The Scale of the (Rightly Ordered) Human: Habitus and the Measure of Technology

The present talk runs the risk of sounding like so many scholastic or Thomist papers: “Let me tell you how what Thomas Aquinas says about habit fixes all your modern AI woes.” Often, such papers are really an exercise in a kind of futility, a kind of “theologianology,” as my friend Fr. Cuddy would say,¹ studying the texts of Thomas and then maybe making a few little substantive observations at the end. Or, to channel the spirit of John Deely, it would be a kind of “backwards-looking Thomism.”² Or, to allow one last allusion, it could well have the feeling of being a Thomist version of those little clickbait ads at the bottom of a website: you can solve the problems of AI with this ONE NEAT TRICK!

We will try to avoid these temptations today. Therefore, let's start with a phenomenon. Whatever textual-historical recovery might take place along the way should be precisely in order to illuminate both that phenomenon and the questions that it arouses.

What appears to us in this present day is a tidal wave of automated intelligence or pseudo-intelligence. Others can discuss the ways that AI perhaps is a newly revived—and, let us admit, very impressive, despite its faults—version of the “large head” calculating machine proposed as a thought experiment by Leibniz. This represents an important point not only of a kind of philosophical psychology but also of the very metaphysics of cognition. At the root of so many discussions of artificial intelligence is the question concerning the very being of knowledge, both speculative and practical.

In the present talk, I would rather pay attention to the human practices involved in such use of technology. This is not because I am insensitive to the “principial” status of the metaphysical question of knowledge-being itself. Instead, I just want to take a different angle, based on reflections I've been undertaking over the past months, not only in preparation for the present talk but also for a series of pedagogical talks on habitus and on human and angelic cognition that I gave this past summer in the Czech Republic.

Let’s start with several amusing thoughts that I have had—not because I think it’s good to start speeches with jokes but, rather, because the particular poetics of humor sometimes places right in our face a datum that captivates our attention.

Recently, I was joking with my research assistant, who was driving across central Pennsylvania. He had stopped in a town that happens to be named “Jersey Shore”—which struck me as funny both because he himself is from New Jersey and because, some years ago, there was a rather trashy television show by that name, chronicling the debauched summer of a houseful of young people at the New Jersey shore. In the same parking lot stood a space marked, beneath the image of a horse and buggy, “Amish parking only”—the Amish being plain, devout Anabaptists who adopt new technology only slowly, and only insofar as it can be folded into the life of their communities. You could hardly imagine two things more unlike one another. It would, I thought, make a good joke, given sufficient taste and tact.

And yet I found myself hesitating to indulge the itch—chiefly because I could tell that I was having trouble imagining possible scenes for such a joke. This happened while I was working on the aforementioned pedagogical presentations, and so it made me think about the way that artificial intelligence and its use were changing the way my own active imagination comes up with new and amusing sights. Marvelous as it is that AI can assemble images out of pre-existing material, we should never underestimate how marvelous it is that the human intellect, memory, cogitative power, and imagination can work together to form new images—sketched out creatively in our awareness, with no material whatever before us. It is an astonishing thing, and it would be a shame to lose the ability.

I had a similar experience while I used this same example during the aforementioned talk in the Czech Republic. While we were traveling in Eastern Europe, we stayed for a week in the eastern Slovakian town of Prešov. Almost every single person I met was surprised by this, because among the major cities of Slovakia, it’s usually not the first that someone would visit. The Prešov region is quite rural and lacks the culture of other areas. As a joke, I would say: you’re so behind the times; Prešov is the Prague of Carpathia. I could feel my brain wish to limp over to AI to come up with an amusing image. Immediate gratification, perhaps. But, not the same as being able to imagine such a thing for oneself.

This is, of course, a very amazing ability. Very early in the days of AI deployment—when poor Will Smith was doomed to freakish videos of himself eating pasta—I made a comment to my wife. I think I was messing around with the prompt to have some sort of image of old Slovakian immigrant women playing football in Pittsburgh. Welcome to the world of my imagination…! But, that was what was striking to me. I said to my wife: you know, it's amazing when you think of it. There is a real sense in which I can see this in my mind's eye. I can't reproduce it, whether in cartoon form or photorealistic form. But I can see this image and project it into my imagination. To use the jargon of scholasticism: I’m able to actively marshal the phantasmic and exemplar resources of my mind to think new beings into existence and even render them present to myself, at least in an imaginative way. It’s quite amazing whenever you think about it, and at the time, it was a striking contrast to the AI system, which one needed to cajole merely to ensure that people had enough fingers and toes, let alone sufficient details to meet the scene imagined ahead of time.

