Some Mediaeval Opponents of Divine Infinity

Sweeney, Leo

doi:10.1484/j.ms.2.306774

Cited by 3 publications

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“…This was no doubt why Albert was ready to make the declaration, astonishing from the perspective of later subsequent theological developments, that in one sense God is 'the most finite of all in His Power and in whatever He is' (Commentary on 1 Sent a 43 c. a 1 ad 1). 43 Another instance of a slightly earlier source than Aquinas, which retains the doctrine of divine finitude, is the Summa Fratris Alexandri which suggests that God is infinite with regard to creatures because not 'finalized' by anything outside himself, but finite in Himself in the sense of 'complete'. 44 But there was another factor, coming from outside Christendom, which thrust the theme of the divine infinity into prominence; namely, the reception into Western philosophy of Arabic Neoplatonized Aristotelianism.…”

Section: The Development Of the Conception Of Divine Infinity Priomentioning

confidence: 99%

Divine Infinity in Thomas Aquinas: I. Philosophico‐Theological Background

Burns

1998

The Heythrop Journal

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According to Étienne Gilson, for Aquinas, 'Infinity … excluding all limits, refusing all determinations … becomes one of the primary characteristics of the Christian God, and the one which, after Being, most clearly distinguishes Him from all other conceptions of God'; 1 and, again, that he made 'the very foundation of this doctrine … the universally accepted doctrine in medieval theology … that God is infinitely above anything we can think and say about him'. 2 Similarly, Maritain wrote that the first Four Ways of Aquinas 'effect a transition to the infinite' by moving from the finitude of created beings to an Infinite First Cause, 3 and Eric Mascall, that Aquinas's doctrine of analogy was 'vital' to him, 'not merely' as an attempt to show how our knowledge of finite things could somehow be extrapolated to yield some knowledge of an infinite God, but how this possibility is 'conditioned by the fact that the finite order is dependent for its very existence on the fiat of the infinite and self-existent God '. 4 Are these readings justifiable? Apparently not, according to a number of recent treatments: Brian Davies's recent comprehensive survey, The Thought of Thomas Aquinas, 5 not untypically, makes virtually no mention of it. Yet, in the Summa Theologiae, 6 immediately after proving God's existence, Aquinas announces the intention of demonstrating five 'modes' of the divine being of which the third is infinity, and in ST 1a 7 and elsewhere, he certainly develops a more detailed treatment of the divine infinity than any previous Christian thinker. On the other hand much traditional scholarship on Aquinas's doctrine of analogy has arguably laboured under serious misapprehensions. In each of his mature treatments of analogical predication (Summa contra Gentiles 32; Compendium of Theology 27; De Potentia 7.7; 7 ST 1a 13) the problem, contrary to the claims of Mascall and many others, is not said to be one of how finite intellects can conceive the infinite, but how human beings, geared to the cognition of composite beings, can discourse intelligibly of an absolutely simple God.

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Section: The Development Of the Conception Of Divine Infinity Priomentioning

confidence: 99%

Divine Infinity in Thomas Aquinas: I. Philosophico‐Theological Background

Burns

1998

The Heythrop Journal

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“…Moreover, techniques based on functional connectivity between EEG channels have been shown to correlate with long-term semantic memory [125]. [327]. In it, participants were requested to automatically predict if a person would remember a video based on the given video dataset and their EEG record.…”

Section: From Electroencephalography Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…the last years[65,111,181,327]. Unfortunately, at the time we were not aware of other possibilities that would have enabled us to compare more easily against other approaches in the literature.…”

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confidence: 99%

Data-driven Modelling of Cognitive and Affective Variables of Perception of Multimedia Content

Faúndez-Carrasco Población

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Understanding how external stimuli are transformed into meaningful impressions that guide human actions has been an enduring challenge. Automatic models of perception of multimedia productions stand out as a path to the characterisation of our interaction with a type of content that has nowadays flooded social media platforms and people's digital time. Aided by well-established theories of perception, we identify memorability, attention, judgements and the emotional state as cognitive and affective variables that provide complementary views towards the comprehension of our perception of multimedia content.Intrinsic media memorability is defined as an inherent property of the visual features of videos that determines the percentage of people who remember watching a clip in a second viewing. Our approaches are based on the extraction of video-level, topic-oriented features using pre-trained Transformers. We find that linear models trained using these features as inputs can reach prediction rates comparable to other state-of-the-art models across several datasets. Secondly, we characterise the attention to short movies at a group-level by means of using electrodermal activity recordings as ground-truth. We develop a binary classification system whose predictions, based on a semantically-driven representation of the acoustic signal of videos, denote whether the group-level attention increases or diminishes. Next, we address the judgement of images attending to a fitness criterion to tourism attractiveness. Our proposal builds upon a Mixture-Of-Experts system to leverage information relative to geolocation tags, which implicitly points to specific semantics and contents, seeking to incorporate into the model design the knowledge about the role of context during the annotation process. In order to predict the emotions elicited by historical artworks, we employ vision-language cross-modal models that seek to exploit the subjective and figurative nature within the artistic domain. We introduce a methodology to approximate systems pre-trained in realistic content to the art domain, finding that following it leads to significant improvements (up to 27%) in predicting emotions. However, given the complexity of understanding the rationale behind "black-box" visual prediction models, hence our last contribution targets the enhancement of the interpretability of these systems. We explore how to improve the explanations provided by LIME, a popular surrogate-based, post-hoc explanatory technique, by indirectly adding information about the statistic of the data distribution the "black-box" model is trained on.We believe this thesis contributes to comprehending the human perception of multimedia content by addressing from a computational perspective several cognitive and affective variables that conform to it. In particular, our approaches seek to combine information from multiple modalities, presenting models that extract patterns from low-level features of the inputs and relate them to human actions and responses spanning variou...

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Spenser’s Mutabilitie and the Indeterminate Universe

Powrie¹

2013

sel

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In the Two Cantos of Mutabilitie , Spenser allegorically explores the unpredictable and revolutionary implications of the new science through Mutabilitie’s insurrection, which transforms the heavens from a recognized hierarchy into an undifferentiated space of uncertainty and debate. Mutabilitie’s challenge to Jove’s superiority resembles the science of Tycho Brahe and Giordano Bruno, both of whom also contested the hierarchical structure of the traditional world system. Mutabilitie signals that the determinate meaning presupposed in the Aristotelian cosmos and the transcendent aspirations of allegory cannot be sustained in a post-Copernican universe.

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Some Mediaeval Opponents of Divine Infinity

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Divine Infinity in Thomas Aquinas: I. Philosophico‐Theological Background

Divine Infinity in Thomas Aquinas: I. Philosophico‐Theological Background

Data-driven Modelling of Cognitive and Affective Variables of Perception of Multimedia Content

Spenser’s Mutabilitie and the Indeterminate Universe

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