S.M.A.R.T. Call for Papers

The Society for Medieval and Renaissance Thomism (S.M.A.R.T.) is planning a session for the 2016 meeting of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, San Francisco, CA, 3-6 November 2016. It is looking for papers which address the topic of “being as first known” but is accepting papers on all aspects of Thomism from 1274 to the publication of the Carmelite Cursus Theologiae (1631-1701).

Please send papers and direct enquiries to Domenic D’Ettore at ddettore[at]marian[dot]edu. Papers and abstracts received by 15 May will receive full consideration. Selection preference will be given to complete papers. A final version of the paper will be required by 1 September in order to facilitate a response paper which will be given during the conference session.

A Word about the Word - DSPT Aquinas Lecture 2016

Fr. Olivier-Thomas Venard, OP, Professor of New Testament and Vice Director of the École Biblique et Archéologique Française de Jérusalem, will deliver the 2016 Aquinas Lecture at the Dominican School of Philosophy & Theology in Berkeley, California. In his presentation, “Life, Language and Christ: A Thomistic Approach,” Venard will posit that Aquinas sees a deep analogy, even a participation, between the Word and our words. The event, to be held Tuesday, February 23rd, at 7:30 pm PST (10:30 pm EST), will be available via live-streaming.

Fabro Symposium at CUA, April 1-2

Father Dreyer of the Institute of the Incarnate Word has announced that there will be a Fabro Symposium at CUA on April 1-2.  It looks great.  You can find more information about it here:

 http://www.iveamerica.org/images/fabro/institute-of-the-incarnate-word-Fabro-Symposium-Poster.jpg

A trove of digitized Garrigou-Lagrange texts

Not long ago there were not (as far as I know) many of Garrigou-Lagrange's writings available electronically online. Last month I discovered that there are now over a dozen available at the Internet Archive. They are all English translations, but for those whose French or Latin is poor or non-existent, this is quite a resource. Obviously, it will also be useful for professors who would like to incorporate some of Garrigou's texts in their classes.

There are now a total of fourteen texts up. You can find them here. Also included is the hitherto hard to obtain English translation of Garrigou's famous (for some, notorious) 1946 Angelicum article "La nouvelle théologie: oú va-t-elle?" Here's what's available as of this posting:

Beatitude: A Commentary on St. Thomas' Theological summa, Ia IIae, qq. 1-54

Christian Perfection & Contemplation

God: His Existence and His Nature (vol. 1)

God: His Existence and His Nature (vol. 2)

The Love of God and the Cross of Jesus (vol. 1)

The Love of God and the Cross of Jesus (vol. 2)

The Mother of The Savior and Our Interior Life

Our Saviour and His Love for Us

Predestination

The Last Writings

The Priest in Union with Christ 

The Three Ages of the Interior Life (vol. 1)

The Three Ages of the Interior Life (vol. 2)

“Where is the New Theology Leading Us?”

There were two other entries that I did not include in this list because I'm not sure what they are. They are supposed to be an index and a bibliography to The Three Ages of the Interior Life. When I clicked on the links, however, I was led to blank pages. 

We certainly owe a debt of gratitude to whoever made the effort to put all of this up.

New translation of Dignitatis humanae

Thomistica.net contributor Michael Pakaluk has produced a new draft translation of the Second Vatican Council's declaration on religious liberty Dignitatis humanae. December 7 was the fiftieth anniversary of the document's promulgation by Paul VI, and December 8 was the fiftieth anniversary of the Council's closing.

Michael tells me that his main goal was to produce an instrument for accurate study. He believes that his translation better reveals Dignitatis humanae's classical roots and the care with which the document was written. He welcomes any corrections and suggestions for improvement.

You can find Michael's translation here on his Academia.edu page.

Thomism and hermeneutic violence: five Dominicans respond to Adriano Oliva

A few weeks ago on Thomistica.net one of our contributors, Tom Osborne, shared some brief thoughts on Adriano Oliva's new book Amours. Oliva, a Dominican, is the president of the Leonine Commission. In Amours he argues for a number of controversial theses, including the moral goodness of some homosexual acts and the permissibility of the reception of communion by divorced and civilly remarried Catholics. He enlists Aquinas in making these arguments.

Prior to Osborne's negative evaluation there was also a highly critical review by Thibaud Collin in La Croix, which you can find here. One of Collin's criticisms has to do with Oliva's reading -- or radical misreading, rather -- of ST, Ia-IIae, q. 31, a. 7. His comments are sharp:

Une telle argumentation repose sur des contresens qu’il convient de manifester. Il semble y avoir ici une lecture sélective du texte de saint Thomas. On rompt la cohérence interne de la doctrine thomasienne pour mieux ensuite piocher ce dont on a besoin afin de reconstruire sa propre théorie, plus proche de celle de Michel Foucault que celle du saint dominicain.