In such artistic—or at least, in this case, pre-artistic—work, there is a kind of ordering of past experience, our powers of imagination, our affect, etc., toward the goal of expressing a scene for ourselves. The person who can do this readily and with ease has a kind of flair for action and, indeed, something more than that, a kind of perfection of what it is to be human: the intellectual virtue of art.

With these lighthearted examples in place, let’s now turn to an account of the metaphysics of “habit,” though I also recommend to you the more detailed pedagogical lectures that I mentioned above, available online in two parts (pt. 1, pt. 2).

The term “habit” is subject to a small amount of ambiguity, at least in the Western European languages. Very often it conjures up the idea of rote activity—repetitive and thoughtless patterns of acting. We might say that I have the habit of tapping my finger on the desk while thinking, or that I habitually sit to the right when I get on a ski lift. In any event, the notion of habit seems to indicate something rather deterministic and unintelligent. Yet, if we appropriately disambiguate the term, we can see that it plays a very important role in the perfecting of finite beings, especially material finite beings such as ourselves.

Setting aside the question of Greek sources—although I can feel a collective shudder going down the spine of the Lyceum at the thought of me making such an abstraction—let’s briefly remark on how Latin scholastics would approach this ambiguous term. For them, the immediate focus was not quite the same thing as our contemporary equivocation or ambiguity. Rather, it was to settle a specific sense of “habit” as a kind of quality, which would be cleared of some of the resonances that come with the past participle habitus: had, held, etc. In a very general sense, this notion of something being “had” was very broad. It could be said of really any of the ways of being that were called “accidents”—something “has” a certain quantity, quality, action, passion, etc. And we even rather naturally say that a substance “has” a nature, even though this is really just a way of speaking about the being in question, though as regards its formal principle of motion and rest. So, there’s a kind of floating sense of habitus, which was sometimes called the post-predicamental sense.

Likewise, there was also a very specific sense of habitus, still reflected in the English term “habit,” referring to a garment, though in our current usage most often limited to the garment worn by Western Catholic religious. This specific sense was, for the followers of Aristotle, a weak, but real, kind of being, namely, the being of “being clothed.”³ This represented a specific genus of being among the ten genera into which the Aristotelian tradition divided mind-independent being.

But then there is the question of our habituation, of our habits in the sense that we are considering here today. And this fell to the category of quality. So we notice here that just as the scholastics did not fear saying distinguo regarding the senses of habitus, neither should we.

This brings us, however, to the question of what a quality is. Well, in the jargon, it's what makes a substance to be “such or such.” In his treatment of this predicament, Poinsot will find himself answering objectors who say, in effect: “This is useless.” But, after sufficient analysis, we can start to see that it is one thing to talk about a substance, another to talk about its quantity, another to talk about its action and passion, etc. These are each irreducible ways of being, thus belonging to genera that call for distinct definitions and, more importantly, for a metaphysical account that recognizes that they are not reducible to each other, despite the temptation some have felt to do so.

But what is quality? We could explicate the aforementioned “that on account of which something is said to be such and such” as also being “that which makes a substance to be disposed in such or such a way.”⁴ Sometimes one would also say that it is a way of being “measured” in such or such a way.⁵

Now, what are the various ways that finite substances can be disposed or “measured” in their plurality?⁶ The Aristotelian tradition names four such species. They can be ranked in descending order, according to the degree to which each participates more or less in the common perfection of the genus. (Remember: a genus should be divided according to the formal character, or ratio, of the whole being divided.⁷ ) Though the genus is univocal, there is still a kind of priority and posteriority in the participation in this common ratio.⁸ In this case, it is this common ratio: that by which a substance is disposed in such or such a way.

So, in what ways can a substance be determined, or “measured,” in a unique, accidental way? St. Thomas and his school answers: in relation to its nature; in regard to the action and passion that result from its natural principles (matter and form); or in regard to quantity. These are the principal ways in which something can be “measured,” or—to put it quite generally—“disposed,” and from them arise the four species of quality.

