Shameless plug for my own Chinese-learning program, Pingtype. It does word-by-word translation as well. Here's a direct link to one example dataset (Bible)
This is really cool; thank you! It was a bit hard at first to understand what was going on (and that the page was still loading), but after find the docs at https://pingtype.github.io/docs/docs.html I understand better, and it seems really impressive and useful. And it's really (pleasantly) surprising that the translation happens offline in the browser, after loading so little data (the font is bigger).
I found this curation of lectures https://aquinas101.thomisticinstitute.org/ (they are on apple podcast as well) very helpful to understand the thought of Aquinas. It's not like a typical course but collection of talks on aspects of Thomistic philosophy.
Excellent. My Latin is crap these days, and if I had to read the original it would take an hour to get through a page with a dictionary open, but it's great to have the Latin right there if something in the English raises an eyebrow.
This translation looks good from a quick scan. Reasonably faithful to the text of Aquinas without being unduly contorted to track the Latin structure. A nice effort!
This reminds be of the "No Fear" series of classics which really helped me get into Shakespeare. What I usually do with stuff like this is read the original, read the translated/simplified version, and then finally read the original text again. I find that this method really helps both reinforce the meaning as well as appreciate the beauty of the original language.
This is a great resource but please for the love of Tommy, use modern English.
"Because the Teacher of Catholic truth ought not only to teach the proficient, but also to instruct beginners, according to the Apostle:"
I'm not looking for: "lol, don't preach to the choir rofl. The Big Guy says so." but it's 2020ish and not 1950.
I know exactly where that language style (in the translation) comes from and it needs to go away. If I find the word "thou" later, I will go (slightly) postal. OK my left eye will twitch a bit.
Translations are not made every day; one has to pick from what is available (and in the public domain at that, for a website like this), and the translation used here is evidently the one published in 1922 in 21 volumes as being by "Fathers of the English Dominican Province" but actually by one person, Father Laurence Shapcote (1864–1947). (Via the article linked from https://thomistica.net/news/2011/9/13/the-shapcote-translati...)
> In 1910 the Province decided to have the Summa translated. Fr Laurence brought out the first volumes before he left England, but the bulk of the work was done in South Africa. In addition he also translated the Summa Contra Gentes (4 volumes, 1923 –1929), and the Quaestiones Disputatae de Potentia (3 volumes, 1932–34). This translation of the Summa is ‘literal’. […] In a way, for students who have no Latin, the Shapcote translation gives a better idea, more of the feel, of the original, even though it does not make conversation with St Thomas so easy.
> Laurence Shapcote never wrote anything: there is no way of telling what his own ‘Thomism’ was. It is a century since he started work. He did not respond to suggestions that he should unmask his anonymity. Readers who are thankful for this literal translation would surely be all the more grateful if they knew that it was done by Laurence Shapcote alone, in very austere conditions, on the Rand and in Natal, doggedly translating his way through the major works of St Thomas.
But your comment is intriguing; I'm mostly struck by the idea that the style of 1950s is so much different from that of 2020s. (For reference, 1950 was the year of publication of Asimov's "I, Robot" collection of stories published earlier, or C. S. Lewis's "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe"; Greene's The Third Man and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four were published the previous year.) In what sense is the sentence fragment you quoted not modern English? You gave an example of what you're not looking for; could you also give an example of how you would rewrite it?
And what does this have to do with "thou", which went out of use in the 17th century? (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thou&oldid=102516...) A translation into standard English wouldn't have used "thou" even in 1950 (and this 1922 translation doesn't either, except in literal quotes from the King James Bible).
Sorry for the late reply and thank you for spending quite a lot of time responding to me.
> But your comment is intriguing; I'm mostly struck by the idea that the style of 1950s is so much different from that of 2020s.
I threw the 1950s into my comment because that is post WW2 and pre me - I'm 50 ie off of 1970 and onwards. I perhaps didn't think it through too much. I am a Brit wot went through the private school system in general apart from the six or seven schools in West Germany, London and Manchester before age eight. My upbringing was loosely observant Church of England.
The CofE Book of Common Prayer, Hymnal etc was full of thee and thou and was modernised to you and you around those decades. You still hear "for Thine is the Kingdom" in the Lord's Prayer even today.
Thine, thee and thou (your, you and you) are still in use. You also see what looks like Ye or ye but the letter that looks like Yy is really the letter thorn so ye is really thee.
