into the program itself, and hence into Adam, and hence into each of us via Adam because he built the machines that built the machines that ... that built the machines that built us.

(I'm calling us "machines" here just because I'm thinking of us as like von Neumann machines in some sense for purposes of illustration.  I realize that we are not literally machines under A-T.)

The point is, it was the program, the nature common to us all, that sinned, and not just the particular instance of the program in Adam.  That is how each of us can have guilt.

This raises the question of when the damage to the nature occurred.  At first, it seems that, if Adam's nature had changed from undamaged to damaged after he was alive, then he would have changed his substantial form and so become a different kind of thing.  That is, he would have been destroyed at the time of his sin and replaced by something else of a different kind.  But this doesn't seem like the intended story.

This suggests that there is an "inner program" and an "outer program".  The inner program is the substantial form itself, which cannot change, any more than the form of "triangle

Hello, everyone.

I am a mathematician with an amateur interest in philosophy.  For several years now, I've been learning a lot from Feser's posts and from the helpful and knowledgeable commentors that his blog attracts.  I'm excited to see that some of these commentors are starting a free-standing forum here.

My own philosophical outlook, both by nature and on reflection, is atheistic, materialistic, and reductionistic.  In other words, from the A-T standpoint, wrong, wrong, wrong!  So I've always appreciated the patience with which my questions have been answered by the commentors on Feser's blog.  Thanks to them, I have some glimmering of the monumental intellectual power of the A-T ediface.  If I am indeed radically wrong in my worldview, then A-T, among all the systems that I know, seems most likely to be right.  I'm looking forward to learning more about this system here.