Doctor Angelicus 5 (2005) is out

There’s something for everyone in David Berger’s wonderful, multi-language journal, Doctor Angelicus. This year’s volume is now available (volume 5 [2005]). You can see the journal’s web site here. Make sure to check out its valuable run-down of the year 2004’s thomistic bibliography. Here is its table of contents:

Dissertationes

• Jörgen Vijgen, "Die heutige Autorität des hl. Thomas von Aquin im Lichte der Tradition" (pp. 7-54)
• Leo Elders s.v.d., "The Doctrine of Being of St. Thomas Aquinas" (pp. 55-74)
• Christian Ferraro v.e., "La conoscenza dell’ens e dell’esse dalla prospettiva del tomismo essenziale" (pp. 75-108)
• Roman Cardal, "Die Dynamik des intellektuellen Lebens und die Rehabilitation der Metaphysik" (pp. 109-126)
• Brunero Gherardini, "L’uomo in San Tommaso" (pp. 127-132)
• Manuel Ocampo Ponce, "Algunas reflexiones sobre la ciencia y la técnica a la luz del pensiamento de Santo Tomás de Aquino" (pp. 133-152)
• Davide Venturini, "Beatitudo, bonum commune und lex bei Thomas von Aquin" (pp. 153-164)
• Mario Coccia, "Credit Where Credit is Due: St. Thomas Aquinas versus Peter Lombard on the True Nature of Charity" (pp. 165-178)
• Uwe Michael Lang, "The Controversies over Chalcedon and the Beginnings of Scholastic Theology: The Case of John Philoponus" (pp. 179-196)
• Jörgen Vijgen, "The Future of Cornelio Fabro’s Legacy" (pp. 197-204)
• David Berger, "Thomas Rusters These vom ‘verwechselbaren Gott’ aus thomistischer Perspektive" (pp. 205-220)

Recensiones

• Thomas Marschler: Jörgen Vijgen (ed.), Indubitanter ad veritatem. Studies offered to Leo J. Elders SVD in Honor of the Golden Jubilee of his Ordination to the Priesthood (pp. 221-223)
• Jörgen Vijgen: Ralph M. McInerny, Aquinas (pp. 223-224)
• David Berger: Ludovicus Carbo a Costaciario, Compendium absolutissimum totius Summae Theologiae D. Thomae Aquinatis (pp. 224-227) / John of St. Thomas, Introduction to the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas (pp. 227-231) /Paulus Engelhardt, Thomas von Aquin. Wegweisung in sein Werk (231-233) / Benedikt Ritzler, Freiheit in der Umarmung des ewig Liebenden. Die historische Entwicklung des Personverständnisses bei Jacques Maritain (pp. 233-236)
• Enrique Alarcón – David Berger – Jörgen Vijgen: "Bibliographia Thomistica 2004" (pp. 237-314)

Happy reading.

Mark's Christmas wish-list

Just got my latest installment of the "Brepols Publishers - Newsletter for Medieval and Renaissance studies," and just in case you’re wondering what you might get me for Christmas this year, I’ll make it easy for you.

• G. Murano - Opere diffuse per "exemplar" e pecia. 897 p., 160 x 240 mm, FIDEM, 2005, PB, ISBN 2-503-51922-9, EUR 69, Disponible. Ce volume recense pour la première fois toutes les listes de taxation et des exemplaria découverts jusqu’à nos jours, depuis ceux connus depuis longtemps, provenant des universités de Paris, Bologne, Padoue etc., jusqu’aux moins connus conservés actuellement à Uppsala, Dubrovnik, Olomouc, Autun, Montpellier, Greiswald etc. More info: Click here.
• C. Sirat - Writing as Handwork. Handwriting, the Writing Hand, and the History of Writing. approx. 250 p., 210 x 270 mm, 2005, BIB 25, PB, ISBN 2-503-52116-9, approx. EUR 65, Publication prévue pour novembre 2005. More info: Click here.
• A.-F. Moskowitz - The Pulpits of Nicola and Giovanni Pisano. 304 p., + 250 b/w ills + 8 colour ills., 220 x 280 mm, 2005, HB, ISBN 1-872501-49-4, approx. EUR 105, Publication date scheduled for December 2005.
• O. Weijers - Le travail intellectuel à la Faculté des arts de Paris: textes et maîtres (ca. 1200-1500) VI. Répertoire des noms commençant par L-M-N-O. approx. 200 p., 160 x 240 mm, 2005, SA 13, PB, ISBN 2-503-52038-3, approx. EUR 40, Publication prévue pour novembre 2005. More info: Click here.

The Midwest Seminar in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy: Schedule

Sponsored by the Marquette University Department of Philosophy (website), Marquette University (Milwaukee, WI).

