Peter Weigel, of the Department of Philosophy at Washington College, has authored a book on Aquinas’s doctrine of the divine simplicity, due to appear this year. Here’s some of the blurb:

Aquinas’s teaching that God is entirely simple is central to his philosophy of God. Much of his thought cannot be properly understood without an adequate grasp of what simplicity involves and why he argues for it. The depth and rigor of Aquinas’s account of divine simplicity mark a significant contribution to the development of this crucial position in traditional philosophical theology. Commentators usually focus on limited aspects of Aquinas’s position, and contemporary philosophical assessments often reflect an incomplete understanding of the distinctive ontology supporting his theological conclusions.

This book offers an in-depth examination of what divine simplicity means for Aquinas and how he argues for its claims. Simplicity and other divine predicates are analyzed within the larger metaphysical and semantic framework surrounding Aquinas’s philosophy of God. The work thus goes beyond the issue of simplicity to some of the fundamental tenets of Aquinas’s philosophical theology and his views on divine predication. The author also engages with a variety of Aquinas’s recent commentators, bringing the insights of this great figure to bear on contemporary discussions.

Among the great works of Thomas Aquinas, the Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard has suffered almost total neglect among translators. Such neglect is surprising, considering that the massive Commentary—more than 4,000 pages in the last printed edition—is not only Aquinas’s first systematic engagement with all the philosophical and theological topics on which he expended his energy over the span of a short career but is also characterized by an exuberance and elaborateness seldom found in his subsequent writings. Although Chenu had already drawn attention decades ago to the importance of studying this youthful tour de force for a fuller understanding of Thomas’s more mature work, the Commentary on the Sentences has remained a closed book for many modern students of Thomistic and medieval thought because of its relative inaccessibility in English or in Latin.

The present volume, containing all the major texts on love and charity, makes available what is by far the most extensive translation ever to be made from the Commentary with the added benefit that the better part of the translation is based on the (as yet unpublished) critical edition of the Leonine Commission. The collection of texts from all four books has a tight thematic coherence that makes it invaluable to students of Thomas’s moral philosophy, moral theology, and philosophical theology. In addition, the inclusion of parallel texts from Aquinas’s first (Parisian) Commentary as well as from his second (Roman) attempt at a commentary, the recently rediscovered Lectura Romana, makes this edition all the more valuable for those who wish to track the internal development of Thomas’s thinking on these matters.

This volume is part of the Thomas Aquinas in Translation Series from CUA, which also has three other texts.

We regret to inform you of the death of Father W. Norris Clarke, S.J., Fordham University Professor Emeritus, who died on Tuesday, June 10, 2008, at St. Barnabas Hospital, Bronx, New York.  Father Clarke was born on June 1, 1915. He joined Fordham's Philosophy Department in 1955 and became Professor Emeritus in 1985.  See more biographical information at:

http://www.fordham.edu/philosophy/faculty/clarke.htm

WAKE:
Sunday, June 15, 2008
3:00-5:00 & 7:00-9:00 PM
Loyola Hall Chapel
Fordham University
Bronx, NY 10458

MASS OF CHRISTIAN BURIAL:
Monday, June 16, 2008
10:30 AM
Fordham University Church
Bronx, NY 10458

BURIAL: Jesuit Cemetery, Auriesville , NY

Other links that I have found are:

• Link to his faculty page at Fordham's website.
• Notice about his funeral services from Fordham.
• Notice on the First Things website, and one on the America website.

The XVth Colloquium of the Société Internationale pour l'Étude de la Philosophie Médiévale (SIEPM), which will mark the 50th anniversary of the Société, will take place at the University of Notre Dame on Wednesday, October 8 through Friday, October 10, 2008. The Colloquium, organized by Kent Emery, Jr. (Notre Dame) assisted by William J. Courtenay (Madison, Wisconsin), will focus on the particularities of the teaching of philosophy and theology in the studia of the mendicant (Augustinian, Carmelite, Dominican, Franciscan) and monastic (Benedictine, Cistercian) orders and at the theological schools at the Papal Court (notably at Avignon) as distinct from instruction in the faculties of the university proper.

