Wisdom, Law, and VirtueLawrence Dewan’s important collection of essays on Aquinas’s metaphysics is now matched by one on ethics. Fordham University Press has published Wisdom, Law and Virtue: Essays in Thomistic Ethics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), which contains an astounding number—twenty-seven!—of his writings on Thomas’s ethics.

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