Laura Arrington at Notre Dame points out that an extensive interview was conducted with the late Fr Servais Pinckaers, OP on the Thomas Instituut of Utrecht's website (main link), in the year 2000. You can find the interview directly here (by-passing the frames of the site).
One of my teachers in Toronto, Walter Principe, C.S.B., had a long-standing interesting in St Thomas's "spirituality," worked on this topic, and published on it, until the very end of his life, in 1996.
Isn't life interesting? Another one of my other teachers, James Weisheipl, OP, wrote an article once insisting that St Thomas had no spirituality, to his credit!
Anyway, a nice overview of Fr Principe's thinking on Thomas's spirituality can be found on-line, on the Spirituality Today website. The article is entitled "Aquinas' Spirituality for Christ's Faithful Living in the World," Spirituality Today 44/2 (1992): 110-131 (link).
It's going to be a paleography-intensive rest-of-the-semester for me, as I return to some editing projects. It can be really good to return to, and tarry in, one's roots.
Two weeks ago my teaching assistant kindly Xeroxed off for me Auguste Pelzer's Abréviations latines médiévales. Supplément au Dizionario di abbreviature latine (Paris: Béatrice-Nauwelaerts, 1966)—twice, actually, so that I can have a copy for work and a copy for home. As its name suggests, Pelzer's short book is a supplement to Adriano Cappelli's essential tool, Lexicon abbreviaturarum: dizionario di abbreviature latine ed italiane, which was in its fifth edition when I bought my first copy in 1983. Pelzer based his work on manuscripts at the Vatican Library, with an eye towards medieval philosophical and theological texts.
Well, Cappelli itself is now on-line, and impressively, at Moscow State University. Follow this link. I'm not sure whether used copies of Cappelli are readily available, but this on-line version will certainly be helpful if you've got a computer nearby as you transcribe.
Thanks to Dick Taylor for the link.
Jack Calahan over at Resources for Modern Aristotelians lets us know that his site has an article from Mortimer Adler that "should be required reading for all philosophy graduate students and advanced undergraduates. (Shame on those who do not have their students read it!)." The article is entitled "The Superiority of Aristotelian to Modern Philosophy and the Failings of Modern Aristotelian Philosophers," and can be downloaded here (14 pages).
Thanks, as always, to Jörgen Vijgen, for sending this along. There is a new, on-line database of titles and abstracts of articles published in Italian Journals: Reviste on-line (or ROL). Here is the presentation, by the site’s project-leader, Francesco Testaferri:
Presentazione del progetto “Riviste on line”
Gentili Responsabili Istituti Aggregati e Affiliati PUL:
Ho il piacere di segnalare l’inaugurazione del nuovo sito: www.rivisteonline.org, un progetto da me curato col sostegno dell’Istituto Teologico di Assisi e della C.E.I. Il progetto rende disponibile gratuitamente a tutti i visitatori del sito, docenti, studenti, ricercatori e altri interessati, una grande banca dati contenente lo spoglio delle riviste teologiche italiane.
Si tratta di una risorsa informatica in crescita, di notevole valore e agilità già allo stato attuale. Risulterà a studenti e studiosi di grande vantaggio nella conduzione delle ricerche bibliografiche.
Tutti gli interessati possono liberamente consultare il sito: www.rivisteonline.org e se lo desiderano leggere la prima presentazione del progetto reperibile nella pagina “informazioni” alla sezione “comunicati stampa”, ove si trovano anche altre particolari indicazioni.
Considerando estremamente utile il servizio di indicizzazione proposto, con la presente si chiede la possibilità di una segnalazione nel modo che vi sar possibile.
Con l’occasione, in attesa di un riscontro, si porgono distinti saluti, chiedendo, nella misura del possibile, di favorire al meglio la divulgazione della notizia di modo che il progetto venga conosciuto nel miglior modo possibile e raggiunga rapidamente tutti i possibili destinatari e gli interessati.
Rimanendo a disposizione per qualsiasi chiarimento o suggerimento, ci è gradito porgere distinti saluti.
Prof. Francesco Testaferri
Ideatore e curatore del progetto
Istituto Teologico di Assisi
mail: informazioni@rivisteonline.org
You can access the site at http://www.rivisteonline.org. Many journals that Thomists regularly consult are found on the site: Angelicum, Aquinas, Gregorianum, Studi morali, on and on. A great find.