Shake the spear wrote during the time of the great vowel shift in English which seems to have taken about 300 years. Spelling in his time was pretty random and looks more like hints and indications, rather than "correct". My home town of Yeovil has over sixty documented spellings since around 400CE. A lot of them are seen in those 300 years. I would put Shakey into a different brand of English because I doubt that he and I could have conversed. My mum could make herself completely unintelligible by falling back to her girlhood Devonian dialect from the 40s/50s.
Language is way more interesting and diverse than a WP page can possibly describe. I do love WP - its a cracking project and I've written quite a lot of WM (M not P - I'm a nerd not a clever bloke) pages. However it does fall short sometimes due to some small minded editors who squat on their pages and refuse to allow changes.
Language scholarship used to need a bit of a kicking but I think that is quietly happening over the last 20-30 years. I'm not an expert in any way but I do see signs of broadmindedness and proper scholarship in some of the books I read that have a language component. That said, you then get threads like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27721748 . Search for the terms Chinese and Sanscrit for the exciting bits (or the bits where you quietly close the door and wander off.) There are some decent ideas and comments in there but they are really hard to find.
Sadly, aggressive nationalism is rearing its ugly head in no small way. I'm a Brit and well aware of my nation's past. It seems like everyone wants to piss off the rest of the world a la the worst excesses of the British Empire. My forebears () invented the word jingoism and it is quite awful seeing others not learning the lessons of our past.
Whoops, sorry. Back in the room ... 8)
() I should point out that my documented ancestors include people who identified with all four UK nations and the male line runs back to Germany (Hanover) in around 1750 where the trail runs cold.
I like Aquinas, especially for his silly attempts to justify Aristotle's particular choice of categories, which eventually led to Occam proposing his razor... but why is this popular now?
Wait is the English a translation or did he write them in both languages? I’m guessing the former since the English seems too modern (and writing both versions would be a lot of work).
cf. 般諾波羅心經 which is, in fact, thought to have been first composed in Chinese, and later to be translated to Sanskrit. Also Aquinas was a 13th c Italian who ended up in Paris, so not altogether unreasonable that he did write in England, in English, given his conventionalized first name. I only say this to safeguard against comments along the lines that were my first impulse.
Yeah that was one (of many) indicators the English wasn't an original from Aquinas. I was just confused because normally a translation will be marked as such, with the translator's name.
It has been said that the quickest way to get a question answered online is to prominently post the wrong answer. I feel like this was Aquinas's role in the development of western philosophy.
It is a joke based on Aquinas' style of answering questions. He begins with a handful of "objections" that take the opposite position to the one he eventually lands on. To take a random example, "Whether a man is bound to give thanks to every benefactor?" (https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q106.A3)
In some ways you're trying to steel man (as opposed to straw man) the opposing arguments. It was a reflection of the oral debating style used in universities at the time.
Strange that that answer doesn't include the fact that they were heavily influenced by Aristotle (who had just been rediscovered by Europeans) who explicitely recommended doing this.
My reading of the joke was that it wasn't about Aquinas's question/answers/objections/resolution style, but just suggesting that Aquinas got a lot of things wrong but got them wrong very clearly, making him a useful person to argue against in order to develop better answers to his questions.
Not OP, but from what I understand Aquinas seems to have had a fixed lens he allowed himself to view the world through and seemingly based the fundamentals of his philosophy on. Not even Aristotle could be properly studied without a Christian lens.
He's generally viewed as a net positive since Christiandom ruled the western world and Aquinas reconciled some Aristotelian and Neoplatonic views with the Catholic Church ("Nothing comes from nothing", "cause and effect", etc) But to Aquinas, those Neoplatonists from whom he derived his cosmology and philosophy were nothing better than pagans lining up to be burned in the good lord's holy fires—even though they figured the same thing about the way things appear to work.
Specifically, I'd add that Aquinas had enormous regard for Aristotle and the pagan philosophers, to the point that he referred to Aristotle with the honorific "the Philosopher".
I'd be wary of misinterpreting endearment as honorific.
Morally, he couldn't exalt a Pagan. He only brought himself to say that they essentially "weren't all bad", and beautifully illustrated. He was right, of course, about them—but ultimately he looked down upon them from a moral and ethical standpoint.
Aquinas acknowledged heavy philosophical debts to Maimonides and Averroes while critiquing them in particulars. And as for the theology, I don't see how you get "looked down on" from: https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q10. To say that Aquinas "looked down on" pagans seems like an almost maximally uncharitable summary of the man's actual views. Where are you seeing this?
The Medieval church's philosophy was called Neoplatonism, after Plato, a 'pagan'. IIRC, they would have loved to have Aristotle's works too, and they were finally discovered in the time of Aquinas.