Fall 2005 Schedule:

• September 16-17, 2005: The Third Midwestern Conference in Medieval Philosophy.
• November 5, 2005, 2-3:30 pm: Aquinas and the Arabs: A Text Seminar. Richard C. Taylor on Thomas Aquinas: In 4 Sent, d.49, q.2, a.1, Resp. See texts. Location: Alumni Memorial Union 131
• November 10, 2005, 6 pm: Josep Puig Montada, Universidad Complutense de Madrid: Ethics and Politics in Averroes. Location Alumni Memorial Union 254. Also: Friday, November 11, 2005, 2:00 pm: "Necessity, Possibility and Potency in Averroes." Location: Alumni Memorial Union 227
• December 3, 2005, 1 pm: Roslyn Weiss, Lehigh University, "A Man for All Reasons: Maimonides’ Account of the Ritual Commandments." Location: Alumni Memorial Union 313

Spring 2006 Schedule:

Forthcoming…

Call for Applications

The Marquette University Mid-West Seminar on Ancient and Medieval Philosophy invites applications for the presentation of a paper in Ancient or Medieval Philosophy at a meeting of the Seminar on Thursday, March 30, 2006. (Due to a very active Spring term in the Marquette Philosophy Department, at present it appears that the seminar will have to be scheduled for March 30. 2006.) For the Winter/Spring term there will be one award. The presenter will be reimbursed up to $500 maximum for travel, room and board expenses only. In most cases this amount will cover all expenses for presenters from North America although applications from elsewhere are welcome. Past participants have come from the US, Canada, England, Israel, Italy and Finland. Deadline: December 1, 2005. Decision by December 20.

The presenter, as well as any visiting scholar, is welcome to make use of Marquette University’s Library which houses one of the finest collections of philosophical materials on Ancient and Medieval thought in the Mid-West. Available electronic resources include: Patrologia Latina; CETEDOC; Thesaurus Linguae Graecae; Past Masters; International Medieval Bibliography; Index Thomisticus; Philosophers’ Index; Index Islamicus; Encyclopaedia of Islam; Encyclopaedia Judaica, and many others (see listing).

Marquette University Faculty Participants:

• Owen Goldin (Ancient)
• Susanne Foster (Ancient, Ethics)
• John Jones (Medieval Social Thought, Neoplatonism)
• James South (Late Medieval & Renaissance)
• Andrew Tallon (NeoThomism, phenomenology)
• Richard C. Taylor (Medieval Latin & Arabic)
• Roland Teske, S.J., (Medieval, Augustine, Philosophy of Religion)
• David Twetten (Medieval, Aquinas)

and others from Marquette and other regional universities. Recent visiting participants in the seminar have included:

• Suzanne Stern-Gillet (Bolton Institute)
• Alfred Ivry (New York University)
• Thomas Williams (University of Iowa)
• Eugene Garver (Saint John’s University)
• Patricia Curd (Purdue University)
• Cristina D’Ancona (Università di Padova)
• John Sisko (College of William and Mary)
• Jeffrey E. Brower (Purdue University)
• Mary J. Sirridge (Lousiana State University)
• Richard Tierney (University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee)
• Kenneth Seeskin (Northwestern University)
• Ruth Glassner (Hebrew University, Mt. Scopus, Jerusalem)
• Steven Harvey (Bar Ilan University)
• Ray Weiss (University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee)
• Hye-Kyung Kim (University of Wisconsin at Green Bay)
• Lorraine Pangle (University of Texas at Austin)

Application Procedure

Send a précis of the proposed presentation with cover letter and cv. Applications from advanced graduate students are welcome but must include a letter of support from the student’s dissertation director.  NOTE: E-mail applications are preferred. Submit applications or requests for information to:

Richard C. Taylor
Department of Philosophy, Marquette University
P.O. Box 1881, Milwaukee, WI 53201-1881 USA.
Email: mistertea@mac.com
Alternate email: Richard.Taylor@Marquette.edu
Telephone: (414)-288-5649. Fax: (414) 288-3010

NEH Summer Seminar 2006: The Seven Deadly Sins

Want to learn cool stuff in a cool place, and get paid for it? Read on.

The Seven Deadly Sins as Cultural Constructions in the Middle Ages

An NEH Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers at Darwin College, University of Cambridge (17 July - 18 August 2006 [5 weeks] see web site here.).

This seminar will examine the cultural construction of moral thought in the Middle Ages using the categories of the Seven Deadly Sins, critically review recent scholarship on the sins, and make maximum use of the unique manuscript, research, and human resources available in Cambridge. The seminar will seek to deepen the participants’ appreciation for the ways in which the conception of morality in the Middle Ages was a response to varying cultural factors, and will make the study of the sins available for inclusion in the participants’ regular college instruction. The format of the seminar will combine individual presentations, guest lectures, and excursions to manuscript collections in Cambridge and to illuminations of the sins in St Mary’s Church, Hardwick (Cambridgeshire) and churches in Hessett and Stanningfield (Suffolk).