More about it here, with a PDF file containing its entire program here.

To whet your appetite, the speakers at the conference are:

• Fabrizio Amerini (Parma)
• Luca Bianchi (Vercelli)
• Alain Boureau (Paris)
• Stephen F. Brown (Boston)
• Julie Casteigt (Toulouse)
• Amos Corbini (Torino)
• Russell Friedman (Leuven)
• Hester Gelber (Palo Alto, California)
• Joseph W. Goering (Toronto)
• Wouter Goris (Amsterdam)
• Guy Guldentops (Köln)
• Jacqueline Hamesse (Louvain-La-Neuve)
• Maarten Hoenen (Freiburg Im Breisgau)
• Alfonso Maierù (Roma)
• Michèle Mulchahey (Toronto)
• Lauge Nielsen (København)
• Patrick Nold (Albany)
• Adriano Oliva, O.P. (Paris)
• Alessandro Palazzo (Lecce)
• Georgio Pini (The Bronx, New York)
• Sylvain Piron (Paris)
• François-Xavier Putallaz (Fribourg, Suisse)
• Christopher Schabel (Nicosia)
• Neslihan Senocak (New York)
• Thomas Sullivan, O.S.B. (Conception Abbey, Missouri)
• Christian Trottmann (Dijon-Paris-Tours)

Recently I decided that I wanted to complete my collection of the journal. But when it turned out that plugging the gaps of my printed collection with the other printed issues would be too costly, I remembered that a subscription to the journal allowed one to get additional access to PDF versions of articles for a mere $5.00 more per year. So I subscribed to the journal as an individual for $30.00 per year, paid the extra $5.00, and now have access to all the articles of the journal's run since 2003, which I've downloaded, and pumped into my bibliography program (EndNote). Check this one off as "done."

Wisdom, Law, and Virtue

The kind people at Fordham University Press have also made a discount available to you that defrays the cost of what is a big (600 pp.), and therefore costly, book. If you wish to buy it, go to the webpage for the book on Fordham’s site, place it in your shopping cart, and then, at check-out, enter the promo code DEW08, which will apply a 20% discount, taking it from its original $85.00 down to $68.00, plus shipping and handling. A nice gesture.

Here is the book’s table-of-contents:

Universal Considerations

Chapter 1. Wisdom and Human Life: The Natural and the Supernatural

Chapter 2. Wisdom as Foundational Ethical Theory in St. Thomas Aquinas

Chapter 3. St. Thomas, Metaphysics, and Human Dignity

Chapter 4. Truth and Happiness

Chapter 5. Antimodern, Ultramodern, Postmodern: A Plea for the Perennial

Chapter 6. Is Thomas Aquinas a Spiritual Hedonist?

Chapter 7. Is Liberty the Criterion in Morals?

The Will and Its Act

Chapter 8. The Real Distinction between Intellect and Will

Chapter 9. St. Thomas, James Keenan, and the Will

Chapter 10. St. Thomas and the Causes of Free Choice

Chapter 11. St. Thomas and the First Cause of Moral Evil

Natural Law

Chapter 12. St. Thomas, Our Natural Lights, and the Moral Order

Chapter 13. Jacques Maritain and the Philosophy of Cooperation

Chapter 14. Natural Law and the First Act of Freedom: Maritain Revisited

Chapter 15. Jean Porter on Natural Law: Thomistic Notes

Legal Justice

Chapter 16. St. Thomas, the Common Good, and the Love of Persons

Chapter 17. St. Thomas, John Finnis, and the Political Good

Chapter 18. Thomas Aquinas, Gerard Bradley, and the Death Penalty

Chapter 19. Death in the Setting of Divine Wisdom: The Doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas

