The End of Neothomism?

The German publisher nova & vetera (Bonn) has published a fascinating book on how by the end of the 1970 Thomism at the faculty of philosophy of the university of Fribourg (Switzerland) came to an end. Here is the table of contents in Pdf.

Das Ende des Neuthomismus. Die 68er, das Konzil und die Dominikaner, written by Eduard Habsburg-Lothringen, comprises three parts. Part 1 applies Thomas Kuhn’s idea of scientific revolution to the movement of Neothomism in general. Part 2 traces the reactions of the Order of Preachers to the Church’s documents on the doctrine of St. Thomas from Leo XIII to John Paul II. Finally part 3 chronicles in detail the history of the faculty of philosophy from the illustrious Gallus Manser (1866-1950) to the tireless but unsuccesfull efforts by the Flemish Dominican Norbertus Luyten (1909-1986) to maintain the chairs, traditionally conferred to the Dominicans. It discloses for the first time important archival material from the correspondence between Fribourg and the Dominican Roman curia. Father Luyten concluded: “C’est vraiment la fin d’une époque”.

10th volume Opera Omnia Cornelio Fabro

The 10th volume of the Collected Works of the Italian Thomist Cornelio Fabro(1911-1995) has been published. For more information on the Opera Omnia of Cornelio Fabro, see our March 2005 Newsletter.

The following comes from the introduction by the author:

“Il libro Dio. Introduzione al problema teologico, cerca di rispondere al «“problema essenziale dell’uomo essenziale”, dal quale ogni altro problema dell’esistenza prende chiarezza (l’etica, il diritto, l’economia…)», cioè il problema di Dio. «L’intelletto umano che tende naturalmente alla verità come al suo bene proprio, è spinto presto o tardi a porsi il problema di Dio, a cercare quindi la dimostrazione della sua esistenza: perché il significato e valore ultimo di ogni verità viene da Dio ed ha in Dio il suo ultimo fondamento, come verità per essenza da cui s’irradia ogni verità creata ch’è verità soltanto per partecipazione». «L’esistenza di Dio è il problema dei problemi: esso costituisce la conclusione di tutta la filosofia e della conoscenza umana sia ordinaria come scientifica, perché da esso dipende l’orientamento definitivo che l’uomo deve dare alla sua condotta e alla sua vita intera”.

Steve Brock rocks!

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.

Michael Sherwin, OP, and some theses at Fribourg

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:

• TITUS, Criag Stephen (2002): Resilience and Christian Virtues: What the Psychosocial Sciences Offer for the Renewal of Thomas Aquinas' Moral Theology of Fortitude and Its Related Virtues (download PDF).
• THERRIEN, Michel (2007): Law, Liberty and Virtue: A Thomistic Defense for the Pedagogical Character of Law (download PDF).

While we're on it, Fr Sherwin himself has an informative website on the University's webspace. They're keeping busy.

The ACPA in Milwaukee

The ACPA (website: American Catholic Philosophical Association) is holding its annual conference here in Milwaukee this fall, from November 9-11, on the theme: Freedom, Will, and Nature. Here is the program for the conference, in DOC and PDF format.

A Festschrift for Fr Horst

Fr Ulrich Horst, OP, has a Festschrift in his honor appearing in Germany. Kirchenbild und Spiritualität: Dominikanische Beiträge zur Ekklesiologie und zum kirchlichen Leben im Mittelalter. Festschrift für Ulrich Horst OP zum 75. Geburtstag, is edited by Thomas Prügl of the University of Notre Dame and Marianne Schlosser. We have a Table of Contents in PDF form (articles by Prügl, Wawrykow, Senner, Bataillon, O’Meara, and many others), and here’s the blurb for the book from the publisher’s website:

Der langjährige Leiter des Münchener Grabmann-Institutes zur Erforschung der mittelalterlichen Theologie und Philosophie, Prof. em. Dr. Ulrich Horst O.P., ist vor allem durch seine Forschungen zur Kirchen- und Papsttheorie in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit, sowie durch seine Studien über Thomas von Aquin und Theologen aus dem Dominikanerorden in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit bekannt. Als akademischer Lehrer betreute er Dissertationen und Habilitationen aus dem Bereich der mittelalterlichen Theologiegeschichte, mit Schwerpunkten auf der Ekklesiologie, Thomas von Aquin und der Theologie des Ordenslebens. In der vorliegenden Festschrift ehren ihn Kollegen und Schüler mit Beiträgen aus eben diesen Gebieten, wobei der Schwerpunkt auf dem Wirken und der Bedeutung des Dominikanerordens für das mittelalterliche Kirchenbild liegt. Der Band, der insgesamt 22 Beiträge umfasst, ist in fünf Abschnitte unterteilt. Im ersten Teil finden sich Beiträge zu theologischen und ekklesiologischen Themen bei Thomas von Aquin und Albertus Magnus. Der zweite Teil beleuchtet die Rolle der Mendikanten in den ekklesiologischen Auseinandersetzungen des 13. und 14. Jahrhundert, vor allem im Zusammenhang mit dem Bettelordenstreit, aber auch im Hinblick auf den kontroverstheologischen Dialog mit der Ostkirche. Ein weiterer Ab-schnitt widmet sich Aspekten der mendikantischen, vor allem der dominikanischen Ordenstheologie. Teil IV greift Themen aus dem Bereich Kirchenreform und Konzilien im Spätmittelalter auf, und ein abschließender Teil schlägt die Brücke in die Neuzeit. Der Band wird ergänzt durch eine Einführung zu Leben und Forschungen, sowie durch ein Schriftenverzeichnis des Jubilars.