From Thérèse Bonin of Duquesne University, a link to a different on-line version of Walter Farrell’s Companion to the Summa (see the original post). This one is found on catholicprimer.org, and has the advantage of not requiring frames. You can access the microsite here.
Having disappeared from a Dominican website, Fr Walter Farrell's monumental Companion to the Summa is on-line.
All of this on-line searching reminds me that my friend and hero, Fr Stephen L. Brock, has a webpage at the website for the Philosophy Faculty at the Pontificia Università della Santa Croce, the Opus Dei university in Rome. Fr Brock and I were school-mates in Toronto. His webpage has a list of his many publications, for most of which you can download PDF versions of the article. In fact, there is a PDF file of his important doctoral dissertation, defended back in the stone-age of the Internet (1988): The Legal Character of Natural Law according to St. Thomas Aquinas.
The articles you’ll find are primarily in the fields of ethics and metaphysics, as well as some reviews he has done of others’ writings. Helpfully the downloaded PDFs agree with the pagination of the journals in which the article or review appeared, such that you can download the PDF and use it, citing its pagination.
Fr Michael Sherwin, OP, in the Faculté de Théologie in Fribourg, has directed some theses on moral theology recently that are on St. Thomas, and in English. The theses are in PDF format, and are fully-downloadable from the website. See:
While we're on it, Fr Sherwin himself has an informative website on the University's webspace. They're keeping busy.
John C. Cahalan has established a web site, Resources for Modern Aristotelians: Philosophical, Theological, Socio-Political and Pastoral, containing modern Aristotelian papers that one may find helpful, which can be downloaded and copied at no charge. The address is:
http://www.foraristotelians.info
The site contains a paper of special interest collecting in a logically integrated way almost everything Yves Simon wrote on the problem of thing and object, the question Maritain considered second in significance only to the real distinction of essence and existence. Among other things, the paper includes material otherwise buried in the important endnotes to The Material Logic of John of St. Thomas (Poinsot). To access this paper click “Virtual Anthology of Modern Aristotelian Philosophy,” also at the above web site.
Other papers at the web site are:
Soon to come:
There are more papers, by Calahan and others, to come. All the material is copyrighted, but you have permission to download and copy it, free of charge, as you please.
I got this in the e-mail the other day:
I take pleasure in informing you, also on behalf of the whole staff, that we have put online the first issue (1/January-June 2007) of the new e-review of Officina di Studi Medievali "Mediaeval Sophia - Studies and researches on medieval knowledge." The review, which has all formal authorizations as a periodical publication, will be updated every six months and will be put online in July and December; it will be placed side by with the academic journal of Officina di Studi Medievali, "Schede Medievali", which will continue to appear once yearly.
In this phase "Mediaeval Sophia" is online with reading and saving of the texts in PDF format, free of charge, for all sections. To connect use the link: www.mediaevalsophia.it. When you enter the site you will be asked to do free registration, with a form to be filled in all parts requested.
We are in the experimental phase and you will excuse us if there are any management problems, which, however, we are working on. Indeed, we will be very happy if you tell us about any problems and difficulties and if you suggest any ways to improve both the services and the review, which is open to contributions from anyone interested in our "International academic community of medieval studies."
For operational difficulties or for information and communications you can contact:
redazione@mediaevalsophia.it
redazione@officinastudimedievali.it
webmaster@mediaevalsophia.it
Thank you for your kind attention,
Alessandro Musco
President of Officina di Studi Medievali
Deputy-Editor of Mediaeval Sophia
OFFICINA di STUDI MEDIEVALI
Via del Parlamento, 32 - 90133 Palermo (Italy)
P. IVA 02473330823 - C.F. 97000790820
Tel. +39 (0)91 / 586314 - Fax. +39 (0)91 / 333121
E-mail: info@officinastudimedievali.it - staff@officinastudimedievali.it
Web: www.officinastudimedievali.it
The people over at the Thomas Institut in Cologne have put together a nifty short documentary about their Institute. The description runs as follows:
This video is a little documentary of the Thomas-Institut of the University of Cologne. The Thomas-Institut is a research Institute whose function it is to serve the study of medieval philosophy by preparing critical editions and historical and systematic studies of medieval authors.
An imbedded YouTube clips follows:
Under the direction of the Sacra Doctrina Project