Chapter 20. Suicide as a Belligerent Tactic: Thomistic Reflections

Various Virtues

Chapter 21. Jacques Maritain, St. Thomas, and the Philosophy of Religion

Chapter 22. Philosophy and Spirituality: Cultivating a Virtue

Chapter 23. St. Thomas and the Ontology of Prayer

Chapter 24. St. Thomas, Lying, and Venial Sin

Chapter 25. Communion with the Tradition: For the Believer Who Is a Philosopher

Methodological Postscript

Chapter 26. ”Obiectum”: Notes on the Invention of a Word

Chapter 27. St. Thomas and Moral Taxonomy

Dear Medievalists,

During this past year, our University of Notre Dame Medieval Institute graduate students have been particularly active in encouraging a sense of community among our medievalist community on campus by sponsoring coffee and social hours, a field trip to the Newberry library for students, and other activities.

In the same spirit, I am initiating an Internet blog for current and past students, faculty, and visitors to the Medieval Institute. My recent pilgrimage to Kalamazoo reminded me that one of the real pleasures of academic life is the opportunity to meet and re-meet interesting colleagues and maintain relationships with individuals who actually get excited about most things medieval.

I hope you will take advantage of the opportunity to share your own thoughts and comments with others who have journeyed through our reading room. Your participation in our on-line community is most welcome and I encourage you to share the following link with other colleagues who may want to keep in touch with our company of scholars.

http://ndmedinst.blogspot.com

I confess to knowing almost nothing about the mechanics of blogging, so I've gone the way of using a template that put me in business in under 5 minutes. Refinements, suggestions, and of course, postings, are very welcome.

Cordially,

Roberta Baranowski
Assistant Director, Medieval Institute
University of Notre Dame

Teleological Grammar

Last fall the kind people at Ave Maria University sent me a copy of Steven Long’s impressive book, The Teleological Grammar of the Moral Act, which seeks to explain and defend Aquinas’s complex yet crucial doctrine of the moral act (a doctrine at the heart of topics such as sexual morality, medical ethics, etc.). The doctrine of double-effect is unintelligible without it.

The book was immediately a topic of much conversation, with a session at this year’s Kalamazoo being devoted to it, and a recent issue of Ave Maria’s journal, Nova et vetera (English edition)—more on this up-and-coming (if not already-arrived) journal in a future post—being built around the topics found in the book. Here is its blurb, found on the web page where you can order it:

Cutting through contemporary confusions with his characteristic rigor and aplomb, Steven A. Long offers the most penetrating study available of St. Thomas Aquinas’s doctrine of the intention, choice, object, end, and species of the moral act. Many studies of human action and morality after Descartes and Kant have suffered from a tendency to split body and soul, so that the intention of the human spirit comes to justify whatever the body is made to do. The portrait of human action and morality that arises from such accounts is one of the soul as the pilot and the body as raw material in need of humanization. In this masterful study, Steven Long reconnects the teleology of the soul with the teleology of the body, so that human goal-oriented action rediscovers its lost moral unity, given it by the Creator who has created the human person as a body-soul unity.

• 2000: Marcia L. Colish. Remapping Scholasticism. Etienne Gilson Series 21. 2000; 21 pages. ISBN 0–88844–721–3. Available in a PDF version.
• 2002: Francis Oakley. Omnipotence and Promise: The Legacy of the Scholastic Distinction of Powers. Etienne Gilson Series 23. 2002; 28 pages. ISBN 0–88844–723–X. Available in a PDF version.
• 2004: Karl F. Morrison. The Male Gaze and Other Reasons for the Hypothetical End of Christian Art in the West. Etienne Gilson Series 26. 2005. 36 pages. ISBN 0–88844–726–4. Available in a PDF version.
• Related Lecture (NOTE: not a Gilson Lecture, but a fine one, indeed): Anthony J. Celano. From Priam to the Good Thief. The Significance of a Single Event in Greek Ethics and Medieval Moral Teaching. EGS 22 / Studies in Medieval Moral Teaching 2. 2001. 24pp. ISBN 0–88844–722–1. Available in a PDF version.

