Papers by Gaetano Masciullo
Veritatis Diaconia, ISSN 2421-4736, Anno VII, n. 13, 2021
Nota teologica nella quale l'Autore espone il dogma della Maternità Divina di Maria Santissima.
Cristianità n. 395 (gennaio-febbraio) - ISSN 1120 – 4877, 2019
The aim of this paper is to show why the Thomistic psychological account can still teach the 21st... more The aim of this paper is to show why the Thomistic psychological account can still teach the 21st century man a lot and, for this, it is more modern than other approaches, usually denominated as "contemporary", for instance the Freudian account, which is here the target of our claim. It could sound bizarre that a Dominican friar from 13th century can teach us about that, especially thinking that his philosophy is strongly influenced by Aristotelism, which is normally conceived as overrun by modernity, from Galileo on and, in the case of psychology, from Wundt and Freud on. Contrarily, a lot of contemporary thinkers believe that the Aristotelian psychological account is still deserving our attention (Franz Brentano, who was Freud’s teacher; Rudolf Allers, who was, instead, one of his pupils; Edith Stein and Viktor Frankl, but also living thinkers as Magda B. Arnold, who developed a very interesting theory of emotions). There is a strong disagreement between the Freudian and the Aquinas accounts concerning the conception of our ‘lower self’. By Freud, the Triebtheorie (literally: ‘Drive Theory’) has a very crucial role in this sense. We will see its peculiarities in the section I, titled Freud’s Triebtheorie. Then we will see the peculiarities of the different psychological account made by Thomas Aquinas in the section II, titled Aquinas’ Theory of Passions. In particular, we’ll see the Aquinas’ account of the passions - the cornerstone of his psychology. Finally, we will show the modernity of Aquinas’ claim in section III, titled Naturalism or Finalism?, attempting to give some arguments in favour of the Thomistic psychological finalism and against the Freudian objections. The paper is written in Italian.
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Papers by Gaetano Masciullo