A Surprise for John Deely

John Deely of the University of St. Thomas in Houston got a smile recently when he found out that, in the front window of a Borders Bookstore in Singapore, his new book, Intentionality and Semiotics: A Story of Mutual Fecundation, was prominently placed alongside those of Alan Greenspan and Al Gore!

Says John Deely: “How great bookstores display books.”

The Nachlass of Angelus Walz, OP

Angelus Walz, OP (1893-1978), was for years a prolific professor of church history at the Angelicum in Rome, and contributed to the cause of Thomas-scholarship in many ways, notably by his biography of Aquinas (especially in its French translation, known simply as Walz-Novarina).

This past week I received an e-mail from a Martin Walter in Germany, who told me that he had found (about five years ago) some interesting pictures in the “Nachlass” of Fr Walz in the Dominican convent in Augsburg. These pictures had been evidently taken by a photographer named Anderson, who had a shop in Rome, in the 1920’s. The pictures were of triumphalistic paintings of St. Thomas, and Fr Walz had obtained copies with the option of having them used in the ground-breaking Xenia Thomistica, a 3-volume publication in 1925 commemorating the 600^th anniversary of Thomas’s birth, loaded with articles by key players in early 20^th-century Thomism (Maritain, Lottin, Garrigou-Lagrange, Merkelbach, Prümmer, Mandonnet, Walz, Grabmann, Pelster, Roland-Gosselin, Chenu [in Latin!]). Of the pictures in Fr Walz’s Nachlass, only one made it into Xenia Thomistica, the one by the painter Francisco de Zurbarán, which you can see in the frontispiece of the third volume.

Martin Walter scanned the three pictures he found, and kindly sent them to me for presentation here. They are found below.

Francisco de Zurbarán’s “Apotheosis of St. Thomas” (1661): this is the picture found in volume 3 of Xenia Thomistica (Seville).

Ludwig Seitz’s “St. Thomas Offers His Works to the Church,” commissioned by Pope Leo XIII (Vatican Museum).

“Heretics Vanquished by the Works of St. Thomas,” also by Ludwig Seitz, and commissioned by Leo XIII (Vatican Museum).

Thank you, Martin Walter!

Turning off references for a while

I've had to turn-off the ability for visitors to create references to articles on the web site because in the last two days fully thirty-five spam references have been created, pointing to web sites whose content would make one's skin crawl. We'll see whether an extended period of down-time will calm the storm, and allow me to open things up again.

International Congress of Medieval Philosophy in Palermo, 2007

Thanks to Jörgen Vijgen for this:

Universality of Reason — Plurality of Philosophies in the Middle Ages
XIIth International Congress of Medieval Philosophy
Palermo, 16-22 September 2007

Organised by Société Internationale pour l’Étude de la Philosophie Médiévale (http://www.siepm.uni-freiburg.de).

4 special sessions devoted to Aquinas, coordinated by A. Oliva OP, papers dealing explicitly with Thomas Aquinas

