News
Aquinas at 800
/The Jacques Maritain Center at the University of Notre Dame is pleased to announce the international conference "Aquinas at 800," in celebration of Aquinas's birth anniversary, Sept. 22-25, 2024. More than 160 speakers will be presenting their research on all areas of the thought of Aquinas. Registration is now open here, and will remain open until Sept. 6th. For any questions, please write aquinas@nd.edu.
Aquinas After 750 Years: Still the Common Doctor?
/Attend an upcoming conference in September 2023 to find out. See the details below or at this website, including registration. See the “Call for Papers” here.
To mark the 750th anniversary of the death of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Thomistic Institute and the Dominican House of Studies present a conference on St. Thomas’s thought with keynote addresses and a call for papers for shorter breakout sessions.
A group of major scholars will treat the theme of Thomas Aquinas as the Common Doctor, each from the perspective of his or her own expertise. Each contributor will treat the question of whether, and to what extent, Aquinas may (or may not) be considered a “common doctor” in theological and philosophical engagements today.
What? A three-day conference on the theme on Aquinas as the Common Doctor in contemporary theology and philosophy.
Where? Dominican House of Studies (487 Michigan Ave. NE, Washington, D.C. 20017)
When? Thursday, September 14 to Saturday, September 16, 2023
Each talk concludes with time for Q&A. Light refreshments, including snacks and coffee, will be served between the lectures.
Featuring:
Therese Cory (University of Notre Dame)
Fr. Serge-Thomas Bonino, O.P. (Angelicum)
Joseph Wawrykow (University of Notre Dame)
Matthew Levering (University of St. Mary of the Lake)
Fr. Thomas Joseph White, O.P. (Angelicum)
Russell Hittinger (University of Tulsa)
Call for papers
We invite paper proposals on themes related to whether, and to what extent, Aquinas may (or may not) be considered a “common doctor,” whether in matters theological, philosophical, or otherwise. In particular, we invite papers on: Philosophy of Nature; Metaphysics; Virtue Theory and Philosophical Ethics; Moral Theology; Scripture and Exegesis; Sacraments; Trinity; Christology; Creation; Nature and Grace; and Faith and Reason (including the engagement with contemporary science).
New Issue of the ACPQ
/The latest issue of the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 94, no. 3 (2020) has various articles that may be of interest to readers of this site.
Several articles consider familiar themes from Thomistic and scholastic philosophy. First, Christopher A. Bobier’s essay “Aquinas on the Emotion of Hope: A Psychological or Theological Treatment?” considers whether St. Thomas’s account of the emotion of hope is theologically informed, concluding that it is. Bobier’s exposition examines in detail one key element to make this connection: why the soul’s passio or emotion of hope is limited in its object to arduous goods, when at least colloquially we say that we “hope for” things that do not seem arduous. To Bobier’s mind, “Aquinas’s limitation of the emotion of hope to future arduous goods that are possible to attain allows for a similarity between theological and emotional hope, a similarity that otherwise would not be there.” This result, however, still comes with the qualification that St. Thomas’s account of hope, even limited to arduous goods, still has non-theological, philosophical grounds.
The arduous good of theological hope, of course, is the attainment of eternal life by the predestined with God’s help. “Was Báñez a Bañecian?” by David Torrijos-Castrillejo aims to determine Domingo Báñez’s “personal opinion regarding the ontology of physical premotion without presupposing the later development of Bañecian doctrine.” In opposition to the more typical interpretation of Thomists he finds in the contemporary literature, and relying on the work of Beltrán de Heredia, OP, among others, Torrijos-Castrillejo argues that Báñez did not consider physical premotion a tertium quid entity between God’s creative action and the human action. Rather, “Báñez only tries to formulate anew the thesis defended by Aquinas himself: namely, that the only numerically new effect of divine motion is the deliberate human action that God and created free will produce together.”
J. Caleb Clanton and Kraig Martin, in “William of Ockham, Andrew of Neufchateau, and the Origins of Divine Command Theory,” place the blame for being the medieval progenitor of divine command theory upon Andrew of Neufchateau rather than William of Ockham. They review the claim that Ockham can be read in a more nuanced way to relieve him of blame for this account of natural law ethics, and then, relying upon and extending the work of Janine Marie Idziak, they argue that Andrew clearly and thoroughly adopts and defends the view that “all features of morality—value, obligation, and natural law itself—arise in virtue of the free decrees of God’s will.”
Shifting from classic debates in perennial philosophy to a contemporary one, the issue also features a book discussion of Aristotle’s Revenge: The Metaphysical Foundations of Physical and Biological Science (reviewed by Thomistica last year). The author, Edward Feser, provides a brief précis of the book followed by the criticisms of philosopher Robert C. Koons and physicist Stephen M. Barr. These articles were previously given as papers at the most recent meeting of the American Catholic Philosophical Association to a standing-room-only crowd.