Common cosmological and philosophical threads run through all religions, but some tenets of Neoplatonism and related Hermetic mystical foundations made their way into Catholicism through two means: early Christian cults and sects before an organized central church ruled on all tenets, and later through Augustine and Aquinas saying "these guys aren't so bad, they figured out why we know there's a god at all and now we can prove it".
Neoplatonism well predates the church. It's beautiful, though.
It's a fundamental tenet of the Catholic belief system. If you're not Catholic christian, then you're Pagan, and it follows if you're not adhering to Catholic Christianity then you are doomed.
Not Christianity in all its forms, sure, but Catholicism absolutely.
Just because Aquinas questioned if "pagans" could be virtuous in spite of their beliefs, does not mean he didn't believe they were destined for exclusion from God. He might have written more positively about them than his counterparts and colleagues in the church, but he was looking down his nose at them.
I don't consider adherents to a dogma reaching out in "charity" to be a relationship of equitable footing. It reminds me of that old English nonsense of "noble savages". Just because they called them "noble"...
edit:
Happy to remove my personal opinions.
I'm not making up these perspectives; this is dogma according to the Catholic Encyclopedia: https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/paganism. And it's literally in the abstract of the first paper linked to.
Aquinas, as a function of his adherence to that dogma, presumed all Pagans to be doomed as a function of their not adhering to the same dogma. He considered them possibly capable of virtue, but morally inferior.
Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents [1], and certainly not on religious flamewar tangents, which this is.
There are plenty of interesting things to discuss about Aquinas in his historical context. The last thing we need is to replace that with generic (and therefore tedious, and eventually nasty) arguments about "dogma" and (god help us) "the errors of modern Christianity".
I understand why he comes across that way, but as a Catholic myself, he's correct in his assertion that the church still holds the doctrine 'extra Ecclesiam nulla salus' (Outside the church there is no salvation) and that most Catholics of Aquinas's time would have believed an even strong version. This is not flame-baiting. It's a statement of Catholic doctrine that's been written on extensively for many years. IMO, he's just providing a factual background for Aquinas' worldview that anyone -- Catholic or otherwise -- can use to interpret his philosophy however they want.
I don't think this is flamebaiting personally, but maybe I have thick skin.
The only thing he's 'wrong' about is that not every non-Catholic is considered a pagan. Some are schismatics or heretics. Again, that's not my opinion or his/her opinion. That's just a statement of what the church publicly proclaims to believe about non-catholics.
There's no reason why a correct statement can't be flamebait. Frequently they are.
The problem here isn't that the GP posted opinion rather than fact, or something like that; it's that the comment was a dramatic swerve into generic flamewar territory. More explanation if it helps: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....
Thank you. You read me correctly. To be fair to dang, my original comment had my personal opinion on dogma laced into it. I removed that portion.
I hadn't felt I was launching into any arguments even with my opinion laced in, but it may also be that I don't tend to be patient with my wording. So what seems only matter-of-fact to me may come across more cold-hearted to others than I intended.
Either way, I appreciate your insightful additions. You'll probably be more helpful on this subject already than I've been.
Dang, nothing I said was to instigate a flame war about religion. I think my comment history should speak for itself, there.
I was defending my statement on Aquinas, and so I had to draw out the conclusion. I think that's fair.
I never directed any remark at anyone's beliefs, so I think this is all heavy-handed, but just the same I removed the offending opinions and tuned my comment to suit HN's mode.
I believe you about your intention, but we have to go by effects, not intentions [1]. What you posted was certainly a swerve into generic religious territory and the sort of thing that, based on experience, is likely to turn into a religious flamewar.
The more important point here is that it's best to avoid generic tangents [2], especially on classic flamewar topics.
>846 How are we to understand this affirmation, often repeated by the Church Fathers?335 Re-formulated positively, it means that all salvation comes from Christ the Head through the Church which is his Body:
>Basing itself on Scripture and Tradition, the Council teaches that the Church, a pilgrim now on earth, is necessary for salvation: the one Christ is the mediator and the way of salvation; he is present to us in his body which is the Church. He himself explicitly asserted the necessity of faith and Baptism, and thereby affirmed at the same time the necessity of the Church which men enter through Baptism as through a door. Hence they could not be saved who, knowing that the Catholic Church was founded as necessary by God through Christ, would refuse either to enter it or to remain in it.336
>847 This affirmation is not aimed at those who, through no fault of their own, do not know Christ and his Church:
>Those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience - those too may achieve eternal salvation.337
>848 "Although in ways known to himself God can lead those who, through no fault of their own, are ignorant of the Gospel, to that faith without which it is impossible to please him, the Church still has the obligation and also the sacred right to evangelize all men.