• Eleonore Stump: Aquinas on Divine Simplicity and the Knowledge of Persons
• Alfredo Storck: La justice des juristes et celle des philosophes selon Thomas d’Aquin
• Anto Gavric: Les disciples dominicains italiens de Thomas d’Aquin
• Andrea Di Maio: “Ragioni dimostrative e probabili” o “potenza della testimonianza e dei miracoli”: due approcci dialogali ai non cristiani in Domenico e Tommaso d’Aquino e in Francesco, Antonio e Bonaventura
• Gabriela Kurylewicz: In Search of the Unity of Contemplative and Active Life - Thomas Aquinas’ Theory of Music
• Jozef Matula: Thomas Aquinas and his Reading of Isaac ben Solomon Israeli
• Antonio Pérez-Estévez: Tomás de Aquino y la razón femenina
• Patricia Moya Cańas: La representación en Tomás de Aquino
• Ignacio A. Silva: Indeterminismo en la naturaleza y acción divina en De potentia Dei de Tomás de Aquino
• Celina Ana Lértora Mendoza: Tres versiones del concordismo medieval: Averroes, Maimónides y Tomás de Aquino
• Peter Hoffmann: The Epistemological Status of Thomas Aquinas’ Concept of Philosophy
• Yoshihisa Yamamoto: Thomas Aquinas on Love as Radical Passivity: Reason and Emotion in Human Actions
• Jorge J.E. Gracia: Individuality and the Principle of Individuation in Thomas Aquinas
• David B. Twetten: Aquinas’ Definition of ‘God’ as a Foundation for a Pluralistic Natural Theology
• Graziano Perillo: «…nam per voces significatur aliquid proprie, et aliquid figurative…» (Tommaso d’Aquino, Summa theologiae, I, 1, 10, ad 3). La metafora tra significato e interpretazione. La prospettiva di Tommaso d’Aquino
• Luca Tuninetti: Veritŕ della proposizione e veritŕ dell’intelletto in Tommaso d’Aquino
• Alexander Fidora: Concepts of Philosophical Rationality in Inter-Religious Dialogues: Crispin, Abaelard, Aquinas, Llull
• Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, The Epistemological Role of Practical Philosophy: Abelard, Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham
• Barbara Faes: Violenza, raptus, estasi nella riflessione teologica di Rolando Cremona e di Tommaso d’Aquino
• Adriano Oliva: Typologie, interprétation et datation des marginalia au Commentaire des Sentences de Thomas d’Aquin
• Iacopo Costa: La réception de la qu. VI De malo de Thomas d’Aquin ŕ la fin du XIIIe sičcle
• Rosa Errico: Ragione umana e veritŕ. Il problema ontologico del senso dell’essere in Edith Stein interprete di Tommaso d’Aquino
• Harm Goris: Thomas Aquinas on the Historical Development of Philosophy
• Yoshihisa Yamamoto: Thomas Aquinas on Love as Radical Passivity: Reason and Emotion in Human Actions
• Luciano Cova: Per mortem a mundo excludi. Persecuzione e soppressione fisica degli eretici in Tommaso d’Aquino e nella tradizione teologica latina
• Evanghelos Moutsopoulos: La restitution des textes aristoteliciens chez Thomas d’Aquin par D. Cydones

Resources for Modern Aristotelians

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:

• “How Simon Trumps Cajetan on Analogy.” In only 3 pages, this shows why the value of Simon’s crucial contribution to analogy does NOT depend on the Cajetanian framework he employed. Click on “Contributions to Modern Aristotelian Philosophy.”
• “Maritain and Marin-Sola on Predestination: A Reply to Michael Torre.” This replies to a Nova et Vetera article by Michael. Click on “Contributions to Modern Aristotelian Philosophy.”
• “A Theory of the Incarnation and Subsistence.” This puts Maritain’s contribution to the problem of subsistence on a firmer footing and offers a solution to the problem of how a substance causes its necessary accidents. Click on “Theological Contributions.”

Soon to come:

• “How Sensory Intentionality is Caused (and Related Matters)”. Offers a solution to the problem (Garrigou-Lagrange, Maritain and Simon’s), that sensory intentionality seems to require a special dependence on God. Also makes de-mystifying contributions on how the agent intellect works.

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.

How to help out John of St. Thomas

This just in, from John Deely of University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas:

As most, perhaps all, of you know, Jacques Maritain considered John of St Thomas — John Poinsot — to be, after only St Thomas himself, his prinicpal teacher in philosophy, and the last "commentator of genius" in the Latin line of Thomistic development. The best edition of the Cursus Philosophicus that John of St Thomas published between 1631 and 1635 was brought out in three volumes in the 1930s under the editorship of B. Reiser, an edition both long out of print and one published before the realization of the importance of publishing scholarly editions on acid-free paper.

Hildesheim Publishing (of Georg Olms) is planning for a Winter 2007/2008 re-issue of this important work provided that they receive enough subscriptions to go forward, a minimum of ten — nine, now that the University of St Thomas, Houston, library has entered a subscription.

The purpose of this e-mail is to ask each of you to have your university library enter a subscription of the work, so that the reprinting will be assured. Of course, private individuals can also enter a subscription. For either an institutional or an individual subscription to this reprint of the Cursus Philosophicus, simply e-mail

Bruno Vogel <customerservice@olms.de>

with full contact information, specifying that

"This is a subscription to the reprinting of Poinsot's Cursus Philosophicus."

While that short message would suffice, I also add the full information concerning this matter should your librarian require it in order to subscribe.

*************************************
Johannes Poinsot, Cursus philosophicus Thomisticus. Nova editio a P. Beato Reiser O.S.B. (1929), Reimpressio revisa. 3 Bände. Reprint: Hildesheim. Mit einem Vorwort und einer Bibliographie von Martin Walter. LXIV/2348 Seiten, Leinen

being handled by:

Bruno Vogel
Kundenbetreuung / Customer Services
Tel: + (49) 05121 1501-17

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