The Seven Deadly SinsThe seminar will be directed by Richard G. Newhauser, Professor of English and Medieval Studies, Trinity University (San Antonio) and will feature lectures by the following faculty:

• Richard Beadle, Department of English, University of Cambridge
• István Bejczy, Department of History, Katholieke Universiteit, Nijmegen, Holland
• David Ganz, Department of English and Classics, King’s College University of London
• Miriam Gill, Department of Art History, University of Leicester
• Nigel Harris, Department of German Studies, University of Birmingham
• Sylvia Huot, Department of French, University of Cambridge
• Ed Peters, Department of History, University of Pennsylvania
• Siegfried Wenzel (Emer.), Department of English, University of Pennsylvania

This seminar means to attract participants from a wide variety of disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Participants will receive a stipend of $ 3,600. DEADLINE for applications: March 1, 2006. For information and application materials go to the web site.

Holy Grail found

Joseph’ Goering’s "The Virgin and the Grail"Well, sort of.

One of the real good guys in medieval studies, Joseph Goering at Toronto, told me a couple of years ago about a project that he had been quietly working on. He thought, he said at the time, that he knew how the legend of the Holy Grail came about. He was working on it, he said, and hoped that he’d finish the project before too lond. Well, the project is done, and the book is published by Yale University Press. Here is the blurb:

Some fifty years before Chretien de Troyes wrote what is probably the first and certainly the most influential story of the Holy Grail, images of the Virgin Mary with a simple but radiant bowl (called a "grail" in local dialect) appeared in churches in the Spanish Pyrenees. In this fascinating book, Joseph Goering explores the links between these sacred images and the origins of one of the West’s most enduring legends.
 

While tracing the early history of the grail, Goering looks back to the Pyrennean religious paintings and argues that they were the original inspiration of the grail legend. He explains how storytellers in northern France could have learned of these paintings and how the enigmatic "grail" in the hands of the Virgin came to form the centrepiece of a story about a knight in King Arthur’s court. Part of the allure of the grail, Goering argues, was that neither Chretien nor his audience knew exactly what it represented or why it was so important. And out of the attempts to answer those questions the literature of the Holy Grail was born.

So if you want something enjoyable to read, by a great historian, you can get the book on Amazon.com.

Opera, the web browser, is now free!

Finally, Opera, the fine web browser, is free and without ads. It sports an RSS-aggregator, and remains among the fastest browsers out there. Very small footprint, and tidy. Firefox still rocks

You can find out more about it here.

Don't let this happen to you!

Lay those bricks, Jörgen!What happens when you’re a serious student of Aquinas — and of all Catholic theology, for that matter — and you’ve got waaaaayyyyyyyyyyy too many books? You have to build an addition to your house…with your own hands!

Thanks, Jörgen Vijgen, for making my day.

Okus: a program for for studying ancient Greek texts

Okus 1.2: a Greek reading programWow.

I recently learned of this program, made by Projects 225. It’s called Okus, and it is

a new computer application, Okus, which is available for studying ancient Greek texts. Okus incorporates new methods for reading ancient Greek, including color-coordination of words based on tense or case, fast point-click morphology parsing, and dictionary-entry browsing.

I downloaded the program, and found out that it has the ability to show Greek texts of classical works, in a color-highlighted way. You click on a particular Greek word in the text (say, from Aristotle), and a panel on the right of the screen gives you the definition of the work, and the declention or conjugation of the term as it is found in the text. The program currently contains many works of Aristotle (not all, alas, but it has the Metaphysics, the Nicomachean Ethics, the Poetics, Politics, and Rhetoric), and a ton of the dialogues of Plato. It contains Homer (the Iliad and the Odyssey) and Hesiod. Importantly for the Thomist, it contains the Greek New Testament and the Septuagint. This is a perfect tool for someone whose Greek is terrible (like me!).

A demonstration version of this program is available for download at http://www.p225.com. At this time Okus is only available on Microsoft Windows (XP and 2000).

Maimonides's Guide for the Perplexed on-line

I was reading this morning through a number of articles on Wikipedia, one of my favorite on-line resources for general knowledge. In response to a student’s query I started on an article on “kabbalah” and ended up (two hours later!) reading through a very useful article on Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed. It contained a link to a 1904 publication that used the 1881 English translation of M. Friedlander. You can simply download the work in PDF format by clicking here. A nice resource to have.

When God starts creating 36-hour days, I fully intend to sit down and read through the whole Guide. Right after I read all of Aristotle, Augustine, Dionysius, Ambrose, Pope St Gregory…….