Koons, sympathetic to the book’s project overall, raises various challenges on behalf of the B-theory of time—sometimes called the “tenseless” theory of time—in response to Feser’s view that there is a more natural place in the Aristotelian philosophy of time for the A-theory and presentism—a “tensed” theory of time, where all that exists only exists in the present. Koons’s exposition turns on the B-theorist’s interpretation of the six key Aristotelian commitments that Feser highlights: time as the measure of change, the successive nature of time and change, the successive existence of time, the existence of time outside the mind, the continuity of time and change, and the nature of change as actualizing potentialities. Barr, not as sympathetic as Koons to Feser’s project, criticizes select aspects of the book: its method being too aprioristic, its putative misunderstanding of modern physics’s account of space, and for the inaccuracy and inapplicability, in the inorganic realm, of the concept of substantial form and its unicity. Feser’s response systematically considers all nine of these points raised by Koons and Barr. I leave it to readers to judge the results. At the very least, the discussion illustrates both the difficulties faced by those who, like Feser, would propose the Aristotelian philosophy of nature to analytic philosophers or contemporary scientists, as well as some ways to be successful while doing so.
Last on our list to be mentioned, but given the first word in the journal issue itself, is an article addressing the proper order between language and thought: “Aquinas’s Teachings on Concepts and Words in His Commentary on John Contra Nicanor Austriaco, OP.” In it, Marie I. George critiques the view put forward by Fr. Austriaco in his 2018 ACPQ article “Defending Adam After Darwin: On the Origin of Sapiens as a Natural Kind.” Specifically, George argues that St. Thomas would deny two claims made by Fr. Austriaco: first, that the capacity for abstraction presupposes the capacity for language, and second, that we grasp concepts through words. He bases both of these claims from a passage of St. Thomas’s commentary on the gospel of St. John, but George argues that he does so mistakenly. She then turns to the broader context of St. Thomas’s doctrine of abstraction, language, concept formation, the predisposition of the human imagination for the intellectual capacity, and, crucially and generally, the temporal priority and role of vague, imperfect concepts in the development of the mind. This brings the classic Meno paradox to bear on the pressing question of the Thomistic philosophical interpretation of human evolution. George concludes that while “Aquinas would be open to the idea that a brain structured in a manner that allows for the imagination of signs suitable for language is a necessary, or even the final, disposition for the reception of the rational soul,” nonetheless “for Aquinas, there is always some priority of abstract thought over language.”
– Reviewed by John G. Brungardt, PhD
New Issue of The Thomist
/The most recent issue of The Thomist now available through online indexes (Vol. 83, no. 3, 2019), includes various articles of possible interest to readers of this site.
The main articles feature three devoted to explicating points of natural law, all balanced by one article on the spiration of the Third Person of the Holy Trinity. Opening his “Retributive Justice and Natural Law” with a consideration of C. S. Lewis’s defense of the essentially retributive character of just punishment, Peter Karl Koritansky argues that retributive justice is intelligible and defensible only on the principles of Thomistic natural law. His article criticizes the shortcomings of the “unfair advantage” theory of punishment, a contemporary alternative attempt to justify retributive justice. St. Thomas’s account is incompatible with the unfair advantage story, provides a sounder basis for understanding punishment, and successfully distinguishes retribution from revenge.
Stephen L. Brock, in “The Specification of Action in St. Thomas: Nonmotivating Conditions in the Object of Intention,” considers the intricate details of the principle of double effect. He argues that “head on effects,” nonintended effects that are per se to intentional actions, escape and bode ill for the typical division between intended effects and side effects. His central claim is that “for Thomas, features of an action that do not motivate the agent, or do not provide reasons for acting, can fall within the agent’s intention, and can sometimes even specify the action.” Defending this thesis allows him to correct mistaken readings of St. Thomas, including some proposed by adherents of the New Natural Law theory.
“Lawrence Dewan, Legal Obligation, and the New Natural Law” finds Charles Robertson also raising various points of debate with the New Natural Law theory, all while expanding upon Fr. Dewan’s metaphysically-rooted account of the legal character of the natural law. Advocates of the former, such as Grisez and Tollefsen, source the obligatory character of natural law in the prescriptions of practical reason. By contrast, Robertson follows St. Thomas and roots the obligatory character of the natural law in the binding force of conscience, itself derived from the divine ordinance that also orders the human good within the common good of the universe as a whole. His exposition allows Robertson to partially correct and extend Dewan’s original account. Robertson mentions as a key source in his considerations the doctoral dissertation of Stephen L. Brock, and so I note that a revised version of that dissertation has been published this year as The Light That Binds: A Study in Thomas Aquinas’s Metaphysics of Natural Law.
