Aquinas

Why Do I Suffer? That Is the Rock of Atheism | Evil, God, and Skeptical Theism

An innocent man, a burned fawn, and the hardest question ever asked of God. This episode follows the problem of evil from its oldest telling to its newest defenses. It begins with a man who loses everything in a single afternoon and refuses every easy explanation, then traces the great answers, evil as absence, the best of all possible worlds, and the earthquake and the novel that broke optimism's public standing. From there the argument sharpens into the twentieth century, a charge of outright contradiction, the celebrated defense that answered it, a theodicy of growing souls, and a dying fawn that changed the question from proof to evidence. The second half belongs to skeptical theism, the claim that human minds cannot survey the reasons a God might have, and to the objections that press it, moral paralysis, spreading doubt, horrendous evils, animal pain, and divine silence. The episode ends where the argument now stands, between a rock and a rope. Settle in, and let the oldest question keep you company. Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.

Avicenna | The Most Prolific Polymath of the Islamic Golden Age

Avicenna's Complete Philosophy

How did a physician writing by lamplight in a mountain fortress come to shape five centuries of world philosophy? The philosopher who called himself Avicenna was born in nine hundred and eighty near Bukhara, memorized the Quran at ten, read Aristotle's Metaphysics forty times, and then built a philosophical system so comprehensive that it became, in two separate civilizations, the foundation on which later thought was constructed. This episode traces his life from the Samanid libraries of his childhood through the courts and prisons of his middle years to the final synthesis he achieved in Isfahan. We work through his great philosophical encyclopedia, his proof that a necessary being must exist, his famous thought experiment about a soul floating in empty space with no sensory contact of any kind, his account of the inner faculties of the mind, his theory of how prophetic knowledge works, and the three allegorical works that say what the philosophy cannot quite say in argument. We follow his ideas into the Latin West, where Thomas Aquinas read and transformed them, and through the Islamic tradition, where Suhrawardi and Mulla Sadra built new philosophies on his foundations. One of the great minds of any civilization, examined at full length. Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.

The Saint Who Made Aristotle Christian

All of Thomas Aquinas's Philosophy Explained

Thomas Aquinas synthesized Aristotelian philosophy with Christian theology to build one of the most comprehensive intellectual systems in Western history. This episode follows his life from his childhood at Roccasecca through his defiance of family opposition to join the Dominican order, his studies under Albertus Magnus, and his career at the University of Paris. It examines his masterwork the Summa Theologica in depth, including the Five Ways of proving God's existence, his metaphysics of being and existence, divine simplicity, natural law ethics, the theory of virtue, and his understanding of grace. The story concludes with his mystical vision of December 1273, when he declared all his writings to be straw, and the long arc of his legacy from condemnation to canonization to the modern Thomistic revival.