Ep. #246 – The Unmoved Mover Revisited w/ Dr. Daniel Shields

Summary

What is Aquinas’s argument for an Unmoved Mover? How has it been understood by many Thomists and why does Daniel Shields have a different take? What should we think about the objection that Newton’s law of inertia disproves a key premise in the first way? Dr. Daniel Shields joins us to discuss these issues and more.

Guest Bio

Dr. Daniel Shields is an assistant professor of philosophy at Wyoming Catholic College. He taught as a visiting Faculty at Xavier University in Cincinnati, and then as an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Pontifical College Josephinum, a seminary in Ohio. His specialties are the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, medieval philosophy, moral philosophy, the philosophy of nature, and the history of science.

He has published articles on the thought of St. Thomas in The Thomist and the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, and his book Nature and Nature’s God: The Scientific and Philosophical Validity of Aquinas’ Unmoved Mover Proof is forthcoming from the Catholic University of America Press. Dr. Shields loves God, church, his family and friends, and the beauty of God’s creation.

Resources

Nature and Nature’s God: A Philosophical and Scientific Defense of Aquinas’s Unmoved Mover Argument by Dr. Daniel Shields

Daniel Shields’s Personal Website

On Ultimate Ends (article) by Daniel Shields

Related Episodes

Ep. #161 – Another look at the First Way of St. Thomas w/ Dr. Michael Sirilla

Ep. #13 – The First Way Still Has Teeth