Of related interest is this: PIMS has republished nine of these lectures in a single volume as part of its Spring 2008 catalog of publications. This volume includes the lectures of the well-known Thomists, Leonard Boyle, Edward Synan, James Weisheipl, Mark Jordan, and James P. Reilly.

From KUL website:

Born 25 May 1921 in Berezowica Mała in Podole. Fell asleep in the Lord while correcting the article "Christianity" 8 May 2008 in Lublin.

The coffin with the body of Fr Krąpiec will be laid in the basilica of the Dominican fathers on Thursday, 15 May at 3 pm, when the Chaplet of the Divine Mercy will be recited. A book of condolence will be set out at the same time.

The funeral ceremonies will take place 16 May 2007, beginning with a Funeral Mass at 10 am in the Basilica of the Dominican Fathers (ul. Złota 9).

We will then process solemnly to the University Church, where the Final Commendation will be made.

The body of Fr Krąpiec will be buried in the cemetery on ul. Lipowa.

(link)

[an extract, excuse the limping English, done in a hurry]

Hardly "limping English"! Thanks, Weronika.

For all those interested in Father Krapiec I refer to the obituary I wrote in German and which was published this week in the Germany daily "Die Tagespost" (link). One year ago I visited Father Krapiec and did one of the last interviews with him. The Portrait which I did out of this material is also available online (link).

Viele Grüße

Journée d'étude, jeudi 15 mai 2008
Les innovations du vocabulaire latin à la fin du moyen âge :
autour du Glossaire du latin philosophique (philosophie, théologie, sciences)

Le Glossaire du latin philosophique, un fichier d'environ 230.000 fiches consacré au vocabulaire philosophique du moyen âge, se trouve désormais à l'Institut de Recherche et d'Histoire des Textes, où il est consultable à la Section latine.

A l'occasion de l'arrivée du Glossaire du latin philosophique à l'Institut de Recherche et d'Histoire des Textes et pour marquer un nouveau départ, nous organisons une journée d'étude consacrée à ce fichier, le jeudi 15 mai 2008, à l'IRHT, 40 avenue d'Iéna, 75016 Paris.

Programme:

9.00-9.30 Accueil des participants
9.30 introduction par Louis Holtz
9.40-10.20 Jacqueline Hamesse, Le « Glossaire du latin philosophique médiéval » : histoire, buts et utilization
10.20-11.00 Anne Grondeux, Parler de grammaire en philosophie : l'enrichissement du vocabulaire médiolatin de la pensée grammatical

pause

11.10-11.50 Alfonso Maierù, Sur la « suppositio vaga » au XIII^e siècle
11.50-12.30 Charles Burnett, The Enrichment of Latin philosophical vocabulary through translations from Arabic

déjeuner

14.00-14.40 Ruedi Imbach, Experiri et experiential chez Albert le Grand et Thomas d'Aquin
14.40-15.20 Monica Calma, La "rhetorica viatoris » dans les commentaires des Sentences au XIV^e siècle
15.20-16.00 Ana Gómez Rabal, Exemples de termes philosophiques dans les glossaires médiévaux et leur survivance/ oubli chez un humaniste, Michel Servet

16.15-17.30 Table ronde : discussion générale sur l'avenir du Glossaire et une éventuelle version informatisée, avec la participation de Bruno Bon, Dragos Calma, Monica Calma, Anita Guerreau, Caroline Heid, Louis Holtz, Adriano Oliva, Jacqueline Hamesse, Jean-Pierre Rothschild, Mariken Teeuwen, Olga Weijers.

Inscriptions et renseignements : aoliva@nerim.net, olgaweijers@hotmail.com