The human intellectual soul, participating in the light of the truth of eternal law by knowing the natural law, is a mirror of the divine in other ways. “The Spiration of Love in God according to Aquinas and His Interpreters,” by Jeremy D. Wilkins, aims to polish theoretically that created speculum in which we find theological analogies to contemplate the Holy Trinity. He focuses on the exegetical questions surrounding St. Thomas’s understanding of “whether the will emanates an operatum, parallel in some way to the procession of the inner word within the intellect.” The exegesis examines St. Thomas’s understanding of the psychological side of the analogy—the activity of the will and love in the human case—for the sake of theological clarity, and adjudicates between available interpretive options. John of St. Thomas and Gilles Emery represent one line of interpretation, Bernard Lonergan and followers (and possibly Cajetan) another; the latter view, Wilkins contends, “succeeds better than the alternative in ascertaining the spiritual structure of contemplation and the spiration of contemplative love, which is Aquinas’s analogue for the spiration of love in God.”
- Reviewed by John Brungardt, PhD
New Book: Thomas Aquinas on the Beatitudes
/In MacIntyre’s After Virtue, which was written in 1981, he argued that even though modern thinkers continued to possess a “simulacra of morality” they had actually “very largely, if not entirely” lost the theoretical and practical comprehension of morality. Indeed, Kantian deontologism and Enlightenment philosophy have both done their part to hinder modern man from an appreciation of the role of virtue and teleology. Thankfully, though, as virtue ethics has become more popular and as Thomists have begun to reassert the foundational role the human desire for happiness has in the moral life (by turning, time and again, to the beginning of the Secunda Pars), some of us moderns have found ourselves on the correct path. Nevertheless, despite the relative proliferation of works on the virtues since the time After Virtue was written, there has not been much work done on the beatitudes, which are, for Thomas, “acts of perfect virtue” (see II-II, q. 29 a. 4 ad 1 and q. 79 aa. 1 & 3) that are distinguished from virtues “not as habit from habit, but as act from habit” (I-II, q. 69 a. 1). It’s good to see that Fr. Anton ten Klooster is taking steps to fill this lacuna.
Click here for more info and ordering info.
New Book: General Principles of Sacramental Theology
/Roger W. Nutt has released a new book with The Catholic University of America Press entitled General Principles of Sacramental Theology.
General Principles of Sacramental Theology addresses a current lacuna in English-language theological literature. Bernard Leeming's highly respected book Principles of Sacramental Theology was published more than sixty years ago. Since that time, there has been a noted decrease, especially in English-language sacramental theology, in treatments of the basic topics and principles—such as the nature of the sacraments of signs, sacramental grace, sacramental character, sacramental causality, sacramental intention, the necessity and number of the sacraments, sacramental matter and form, inter alia—which apply to all of the sacraments.
Rather than deconstruct the Church's tradition, as many recent books on the sacraments do, Roger Nutt offers a vibrant presentation of these principles as a sound foundation for a renewed appreciation of each of the seven sacraments in the Christian life as the divinely willed means of communion and friendship between God and humanity. The sacraments bestow and nourish the personal communion with Jesus Christ that is the true source of human happiness. Recourse to the patrimony of Catholic wisdom, especially St. Thomas Aquinas, can help to highlight the sacraments and their significance within the plan of salvation.
This book will be of use in seminary, graduate, and undergraduate courses. It is further offered as a source of hope to all those seeking deeper intimacy with God amidst the confusion, alienation, and disappointment that accompanies life in a fallen world. The sacraments play an irreplaceable role in pursuing a Universal Call to Holiness that is so central to Vatican II's teaching.
Roger W. Nutt is associate professor of theology at Ave Maria University, Florida
“This book will help priests and laity alike to gain a fuller understanding of the worth and power of the sacraments. Prof. Nutt helps to move the conversation about the sacraments forward in a much-needed way in our day.”
New Book: Thomism and Predestination
/A new book entitled Thomism and Predestination: Principles and Disputations is now available from The Catholic University of America Press. See below for more details.
"There is perhaps no aspect of traditional Thomistic thought so contested in modern Catholic theology as the notion of predestination as presented by the classical Thomist school. What is that doctrine, and why is it so controversial? Has it been rightly understood in the context of modern debates? At the same time, the Church's traditional affirmation of a mystery of predestination is largely ignored in modern Catholic theology more generally. Why is this the case? Can a theology that emphasizes the Augustinian notion of the primacy of salvation by grace alone also forego a theology of predestination?