I think you're hierarchy is fine, but keep in mind the Baltimore catechism is not an 'official' church document issued by Rome.
As something issued by all bishops in the USA, it did at one time have official status in dioceses within the United States.
But it's not a place to cite 'official' Catholic teaching, because it's not a universal Church document the way a church council, a vatican statement, or the writings of one of the church doctors would be.
It's best to cite a source that the Baltimore Catechism would have used as the authoritative source.
>Aquinas reconciled some Aristotelian and Neoplatonic views with the Catholic Church
I wonder if you might be mistaking Aquinas for Augustine? Augustine introduced huge amounts of Neoplatonism into Christianity very early---little more than a century after the original Neoplatonist, Plotinus himself. It's also worth noting that Plotinus was a disciple of the mysterious Ammonius Saccas, one of whose other disciples was none other than Origen, a very influential early Christian writer (albeit later considered a heretic).
It's fair to say Augustine did more reconciling with Neoplatonism. Aquinas did some. I think Aquinas was more wary of relying too heavily upon a philosophy that he saw as incomplete. Even "the philosopher" could not provide a comprehensive framework for Christian philosophy. When Neoplatonism was useful, he would take parts here and there, but he was under no illusion that Neoplatonism provided a sufficient framework for understanding the world. The early Italian renaissance philosophers were far more taken with Plato and the Neoplatonists. Marsilio Ficino, for example, probably went too far trying to reconcile parts that were (arguably) fundamentally incompatible with Christianity.
My understanding, which was never great and is imperfectly recalled:
Augustine was the foundation of Neoplatonism in the Medieval church, which was it's guiding philosophy (to some great extent) for centuries.
The works of Aristotle were lost to them. They knew of Aristotle but didn't have his writings. Around the time of Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle's works were rediscovered, having been preserved in the Muslim world. Aquinas' great task was reconciling them with the existing church.
Augustine does explicitly reference Aristotle's "Categories" in his Confessions, I believe. Not sure what other material of Aristotle's was available to Augustine, I'm not a scholar on the subject. Of course, even to us today, many of Aristotle's works are STILL lost, so...
He wrote a lot about a variety of Big Topics in philosophy and theology, often getting things quite wrong, sometimes subtly, sometimes... less subtly. This has prompted much commentary, refutation, and further development toward better arguments.
Sorry, I’ve assumed that my point is clear, given the quote: Aquinas’ work is based on assumptions which perhaps made sense back then, but now are obviously wrong, rendering his conclusions worthless (apart from their historical value, of course).
> ... is, technically, BS. And pretty much all of Aquinas follows this pattern. Which was very highly regarded back then, but now we know better.
You seem confident in that assertion. Care to elaborate, preferably with examples/arguments?
N.b., it's not the first time I've heard such a claim so boldly stated. Typically, dismissive attitudes toward Thomas are rooted in widespread misunderstanding about what he actually argued and on what basis. Feser, for example, recalls how he had held a caricaturish view of some of the most famous arguments Thomas put forth because those caricatures are what are often taught to students of philosophy nowadays, largely because the caricatures have become part of academic received wisdom, not necessarily because of some ill intent.
None of this is to say that Thomas is infallible, just that he is a great teacher. Arguments that rely on the science of his day, for example, may require revision, but his philosophical synthesis, for example, is, at the VERY least, very defensible.
I’m not sure that’s true. There is a certain strand in postmodernist/critical thought that, by consistently seeking to unmask power, recovers the perennial, “religious” questions. Some examples might include Horkheimer’s later works, Simone Weil, or Habermas, who famously had an encounter with Pope Benedict XVI (then, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger) that caused him to reevaluate a lot of his views towards religious thought.
I think Aquinas is also pretty accessible to the dedicated novice.
Maybe you mean positivist instead of postmodernist? In that case, yeah, I’d agree.
Please don't take HN threads into generic ideological tangents. The more generic they get, the more repetitive and tedious they are, and then they inevitably turn nasty.
Bertrand Russell on Thomas Aquinas:
“There is little of the true philosophic spirit in Aquinas. He does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead. He is not engaged in an enquiry, the result of which it is impossible to know in advance. Before he begins to philosophize, he already knows the truth; it is declared in the Catholic faith. If he can find apparently rational arguments for some parts of the faith, so much the better; if he cannot, he need only fall back on revelation. The finding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance is not philosophy, but special pleading.” [History of Western Philosophy p. 453]
Of course, Anthony Kenny countered Russell’s assertion by humorously noting, “ It is extraordinary that that accusation should be made by Russell, who in the book Principia Mathematica takes hundreds of pages to prove that two and two make four, which is something he had believed all his life” (Aquinas on Mind, 11).