The lowest and least important of these measurings takes place with regard to quantity. We can say that something is disposed in its figure or shape. In itself, this purely quantitative disposition of a substance is not subject to the language of good or evil (well or ill) disposition. It merely indicates the way the quantitative parts of a substance are arranged in relation to one another. This may have a bearing on the other kinds of quality a being can have; but of itself, quantity says nothing about ends and teleology, and so one cannot speak of good or bad ordering here.

If we now consider the action and passion that result from matter and form, we arrive at the third and second species of quality: sensible qualities (the third species) and powers (the second). For from the form of a given being there flow certain powers that qualify the substance in relation to operation—qualities such as memory, intellect, and will. Although such qualifications designate an ordering to action, they do not, of themselves, designate anything good or evil. Operation, as such, is not an end in itself; it is measured by something else, by the nature of the agent.

There remains, therefore, one final way of being qualitatively disposed or measured: in relation to the substantial nature itself. We can ask whether a being is well or ill disposed with regard to the perfection of its nature. This is the species to which habit belongs. Because a thing can be well or ill disposed in relation to its nature, we may say that this particular disposition is good or ill; for here we are speaking quite directly of the way a being is disposed—not in its quantity, nor in its capacity to undergo passion, nor in its capacity to act, but specifically and directly in relation to its nature, which is itself a kind of end, insofar as the nature is the principle of the thing’s acts. Substances succeed or fail in being what they are to the degree that they exist and act in accord with their nature. To attend to this particular disposition—how well a thing is disposed in relation to its natural perfection—is to attend to the specific quality that is habit. It is the first species, because it is the most perfect and complete way that a substance can “hold itself” (se habet), namely precisely as regards the measure of its natural perfection.

If we wanted to completely nerd out on scholastic accounts of habit, we could delve more deeply into this final division. Sometimes this last division is considered “disposition in general,” itself a kind of genus containing both disposition in a strict sense and habit in its most unique sense (as referring to those character traits that are difficult to remove precisely because of their objective principles, think science in opposition to opinion). And there is even crossover, in which we can speak of habit taking on the character of a disposition (habitus in statu dispositionis) and even disposition taking on the character of a habit. However, lest this talk completely give in to the temptation of endless scholastic exposition, I want to stay at the somewhat general level of disposition-habit that we have reached here, though I will most often speak in terms of the strong sense of habit which has objective stability.

To have habits is to have order among parts, a disposition directed to the perfect perfection of nature. It goes down to the roots of our being, to the roots of our ordering as active beings. A habit does not merely structure our being so that we can act in a particular way. If that were the case, we would be talking about a different sort of quality, namely, an active power, such as our imagination, intellect, or will. Rather, a habit is a mode of substance by which the parts of that substance are ordered precisely in a way that is measured by the perfection of that very nature. It is one thing for our substance to be ordered toward action. It’s another, much deeper, thing for us to be ordered in a way that some portion of our being is put in right order toward some stable activity cluster, which makes us to be human in a given way: to be just, to be scientifically capable, to be artistically adroit. In fact, this is precisely why habits can be said to be good or ill to the degree that they do or do not order us toward our perfection. They are, as it were, measured in light of the comprehensive view of our nature as a particular, substantial agentive being.⁹

Habit looks not merely to putting us in good quantitative order, or a good order for being active or for “receiving” activity, but rather to putting us in good order toward the complete activity of our being. We are not substances that are simple. We are, as it were, a buzzing plurality, in need of right order. The whole of our being must be, as it were, “humanized.” It is only by dint of much work—much hammering on the anvil—that we gradually make what is most characteristically human, namely the right order of reason, pass into the crevices of all of our appetites and cognitions, into the relationships that we have with other people, and even into the broader relationship that we have with the world around us. Habit is the stamp of nature, and hence of what is highest and most characteristic in this nature, on this great materiality of all the manifold subdivisions of our being.