Position in Thomistic moral theology at Providence Colllege, RI

The Department of Theology, Providence College (Providence, RI [Rhode Island, USA]), is now advertising a position at the Assistant Professor (tenure track) level, to commence in the fall, 2006. Here is the description:

Doctoral degree with a concentration in moral theology is required.  Successful candidate must be competent in Thomistic moral theology.  Teaching duties include an interdisciplinary Development of Western Civilization Program.  Submit cv, graduate transcripts, three letters of recommendation and a written response to the College Mission statement (available from our website) by November 30, 2005.  Send materials to: Moral Theology Search Committee, Department of Theology, Providence College, Providence, RI 02918.  Materials received after this date will be reviewed at the Committee’s discretion.  Providence College is a Roman Catholic four-year liberal arts institution conducted under the auspices of the Dominican Friars.  The College encourages applications from women and persons of color. AA/EOE

The ad mentions a mission statement but doesn’t tell you precisely where to find it (). I think that I found it here. This is a wonderful place, with wonderful, decent people. If you’re in the market for a position of this sort, don’t hesitate to contact them.

Correction: Leonard Boyle, OP, lecture IS published in English

Ugh. I hate being wrong.

A while back, in the first newsletter, I said that:

All the articles in the neat little collection of Leonard Boyle’s articles on Aquinas (Facing History: A Different Thomas Aquinas [Louvain-la-Neuve: FIDEM, 2000]) are in English…save one. The last article is in French, “Saint Thomas d’Aquin et le troisième millenaire,” (pp. 141-159). This is all a tad odd, since the original talk upon which this text was based was given in English in Chicago in 1999. You can, however, see a transcription of the talk in English, and indeed listen to the talk (in RealAudio or QuickTime format) by clicking here.

Thanks to Michael Sherwin, OP, we now know of a full publication of the talk. He explains:

You probably already know about this, but a published version of the talk in English exists.  Leonard gave the talk again as one of the Aquinas Lectures at Maynooth.  McEvoy published a collection of these talks.  Here is the reference: Leonard Boyle, "St. Thomas Aquinas and the third millennium" in Thomas Aquinas: Approaches to Truth: the Aquinas Lectures at Maynooth, 1996-2001, edited by James McEvoy and Michael Dunne (Four Courts Press, 2002), 38-52.

My bad, Fr. Michael; I didn’t know about the talk!. It really is a wonderful talk. And if you read carefully, you’ll even see some Dominicans disagreeing with each other about some important matters in the Order’s history (Hint: The papal bull, Cum qui recipit prophetam).

Update on 2005-09-30 16:25 by Mark Johnson

I’m wrong twice! James Ginther points out:

Boyle’s talk was also printed in the last festschrift (Omnia Disce, ed. A. Duggan, J. Greatrex, and B. Bolton; Ashgate, 2005).

You can read his full comment in the comments on this news item.

Aquinas on Scripture: a new book from T&T Clark

Aquinas on Scripture: A Critical Introduction to his CommentariesThe folks at T & T Clark have come out with another useful book on Aquinas, this time one devoted to his reading and commenting on sacred scripture. The book is entitled Aquinas on Scripture: A Critical Introduction to his Commentaries. Here’s the blurb:

This book evaluates all the biblical commentaries of St Thomas Aquinas for the modern age with each commentary examined by an expert, specialist scholar in that field. Each chapter focuses on the two or three major themes of its particular commentary and also relates the themes of the commentaries to Aquinas’ Summa Contra Gentiles and especially to his Summa Theologica.

The purpose of this volume is not only to evaluate Aquinas’ commentaries, but also, in so doing, to demonstrate that Aquinas is primarily a biblical theologian, a consideration that has come more and more to the fore in recent studies. No other book systematically addresses this important issue for Aquinas, biblical studies and theology.

Here’s the line-up of articles in the book, their authors, and affiliations:

• Introductory Essay, by Nicholas M. Healy, St John’s University, New York, USA
• Job, by John Yocum, Loyola School of Theology, Ateneo University, Manila
• Isaiah, by Joseph Wawrykow, University of Notre Dame, USA
• Matthew, by Jeremy Holmes, doctoral student at Marquette University
• John, by Matthew Levering, Ave Marie University, Naples, Florida
• Romans/Galatians, Steven Boguslawski, Sacred Heart Major Seminary, USA
• 1&2 Corinthians, by Daniel Keating, Sacred Heart Major Seminary, USA
• Ephesians/Colossians, by Mark Edwards, Christ Church College, Oxford University, UK
• Philippians, 1&T Thessalonians, Philemon, by Francesca Murphy, University of Aberdeen, Scotland
• 1&2 Timothy, Titus, by John Saward, Greyfriars, Oxford and International Theological Institute,
  Gaming, Austria
• Hebrews, by T. Weinandy, Greyfriars, Oxford and the United States Conference of
  Catholic Bishops, Washington, D.C.
• Index

The hardback copy of the book is absurdly priced at $105.00 USD, making the paperback appear reasonable at $29.95.