Russell also misunderstands much of Thomas’s project in this quotation. To my knowledge, Thomas never claimed to be doing philosophy (at least not according to the modern understanding of it); most of his work is theology that happens to have philosophical implications. But as Thomas notes in the opening articles of the Summa Theologica, theology as a scientia takes divine revelation as its first principles and makes rational deductions on the basis of that deposit of revelation. Importantly, however, it pursues its ends using particularly theological methods and criteria, some of which overlap with philosophical methods and criteria, while others do not.
But the starting point of theology is Anselm’s “Credo ut intelligam,” not Descartes’s Cogito. To imagine that theology is just some poorly-conducted version of philosophy is fundamentally a category error.
So theology need not make any rational sense whatsoever? It is more an affirmation/fiction/opinion that represents the authors’ own intuitions about divine matters, or perhaps proceeds from a survey/study of previous hierology/sacred texts? Is an experience of personal revelation therefore necessary to study the subject? You believe a man must believe in a (presumably exclusively Christian?) God, as defined in canonical scriptures, as interpreted by the Catholic church, to study or rationalise about theology? Augustine defined ‘theologia’ as: "…reasoning or discussion concerning the Deity..." - but he got the ‘rationem’ bit wrong? Aristotle must also have been a misguided old fuddy-duddy when he stated that there were three aspects of theoretical philosophy: mathematics, physics and theology - or rather he didn’t mean theology as you define it, but instead something more akin to metaphysics? Thomas Aquinas defines theology as: ‘…what is taught by God, teaches of God and leads to God’ - this seems much closer to what you suggest? A person must first believe, and then an understanding, or more knowledge, of the nature of a god, that you already believe in, will more likely accrue to the initiate after appropriate study, but only given that prior belief? Would you agree with Thomas Paine:
“The study of theology, as it stands in Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authorities; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and it admits of no conclusion. Not anything can be studied as a science, without our being in possession of the principles upon which it is founded; and as this is the case with Christian theology, it is therefore the study of nothing.”
…or Protagoras: "Concerning the gods I cannot know either that they exist or that they do not exist, or what form they might have, for there is much to prevent one's knowing: the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of man's life."
…understand that might be a bit heavy duty/tough ask for a HN comment - but I am genuinely interested if you can point me to useful passages/sources/help me understand Aquinas’/your ideas better…
“…Hence nothing prevents those things which may be learned from the philosophical disciplines, so far as they can be known by the light of natural reason, from being considered by another science according as they are known by the light of divine revelation. Hence theology included in sacred doctrine differs in kind from that theology which is part of philosophy…”
Theology is to philosophy what alchemy is to chemistry. Sure, it’s not technically a poorly-conducted version of the other, that would be a category error, but you can’t really ignore their relationship either.
There is no index on the left, the scrollbar thumb doesn't work, and when you scroll down with the arrow keys, it goes only a few paragraphs before stopping.
Listing the ones I know (in no particular order, just a list I had collected a while ago):
- Physical (print) books: Loeb Classical Library (Greek and Latin) https://www.loebclassics.com/, Clay Sanskrit Library (Sanskrit) http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org/volumes_current.php, Murty Classical Library of India (various languages) https://murtylibrary.com/volumes.php.
- Perseus Hopper (Greek and Latin), https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/
- Chinese Text Project (https://ctext.org/)
- https://nodictionaries.com/ (Latin)
- http://pseudw.herokuapp.com/iliad/books/1?start=500&end=589&... = https://github.com/nkallen/pseudw/ (Greek: The Iliad)
- http://alpheios.net/ (Latin, Greek)
- quran.com / legacy.quran.com / corpus.quran.com (The Quran: Arabic)
- Dickinson College Commentaries (Latin) e.g. https://dcc.dickinson.edu/tacitus-agricola/1
- "e-readers" under http://sanskrit.uohyd.ac.in/scl/ (Sanskrit)
- Gita Supersite (Sanskrit) e.g. https://www.gitasupersite.iitk.ac.in/srimad?language=dv&fiel...
- https://greenmesg.org/stotras/lakshmi/sri_suktam.php etc (Sanskrit)
- No Fear Shakespeare (https://www.sparknotes.com/shakespeare/)
- https://github.com/tasuki/side-by-side e.g. https://enchiridion.tasuki.org https://ttc.tasuki.org/
- This one (https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.I.Pr.3)
Of these, http://alpheios.net/ and https://github.com/tasuki/side-by-side are ones that allow you to build your own webpages / present your own texts. Are there more?