It’s very easy to miss the importance of this. But it's what makes all the difference between mere native dispositions and true character, between blind virtuosity and true artcraft, between strong opinions and true science or wisdom. Virtuous character, art, wisdom—these are capacities which deploy all of our being toward the excellent ends that humans alone can exercise, because we are rational. They require many things: a well-fed and well-curated imagination; passions that are ready to deploy themselves in view of excellence in all sorts of situations, both well-trained and long-experienced; proper relationships with others, so that we might learn and share the goods of humanity that can only be shared commonly by the political and cultural animal that we are; and, for the philosopher, a discursive mind which is, however, ready to come to a halt before truths that are primary—not demonstrated but the source of demonstration. In a word, there are many crevices both to be filled and to be ordered. This is the work of building habits and the work of exercising them in the matrix of public life, which is the space of our noetic existence as embodied agents.

In every age, technology raises questions concerning how this process of habituation will take place. The extension of our powers by technology always risks something of our “nature.” Every era has its anxiety over the way that the medium of technology alters our patterns of life and, more profoundly, our very patterns of being—the patterns of our ordering toward natural perfection, the patterns of our habituation.¹⁰ The coming of the printed book altered our relationship with memory in ways that we ourselves can no longer even imagine. Without being a sociological reductionist who would understand man only as an effect of his environment,¹¹ we can nonetheless say that the automobile has altered the structure of relationships such that certain virtues of justice are significantly different in our life-world than they would have been in an earlier, pre-automobile era. The collapsing of the world into a single digital community has led to the atrophying of the prudential and political soul, replacing it with something like the swarming activity of an aggregate hive.

Artificial intelligence poses questions along these lines, but in a way that pushes toward a kind of asymptote. We have all been on this path for some time. Think of how long we have now been habituated to set aside our memory, and even our capacity for dialectical thinking, in order to pull up our phone to see what someone else has said on Wikipedia or on, well… let’s admit it… maybe some Reddit board that scratches our itch and tickles our fancy. Artificial intelligence is, in many ways, a projection of this same dynamic, but now in a way that covers vast swathes of seeming noetic territory. At our fingertips is now the AI-derived reddit board—perhaps it has the feeling of 4chan—that can explain to me, in whatsoever way I so desire, why so many people don’t care at all about second intentions….

But, of course, a tickled phantasia is not the same thing as a well-trained memory and capacity for active imagination. To have a tickled fancy is a quick fix for the hard work of constructing from long experience a stable memory which focuses on precisely what must be considered in order to see—or at least attempt to see—what is essential and to set aside what is accidental, to see what is morally necessary for me here and now and to avoid what is morally deleterious.¹² It is all too tempting to turn to AI to ask some questions about human motives and the human condition. But it is one thing to experience a quick answer about why X might do Y in circumstances Z. It is another to attempt to fathom the human condition, with all of its intricacies, to try to understand a fellow being who is muddling through the conditions of human existence. In other words, a shared human life, side by side and amid the tension of not knowing, might indeed be the only path for actually knowing what it is that “maketh man.”

The person who uses AI without measure becomes a potent gathering of capacities no longer governed by any stable, intrinsic principle of ordering. All technology involves a kind of extension of human capacity into instruments that are external to us. There are ways that we substitute ourselves out through technologies and through social technologies. Thomas Aquinas had four secretaries who were his force amplifiers, and the person with a great vision might need an entire team of scientists and technology to make real the vision that is inchoate in him. And the fully developed human, qua human, lives in the political community, which requires many relationships where our capacities seem to be “farmed out” to others. However, all of this can be a kind of ordering of our character. We can order our own self and our relations in a way that stably bears the mark of human perfection, which gathers together not only the conditions of our own character but also the world around us (for this is the work of justice), in a way that enables us to say: this is indeed a rightly ordered human life.

This is what is at stake with the notion of habit. And it is the sort of thing we need to be constantly asking ourselves about when we use artificial intelligence. In point of fact, we need a kind of searching of the soul, a sounding out of our depths, an examination not of conscience but of our whole human fabric—both psychic and interpersonal—to ask if we are truly and stably ordered toward human goods or if, by contrast, we have substituted this, so that when we flip our phone open to ask Claude a question we might be like the person who accidentally walks into the mail room of a former apartment and thoughtlessly goes to pick up mail from a slot that is no longer his.¹³ A mere subjective disposition has replaced a stable, objective habit, somewhat like a house that just happens to be standing but which can all too readily fall apart when circumstances reveal that the whole was never stably constructed but was only fortunately arranged for the present conditions. But this is not a house we are talking about. It is a human person with an embodied-spiritual nature. To lack the objective qualitative ordering that comprises the various habits we might have is like the person who happens to make correct decisions only because of the fortunate accident of being in the circumstances that meet with his or her whims, or like the person who only holds opinions and hunches but blessedly holds the correct opinions and hunches, though without real reasons for them.

