The Human Person – A Metaphysical Gaze – THE INSTITUTE OF ST JOHN Fr Thomas Dunton CSJ

The body is first in the order of conditioning – our work, personality, nature, community, moral life, imagination are all aspects of our body’s conditioning. In addition, we are the products of atavism, the inherited characteristics from our parents. However, the body is completely relative to the spiritual soul which finalises us and brings true…

Pere Marie-Dominique Philippe described the body as ‘The substantial conditioning of the human person’. We have no experience outside of our bodies, so in one sense we only exist – we are only able to say ‘I am’ – in union with our bodies. But if we ask the question: ‘What is the purpose of…

Beginning with the judgement of existence ‘this is’, and discovering the reality of existence outside ourselves, enables us to affirm the metaphysical, objective, reality of ‘I am’. ‘I am’ becomes therefore more than I am conscious of myself being, and leads onward to the discovery of my radical autonomy. More than this, I discover I…

Beyond all determinations, which describe our form, there is a more profound level of being which is described by ‘act’. As human beings we have the capacity to choose, and this implies a capacity to choose an ‘end’, in other words to choose our ‘finality’. To what principles or persons is our life ordered? Our…

What is ‘that-which-is in so far as it is’? This question is concerned with the judgement of existence. It leads further to such questions as: Can the matter which exists be described solely by its form? Or solely by its actions? Or both? Or is there something more ultimate than both these? Aristotle used the…

‘First Philosophy’ was the term used by Aristotle to embrace the study or search for what is absolutely first, or ultimate. In more recent centuries the term ‘Metaphysics’ has tended to replace the term ‘First Philosophy’, but it is concerned with the same aim – to go beyond the characteristics of man to the question…