Now, five Dominicans -- Bernhard Blankenhorn, Catherine Joseph Droste, Efrem Jindráček, Dominic Legge, and Thomas Joseph White -- have responded to Oliva at First Things. Like Collin, they also charge Oliva with a radical misreading of Aquinas (among other things). You can find their comments here. I can only (not without sadness) concur with their judgments.

New Collection of Essays on Aquinas’s De malo

There is a new collection of essays from Cambridge University Press titled Aquinas’s ‘Disputed Questions on Evil’: A Critical Guide.

Chapters and contributors include:

1. Metaphysical Themes in De malo, 1 John F. Wippel
2. Weakness and Willful Wrongdoing in Aquinas’s De malo Bonnie Kent and Ashley Dressel
3. Free Choice Tobias Hoffmann and Peter Furlong
4. Venial Sin and the Ultimate End Steven J. Jensen
5. The Promise and Pitfalls of Glory: Aquinas on the Forgotten Vice of Vainglory Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung
6. The Goodness and Evil of Objects and Ends Thomas M. Osborne, Jr
7. Evil and Moral Failure in De malo Carl N. Still and Darren E. Dahl
8. Attention, Intentionality, and Mind-reading in Aquinas’s De malo, q. 16, a. 8 Therese Scarpelli Cory
9. Evil as Privation: The Neoplatonic Background to Aquinas’s De malo, 1 Fran O’Rourke
10. Moral Luck and the Capital Vices in De malo: Gluttony and Lust M. V. Dougherty

From the Publisher's blurb:

This collection of ten, specially commissioned new essays, the first book-length English-language study of Disputed Questions on Evil, examines the most interesting and philosophically relevant aspects of Aquinas’s work, highlighting what is distinctive about it and situating it in relation not only to Aquinas’s other works but also to contemporary philosophical debates in metaphysics, ethics, and philosophy of action. The essays also explore the history of the work’s interpretation.

Publisher’s page is here.

New book on Aquinas's philosophy by Stephen Brock

Stephen L. Brock, professor of medieval philosophy at the Pontificia Università della Santa Croce in Rome, has just published a book entitled The Philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas: A Sketch. Here is the book description from Cascade Books (an imprint of Wipf and Stock):

If Saint Thomas Aquinas was a great theologian, it is in no small part because he was a great philosopher. And he was a great philosopher because he was a great metaphysician. In the twentieth century, metaphysics was not much in vogue, among either theologians or even philosophers; but now it is making a comeback, and once the contours of Thomas's metaphysical vision are glimpsed, it looks like anything but a museum piece. It only needs some dusting off. Many are studying Thomas now for the answers that he might be able to give to current questions, but he is perhaps even more interesting for the questions that he can raise regarding current answers: about the physical world, about human life and knowledge, and (needless to say) about God. This book is aimed at helping those who are not experts in medieval thought to begin to enter into Thomas's philosophical point of view. Along the way, it brings out some aspects of his thought that are not often emphasized in the current literature, and it offers a reading of his teaching on the divine nature that goes rather against the drift of some prominent recent interpretations.

This sounds like an important new contribution. Personally, I am looking forward to seeing what in Brock's reading of Aquinas's teaching on the divine nature goes "against the drift of some prominent recent interpretations."

You can find out more information and purchase Brock's book here or here.

Aquinas and Whitehead

The managing editor of Open Theology, Katarzyna Tempczyk, has written Thomistica.net to inform us of a special issue of the journal on Whitehead and Aquinas. The contributions come from papers delivered this past summer at the 10th International Whitehead Conference at the Center for Process Studies in Claremont, California. The special issue is edited by Joseph Bracken, who also writes an introduction to the papers. All the papers can be accessed for free at the journal site.

Open Theology is a peer-reviewed open-access journal published by De Gruyter. If you would like further info on the journal, including submission guidelines, go here.

Thomism Conference by Dominican Friars Postponed

The friars of the Order of Preachers (Dominicans) have held conferences on Thomism in 2010 (Warsaw) and 2013 (Washington, D.C.), with plans (as I had earlier noted) for another in 2016, to be hosted by the Toulouse Province of friars (publishers of the Revue Thomiste). However, due to several events already scheduled for 2016, including those connected with the 800th Jubilee of the Order, the conference has been postponed until 2017. 

While conference attendance has been restricted to Dominican friars, some of the presentations have been published, both for the 2010 conference (Dominicans and the Challenge of Thomism) and for the 2013 event (Nova et Vetera 12.4, Autumn 2014).