In fact, this is one major danger posed for intellectual life in the world of AI. For example—I think of this quite a bit—this situation will soon be the great temptation of so many young scholastics, I fear: to live in the swarm of various sententiae in AI translations, but without actually having a soul whose memories, past thoughts, and cogitations actually lead to the possibility of thinking thoughts…. This is, in the end, the effect of the loss of habit, in the rich sense that I have intended in this talk. It is to allow material extension, floating on the sea of barely formed suspicions, barely grasped beyond the particularity of the expression itself,¹⁴ to replace the vitality of long nurtured habit, by which us enter into a tradition of tutelage and agency with other humans, both living and dead, a habit which perfects our very nature. With his native drama, Maritain well expressed this bent within the Cartesian desire for Method and Science:

Descartes, in rejecting accidents and qualities as fiction, suppresses in a general way those habitus and virtues that gave Thomist psychology the means of a subtle and profound realism that modern psychology has scarcely rediscovered. In particular it destroys the notion of intellectual habitus, and the real meaning of its doctrine is that “common sense” or “natural light,”—reason just as we receive it from nature and not as it is fashioned by the teaching of masters (worthy of the name—they were hardly that anymore) and especially by the intercourse with objects difficult to grapple with, reason in the state of nature is fitted to arrive, from the instant it makes use of the Method, at the summits of science and of wisdom. A claim for unculturedness to which was given, from then on, some satisfaction.

One consequence of that suppression of intellectual habitus is that the idea of science inevitably becomes purely material: science is no longer a spiritual quality within us, a light, a living fire which intrinsically perfects our soul, it is nothing but a collection of well-ordered concepts in us, that “accumulation,” that “co-ordination of notions” where the ancients used to see only the material of science, and which they carefully distinguished from intellectual virtue itself—the “interior force.” From then on, the true notion of the growth of science in the mind was to disappear, whether it was a question of “intensive growth,” which happens when the mind penetrates the same truth in a more profound and vehement fashion, and clings to it more strongly, or of “extensive growth” properly so-called, which takes place when the inner force that constitutes the habitus dilates and rises up to attain new conclusions and new objects. Science does not increase except by extrinsic addition, like a heap piling up and spreading out so that, by a consequence which Descartes certainly did not foresee (for he was a great enemy of erudition), Science born of his reform—I mean to say the idea that was to be created of Science—could, by confusing the true progressive movement of science with the research of vast merely material increments, only crush and weaken the mind as a fire one smothers with too much fuel.

More generally, the suppression of intellectual habitus will cause us little by little to lose sight of the fact that science is something of a determined subject, something of man, the intrinsic perfecting of a being endowed with a certain nature and situated in certain conditions; the tendency is more and more to look upon it as an absolute which is sufficient to itself in the abstract, and which sits enthroned in the ideological heavens: science which is neither astronomy nor botany, which is not human science or angelic science or divine science, which is THE SCIENCE.¹⁵

We need habits precisely because we must be stably ready to act not as some universal agent, not as some possessor and master of Science and Method, but as someone whose humanity is a participant in the shared, multi-generational task of being human, of actively engaging with reality, as beings that act from our own intrinsic principles, even those which are the habitual flower of our substantial nature. Incidentally, this is why I think institutions like the Lyceum—both digital and, especially, embodied—are very important. I assure you, Brian did not tell me to make these sorts of comments at the end of my talk! I am not being paid for today’s message! However, in all seriousness, the work of forming, growing, and living in accord with habits takes place through practices and communities. Of course, this is nothing all that groundbreaking. One need only think of the work of MacIntyre, Taylor, Hauerwas, and others to find many similar claims regarding the importance of practices for the structure of human agency. But it is easy to forget the importance of this, especially in a time of such revolutionary technology.

