Markos Klemz Guerrero

I am a professor in the Department of Philosophy and in the graduate program “Logic and Metaphysics” at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. I am interested mainly in metaphysics and theory of knowledge, especially in the thought of Thomas Aquinas, keeping in mind its potential interactions with early modern and analytical philosophy. Lately, I have been publishing on Aquinas’s theory of sensation and, more recently, on some general features of his account of material substances.

During my stay at Notre Dame, I will be working on the project “Aquinas on the Varieties of Modality” (funded by the Brazilian Federal Foundation for Support and Evaluation of Graduate Education - CAPES), which concerns the various senses in which something can be taken to be necessary or possible according to Aquinas. Assuming there is no general and univocal notion under which one can gather those various senses, our research aims at investigating the role those concepts play in two particular contexts, a strictly metaphysical one, the Third Way, and an epistemological one, the self-evidence of first principles. Concerning the first topic, we will try to establish that it is possible to provide a simple and straightforward reconstruction of a notoriously problematic step of the Third Way by appealing to the necessity of the past. Concerning the second topic, we will analyze how the kind of necessity which belongs to first principles might serve as a common thread that allows one to understand precisely in which way human intellect abstracts insofar as it participates in the light of Divine Intellect. Both those enterprises will require elucidating the dependence and irreducibility between logical, metaphysical and natural modalities.

Affiliation:  Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

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