Thomism and Predestination: Principles and Disputations considers these topics from various angles: the principles of the classical Thomistic treatment of predestination, their contested interpretation among modern theologians, examples of the doctrine as illustrated by the spiritual writings of the saints, and the challenges to Catholic theology that the Thomistic tradition continues to pose. This volume initiates readers―especially future theologians and Catholic intellectuals―to a central theme of theology that is speculatively challenging and deeply interconnected to many other elements of the faith.
ABOUT THE EDITORS
Steven A. Long is a professor of Theology at Ave Maria University and author of Teleological Grammar of the Moral Act (Sapientia Press of Ave Maria University Publications). Roger W. Nutt is an associate professor of Theology, codirector of the Aquinas Center for Theological Renewal, and editor-in-chief of Sapientia Press of Ave Maria University. Thomas Joseph White, OP, is the director of the Thomistic Institute at the Domincan House of Studies. He is the author of several books including The Incarnate Lord: A Thomistic Study in Christology (CUA Press), and coeditor of the theological journal Nova et Vetera."
Perfect Hatred? Aquinas Lecture in Berkeley
/The 24th Annual Aquinas Lecture at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley, CA, will be given by Dr. Diana Fritz-Cates, Associate Professor of Religious Ethics at The University of Iowa, on Wednesday, March 12, at 7:30 pm PST (10:30 pm EST). Entitled “Hatred in the Light of Love: A Thomistic Analysis,” the live-streamed presentation will present a conceptual and ethical analysis of hatred, based on the moral psychology of St. Thomas Aquinas.
Discounts and new texts from Critical Reprints
/The proprietors of Critical Reprints, which produces reprints of Latin editions of important texts by Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, et al. through Lulu.com, have asked us to let our readers know about some coupons Lulu is offering through Dec. 15. Here are the coupon codes:
FREESHIP (free shipping through Dec. 15)
HOLIDAY25 (25% off through Dec. 15 on up to 14 books)
They have also forwarded us the below information about new texts and a giveaway.
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Critical Reprints is pleased to bring you several reprints of important scholarly texts from Thomas Aquinas, Alexander of Hales, and Albert the Great!
In addition to the many reprints of Thomas Aquinas we already stock (like the Leonine Summa theologiae and Summa contra Gentiles), we are now offering:
- The Marietti edition of Aquinas's Commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics (1950)
- The Marietti edition of Aquinas's Commentary on Pseudo-Dionysius's On the Divine Names (1950)
- The Parma edition of the portions of Aquinas's Commentary on the Sentences of Peter the Lombard not included in the Mandonnet/Moos edition
In addition to the reprints connected with Alexander of Hales we already stock (the whole Summa fratris Alexandri), we are now offering:
We've also added:
Quodlibetal Giveaway (Advent 2013)
For this holiday season, we are inaugurating our first semiannual Quodlibetal Giveaway! Quodlibet means "whatever", and in the Middle Ages, magistri would hold seminannual quodlibetal questions in Advent and Easter, where anyone could ask whatever of the masters. Here at Critical Reprints, we're doing our own take on the medieval quodlibet, by giving you an opportunity to win one critical reprint from whatever we reprint every Advent and Easter.
Interview about Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas conference in Houston
/Zenit has published an interview I conducted with John Hittinger (The Center for Thomistic Studies at the University of St. Thomas, Houston and the John Paul II Forum) about the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas conference this Oct. 17-19 in Houston. You can find the interview here. John is one of the conference organizers. Tom Osborne, who teaches at The Center for Thomistic Studies and is a Thomistica.net contributor, posted about the conference earlier this year.
Call for papers: Aquinas's moral philosophy
/It is a little late to be posting this notice but I just came across it and, as they say, better late than never. The online journal Diametros, which is sponsored by the Institute of Philosophy at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, has announced a call for papers on Aquinas’s moral philosophy and contemporary practical ethics. The deadline is Tuesday, September 10! Here is the notice from PhilPapers:
The Editorial Board of Diametros - An Online Journal of Philosophy is planning to publish a special edition of the journal dedicated to actual and possible applications of Thomas Aquinas’ moral theory to the problems of contemporary practical ethics. The thematic scope of the publication is considerably broad, and that in two respects. On the one hand, we believe that there are a number of issues in St. Thomas’ moral philosophy, in particular his doctrine of natural law, which need to be considered in relation to contemporary practical ethics. On the other hand, Aquinas’ moral theory will certainly shed new light on many issues in practical ethics, especially in bioethics. Thus we do not wish to limit the scope of the articles published in the special edition. However, we would appreciate that the articles not be focused too narrowly on specific issues, so that the special edition will be of interest to a broader audience and not only to specialists in St. Thomas’ ethics.