Congratulations to Michael Bors, who defended his doctoral dissertation with distinction on April 15th! His topic was "The Gradation Principle (of the Fourth Way) According to St. Thomas Aquinas" and his director was Nathaniel Taylor, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America.
Michael Bors, a native of Annapolis, Maryland, graduated in 2015 from Thomas Aquinas College, California, as a Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts. In 2019 he received his Licentiate in Philosophy from The Catholic University of America. He has taught philosophy at CUA (through the First-Year Experience program) and Latin and rhetoric at Chesterton Academy of Annapolis. In fall 2026, he will teach epistemology at St. Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore.
Dissertation Abstract:
Throughout his writings, most famously in the Fourth Way of the Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas Aquinas employs the gradation principle: “more such and less such are said of different things insofar as they approach differently to something that is most such.” Many objections are raised against the principle: it seems falsified by quantities, the grounds for its self-evidence are not apparent, Aquinas’s example of more and most hot is outdated, and the underlying metaphysics is fiercely contested. Against these, this dissertation argues that the gradation principle is a self-evident, axiomatic truth that is manifest in everyday experience, in all parts of philosophy, and in the modern sciences. This thesis is defended through five chapters or “studies.”
The textual study considers seven variations on the principle found in St. Thomas and his sources. Aquinas sometimes describes gradation as resulting from agent causality, exemplarism, or participation, yet the principle is not limited to any of these. He also frequently applies the principle to gradations in which the most such is something other than God. The philological study proves that gradus and magis, minus, and maxime refer not to quantities but intensities; therefore, the quantitative objection is based on a misreading of the text. The logical study shows how more and less such stand to most such as measured to measure and less than most such to most such; thus the principle is per se in the first sense of Posterior Analytics 1.4.
The inductive study re-habituates readers to seeing the gradation principle at work not only in the transcendentals, but in all kinds of being, including modern heat theory. Finally, the metaphysical study, after proving that being as such is gradational, illuminates the gradation principle with the light of three other axioms, clarifying the simultaneity of lower degrees and highest degree, the ability of all four causes to produce gradation, and the role subjects play in “participating” in a shared nature. In the end, this dissertation restores the gradation principle as a “crossroads” of metaphysics, where many kinds of being and many metaphysical paradigms meet on the common ground of gradation.