Habits, as we have noted, are not like powers, qualities that dispose us merely to act. Habits are qualities that dispose us precisely with regard to our nature's perfection, that is, with regard to the deepest spring of our being and, therefrom, our action. TO BE as human is to be multiple, to be complex, to be shot through with potency and the constant wear and tear of our material conditions. But the flipside of this is that to be human is also to be habituated, to be ordered, and to be the kind of being that is always working on this order and living within it. It is like the remark that is sometimes made in the context of the natural law: there is a real sense in which we must become human—we might say, become habituated to our humanity. And from that BEING then flows the most stable and unified ACTION.

And it is not merely a question of how our habits come into being and grow through action. It is a question of how our nature, thus qualitatively enriched by such habits, exists in act, as operative. In other words, it is a question of how, in all the various ways of being human, we exist in act. Agere sequitur esse: action follows being, yes. But also, we might say, being is for the sake of action: Omnis enim res propter suam operationem esse videtur: operatio enim est ultima perfectio rei.¹⁶ Indeed, this is a maxim that holds above all for God Himself, for which reason some important Thomists—including our own John of St. Thomas, who is so important for the Lyceum—held that the metaphysical constitutive of God is Ever-Actual Self-Subsistent Intellection.

But, for God, being and action are entirely one. For us, we have to be actualized, and in this actualization, we bring to bear all of the ordering—of powers, habits, relations, etc.—that habits inculcate. Thus, our action is nothing other than the ultimate actualization of what is provided by habit itself. The rightly ordered person is, in first act, what the rightly actualized person will be in ultimate act.

Therefore, we must do the work of building and maintaining the habits of being human with real devotion. A memory, a thought, an example, a series of fabricated counterarguments…. When all of these are quickly sought from technology, we must admit that what has not been ordered is ourselves. That kind of ordering is a difficult affair. To imagine, to think, to contemplate, to order and be ordered—to be rational both speculatively and practically—we must reach through our multiplicity in order to know. We must imagine our own imaginings. We must know how to position a problem—whether speculative or something technical or moral—and how to approach that position with an eye to answering precisely what has been raised, to see the answer as the answer to the question that we ourselves have formulated. We must be able to grasp not only passing examples immediately presented to our mind, but to see in our reflection the dialectical play of accidents, properties, differences, genera, and species. We must actually grasp the movement of truth which is expressed in a syllogism, which is something much more vital than a proper form that can be quickly checked using an electronic helper. We must have the providential eye which can overcome multiplicity through art and prudence.

And the place to do this is in the shared space that is the human community, the interpersonal domain. Last year, I led a seminar at the Lyceum concerning the nature of dialectical logic.¹⁷ This seminar was quite important for a number of us. It made very clear to us the importance of profoundly appreciating the place of probable certainty and the public, shared work of debate and dialectic for all human knowing. The readers of Aristotle often focus on his Posterior Analytics, the logic of science. But—and this is a point that is obvious, or at least should be obvious, to any reader of Aristotle—we only reach science after the long labor of dialectic (and here too rhetoric comes to mind, though I fear complicating things precisely as I try to land this plane). And in the end, dialectic is the work of question and answer. It does not need to be only the kind of question and answer that we see in the Socratic school, though that gives us a very striking and perennial image for such noetic back-and-forth. Such shared labor, however, is the rule in all of our knowing, whether speculative, artistic, or moral. We learn from the examples of humanity that live in the shared space of our culture, whether immediately embodied or in the wisdom of our practices, mores, and intellectual culture. But of course, it is most human when we do this in each other’s actual presence, one actualized human with another. It is there that the work of ordering the human person, and the human community, takes place in a way that is truly human—that is, not as an angelic spirit, but as a spirit that is made to be the form of the body.

And so, I am no oracle. I offer you no grand injunctions about “how to live in the age of AI.” However, I would like to encourage you to consider that to be human is to labor at habituation, shared and communal habituation. To be human is to take up the project of setting in order, in right disposition, all that you are—in accord with your nature and, in the order of grace (which is the supreme order), in accord with the “natural law” of your supernaturalized nature.¹⁸ A sound metaphysics, a sound moral philosophy, and a sound moral theology propose that humanity can find its full perfection by spiritualizing the whole of our psychic organism, without ever abandoning that very organism. They propose that we order ourselves by means of habits—qualities disposing our substance well or ill in relation to its nature (or in relation to the end), and doing so by reason of a motive that is objectively rooted and lends a solidity to who we are. In the years to come, it will fall to Catholics in particular, I believe, to bear witness that this—namely, to fulfill the human condition together, not to transcend it—is the truly dignified way forward.

