Liliana Irizar sent along a reminder that the Spanish-language website devoted to the work of Lawrence Dewan, OP, continues to improve. See the site here.
More news: According to Liliana Irizar, “we are translating Fr. Dewan’s metaphysical lessons (his metaphysics classes). The book will entitled “Lecciones de Metafísica.” The plan is it comes out at the end of this year.”
This seems to be the mother of all on-line resources for Catholic texts, often in the Latin. I got an e-mail from Poland encouraging me to look at Documenta Catholica Omnia. I’ve only looked at it briefly, but the site has the Bible, Du Cange and Mansi! At the least I’ll bookmark the site, and return for further study.
All-around superman, Jörgen Vijgen, has updated his Albert the Great Bibliography, and has sent me an updated PDF of the same.
More Albert news to follow.
Proh dolor! I’m collecting items for the eventual posting of another 10 reasons I am not a Thomist, and came across this item/issue this morning. As a student of Aquinas in the post-neo-scholastic period I of course knew about the existence of the famous “24 Thomistic theses,” asserted by Pius X in 1914 to be the central theses of the philosophical teaching of Aquinas, especially in the metaphysical realm. My teachers, Fr James Weisheipl and Lawrence Dewan—the former a member of River Forest Thomism, and the latter a clarification, he would argue, of the Toronto Existential Thomistic school—both had referred to the theses now and again, and how the philosophical system “Thomism” was thought to be staked-out by these discrete tenets. Neither required us to think that our learning would fail to be ad normas sancti Thomae, however, should we fail to memorize the theses.
Fine. But it dawned on me today, as I was hunting through various websites, that I’m not sure that I could enunciate even one of those theses! Materially I could, of course, in the sense that I could probably name this or that Thomistic philosophical teaching, and provide some explanation and that, as it happens, a doctrine I mention might be among the 24 theses. But formally speaking, if you were to ask me something like, “what are the ____ (give number here) essential theses of Thomistic metaphysics?” I’d swing and miss.
Not to worry. Today I found some handy resources, in the form of Hugh McDonald’s Latin-based list and translation of the theses, and another rendering of the theses with footnotes to places in Thomas’s works where the thesis is found or substantiated. So at least I know what the theses are now.
Failure to know them certainly does not make someone a non-Thomist, but since I try to know as much as I can about the history of Thomas’s teaching (and its antecedents), it’s clear that I’ve got to do more study on this part of the history of Thomism.
One of our most esteemed colleagues here in the Theology Department at Marquette University is Fr Robert Doran, SJ, a student of Bernard Lonergan’s, and together with Frederick Crowe, SJ, an editor of Lonergan’s works. Since he came here he has been working away in an effort to get a website devoted to Lonergan launched, which would house all the digital content of Lonergan that exists (video clips, audio, PDF’s, on and on). Well, that’s been done, and the site is stunning. Take a look at http://www.bernardlonergan.com. All you need do is register on the site (it’s free and easy), and then you can have access to the digital content. Fr Doran has the ambition to make much of Lonergan’s most famous material—and material of direct interest to Thomists—available on the site.
From Robert Pasnau (and here), who directs us to LibriVox, a website with readings from public domain books (at least PD book in the USA) which includes—wait for it!—a section of readings from the Summa theologiae! Currently you'll find there readings from Questions 1-26 of the Prima pars, in a variety of formats. The reader is Jim Ruddy, using the older English Dominicans translation. Now you can listen to the Summa while you go for a jog, wash the dishes, or mow the lawn.
Last fall I posted about a conference to take place in Dublin, devoted to honoring the 80th birthday of Alisdair MacIntyre. The conference has come and gone. But one of my students, who received a scholarship to attend and participate in the conference, pointed out to me that the conference’s website has a video of MacIntyre’s lecture, delivered at the conference: “On having survived the academic moral philosophy of the twentieth century.” This is surely worth the 50-minute investment of your time to watch. I embed the video below:
At a recent symposium I met up with a colleague, and promised him some information that I had stashed away in my office back at Marquette. One of my dear teachers, James A. Weisheipl, OP, had written a nice piece about the history of the Thomistic revival, and I assured my friend that this would be a good resource for a project he was working on.
Life is full of surprises.
I got back to Milwaukee, and went hunting through my “Weisheipl” folders in my office, and came across the piece in question. The article is a small pamphlet of a presentation he gave, as it happens, here in Milwaukee in 1965: “Thomism as a Perennial Philosophy” (PDF/online). But as I pulled the pamphlet out of the folder, out popped two pictures of Fr Weisheipl that I hadn’t seen for at least a decade!
My immediate reactions:
You can be the judge, of course. I’m estimating that the picture on the left dates from the early 1960’s, while the one on the right dates from the early 1980’s—I remember Fr Weisheipl sending me off with a copy of the second picture, asking me to send it to Catholic University of America Press, for use on the dust jacket of his Nature and Motion in the Middle Ages (permalink/publisher).
La vita é bella. Every now and then life makes you smile—even if you still have tears in your eyes.
Thomas Osborne of the University of St. Thomas (Houston, TX), pointed me recently to Tobias Hoffman’s marvelous bibliography on Duns Scotus, “Duns Scotus Bibliography: 1950 to the Present,” which you can download from his CUA web site. The bibliography would run to 224 printed pages, and lists primary bibliography (the editions and translations), and secondary bibliography in all the scholarly languages.
Wow.
The people at the Leonine Commission’s website have posted a short article on the life of Fr Louis-Jacques Bataillon, OP, who passed away on February 13th. The article also features a piercing photo of Fr Bataillon in what appears to be the Leonine Commission’s library at Saint-Jacques.
The site mentioned in my previous post also has other links of interest to the Thomas-scholar, such as a link on John of Vercelli (who was Master General of the Dominicans during Thomas’s lifetime), on the Doors of Santa Sabina in Rome (where Thomas lived in the middle-1260’s), and a general introduction to Dominic and the Dominican Order.
But the site also sports two videos of direct interest to Thomas-scholars interested in the state of Thomas’s texts (and therefore interested in the Leonine Commission). The first video (just below) is of Fr Hinnebusch explaining the history and nature of the Commission.
Fr Pawel Krupa, OP, of the Leonine Commission also has a video about the Leonine Commission (actually, it’s an audio interview with some pictures). It’s in French.
Shhhh. Don’t mind me. I’m over here downloading like a thief!
My “enabler” in this furtive enterprise is Bruce Marshall of Southern Methodist University, who recently told me two things:
I’ve promptly downloaded all 25 lectures for my computer, and I’ll try to outfit them so that I can toss them into an iPod or MP3 player (in downloaded form they are in MOV format, Apple’s QuickTime Movie format).
Under the direction of the Sacra Doctrina Project