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1. See Cajetan Cuddy, “Casuistry and Theology,” The National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 25, no. 2 (Summer 2025): 289–315; at a more popular level, see Jack F. Trent, “The Danger of Theologianology,” Word on Fire Institute, https://www.wordonfire.org/articles/the-danger-of-theologianology/.↩︎

2. See, for example, John N. Deely, “Quid sit postmodernismus?” in Postmodernism and Christian Philosophy, ed. Roman T. Ciapalo (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1997), 68–96.↩︎

3. For an interesting reflection on this topic, see Charles De Koninck’s treatment of the specific predicament of habitus in his collected works. Also see the relevant passages in Poinsot’s Cursus philosohicus, not only concerning this kind of habitus specifically but also regarding the non-reducibility of the “later” predicaments.↩︎

4. I am here following the lucid account provided in Michel Labourdette’s Grand cours. Also, however, see the account on habitus in Garrigou-Lagrange’s De beatitudine.↩︎

5. This usage will have a reverberation in modern philosophical usage when the latter speaks of “modes”.↩︎

6. I put it this way to make room for quality among purely spiritual beings.↩︎

7. See Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, “On the Search for Definitions According to Aristotle and St. Thomas,” Philosophizing in Faith, ed. and trans. Matthew K. Minerd (Cluny Media, 2019), 21–34 (here, 27–28).↩︎

8. Thus, one sometimes speaks of an “analogy of inequality” within a genus. However, I would like to avoid taking up this topic here.↩︎

9. I am presupposing here, however, certain precisions concerning the relationship between reason and nature which are exposited in almost painful detail by Fr. Leonard Lehu in a text that I once upon a time sketched in draft translation, available on To Be a Thomist.↩︎

10. At the Lyceum one doubtlessly thinks of a study like McLuhan’s Understanding Media, though many other studies in the philosophy of technology might be considered as well.↩︎

11. See Pierre Manent, The City of Man, trans. Mark A. LePain (Princeton University Press, 1994), ch. 2. This chapter is one among many shots that Manent makes, throughout his career, against the primarily speculative outlook of modern “political” thought.↩︎

12. One cannot help but think of the work of sometime friend of the Lyceum Institute, Dr. Daniel DeHaan, Daniel De Haan, “Moral Perception and the Function of the Vis Cogitativa in Thomas Aquinas’s Doctrine of Antecedent and Consequent Passions,” International Journal on the Philosophical Tradition from Late Antiquity to the Late Middle Ages 25 (2014): 287-328; idem., “Perception and the Vis Cogitativa: A Thomistic Analysis of Aspectual, Actional, and Affectional Percepts,” American Catholic Philosophical Quaterly 88, no. 3 (2014) 397-437; John Jalcevac, “Mitigating the Magic: The Role of Memory, the Vis Cogitativa, and Experience in Aquinas’s Abstractionist Epistemology,” American Catholic Philosophical Quaterly 97, no. 3 (2023): 267-292. I have also been influenced, of course, by my own teacher Msgr. Sokolowski, though at more of a distance here.↩︎

13. The example is taken from Yves R. Simon, The Definition of Moral Virtue, ed. Vukan Kuic (Fordham University Press, 1999).↩︎

14. I owe this insight to Ryan Hurd, who expressed the situation as being a kind of aggregation of phantasms of all these various statements.↩︎

15. Jacques Maritain, The Dream of Descartes, trans. Mabelle L. Andison, The Dream of Descartes (Editions Poetry London: 1946), 39–40↩︎

16. Thomas Aquinas, SCG, bk. 3, ch. 113, no. 1.↩︎

17. A kind of summary of this course can be found here on To Be a Thomist as “An Introduction to Dialectical Logic: The Recovery of Probable Certainty as the Labor of the Human Intellect.”↩︎

18. An expression I take from Fr. Antoine Lemonnyer, OP.↩︎