Fordham publishes Dewan’s collected essays on Aquinas’s ethics

Wisdom, Law, and VirtueLawrence Dewan’s important collection of essays on Aquinas’s metaphysics is now matched by one on ethics. Fordham University Press has published Wisdom, Law and Virtue: Essays in Thomistic Ethics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), which contains an astounding number—twenty-seven!—of his writings on Thomas’s ethics.

The kind people at Fordham University Press have also made a discount available to you that defrays the cost of what is a big (600 pp.), and therefore costly, book. If you wish to buy it, go to the webpage for the book on Fordham’s site, place it in your shopping cart, and then, at check-out, enter the promo code DEW08, which will apply a 20% discount, taking it from its original $85.00 down to $68.00, plus shipping and handling. A nice gesture.

Here is the book’s table-of-contents:

Universal Considerations

Chapter 1. Wisdom and Human Life: The Natural and the Supernatural

Chapter 2. Wisdom as Foundational Ethical Theory in St. Thomas Aquinas

Chapter 3. St. Thomas, Metaphysics, and Human Dignity

Chapter 4. Truth and Happiness

Chapter 5. Antimodern, Ultramodern, Postmodern: A Plea for the Perennial

Chapter 6. Is Thomas Aquinas a Spiritual Hedonist?

Chapter 7. Is Liberty the Criterion in Morals?

The Will and Its Act

Chapter 8. The Real Distinction between Intellect and Will

Chapter 9. St. Thomas, James Keenan, and the Will

Chapter 10. St. Thomas and the Causes of Free Choice

Chapter 11. St. Thomas and the First Cause of Moral Evil

Natural Law

Chapter 12. St. Thomas, Our Natural Lights, and the Moral Order

Chapter 13. Jacques Maritain and the Philosophy of Cooperation

Chapter 14. Natural Law and the First Act of Freedom: Maritain Revisited

Chapter 15. Jean Porter on Natural Law: Thomistic Notes

Legal Justice

Chapter 16. St. Thomas, the Common Good, and the Love of Persons

Chapter 17. St. Thomas, John Finnis, and the Political Good

Chapter 18. Thomas Aquinas, Gerard Bradley, and the Death Penalty

Chapter 19. Death in the Setting of Divine Wisdom: The Doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas

Chapter 20. Suicide as a Belligerent Tactic: Thomistic Reflections

Various Virtues

Chapter 21. Jacques Maritain, St. Thomas, and the Philosophy of Religion

Chapter 22. Philosophy and Spirituality: Cultivating a Virtue

Chapter 23. St. Thomas and the Ontology of Prayer

Chapter 24. St. Thomas, Lying, and Venial Sin

Chapter 25. Communion with the Tradition: For the Believer Who Is a Philosopher

Methodological Postscript

Chapter 26. ”Obiectum”: Notes on the Invention of a Word

Chapter 27. St. Thomas and Moral Taxonomy

A blog for Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute

The Medieval Institute at Notre Dame has just set up a blog. Here is the announcement from Roberta Baranowski:

Dear Medievalists,

During this past year, our University of Notre Dame Medieval Institute graduate students have been particularly active in encouraging a sense of community among our medievalist community on campus by sponsoring coffee and social hours, a field trip to the Newberry library for students, and other activities.

In the same spirit, I am initiating an Internet blog for current and past students, faculty, and visitors to the Medieval Institute. My recent pilgrimage to Kalamazoo reminded me that one of the real pleasures of academic life is the opportunity to meet and re-meet interesting colleagues and maintain relationships with individuals who actually get excited about most things medieval.

I hope you will take advantage of the opportunity to share your own thoughts and comments with others who have journeyed through our reading room. Your participation in our on-line community is most welcome and I encourage you to share the following link with other colleagues who may want to keep in touch with our company of scholars.

http://ndmedinst.blogspot.com

I confess to knowing almost nothing about the mechanics of blogging, so I've gone the way of using a template that put me in business in under 5 minutes. Refinements, suggestions, and of course, postings, are very welcome.

Cordially,

Roberta Baranowski
Assistant Director, Medieval Institute
University of Notre Dame

Teleological Grammar by Steven Long

Heu! Oh, well. Better late than never.
Teleological Grammar

Last fall the kind people at Ave Maria University sent me a copy of Steven Long’s impressive book, The Teleological Grammar of the Moral Act, which seeks to explain and defend Aquinas’s complex yet crucial doctrine of the moral act (a doctrine at the heart of topics such as sexual morality, medical ethics, etc.). The doctrine of double-effect is unintelligible without it.

The book was immediately a topic of much conversation, with a session at this year’s Kalamazoo being devoted to it, and a recent issue of Ave Maria’s journal, Nova et vetera (English edition)—more on this up-and-coming (if not already-arrived) journal in a future post—being built around the topics found in the book. Here is its blurb, found on the web page where you can order it:

Cutting through contemporary confusions with his characteristic rigor and aplomb, Steven A. Long offers the most penetrating study available of St. Thomas Aquinas’s doctrine of the intention, choice, object, end, and species of the moral act. Many studies of human action and morality after Descartes and Kant have suffered from a tendency to split body and soul, so that the intention of the human spirit comes to justify whatever the body is made to do. The portrait of human action and morality that arises from such accounts is one of the soul as the pilot and the body as raw material in need of humanization. In this masterful study, Steven Long reconnects the teleology of the soul with the teleology of the body, so that human goal-oriented action rediscovers its lost moral unity, given it by the Creator who has created the human person as a body-soul unity.

PIMS posts Gilson Lecture PDFs

The publications department at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto (PIMS) has placed some PDF versions of the annual Etienne Gilson Lecture onto their site for free downloading. Every year the Institute invites a senior medievalist to deliver the lecture—this spring's lecture was by M. Michèle Mulchahey—and thereafter publishes the lecture in a small booklet. Leonard Boyle's epic The Setting of the Summa theologiae of Saint Thomas (link), published many times, first saw light as this lecture, as did Mark Jordan's The Alleged Aristotelianism of Thomas Aquinas (link). The Institute provides a separate page devoted to it, which includes the detailed on the following past lectures, and links to the PDF versions of their lectures. Here is a sampling:

• 2000: Marcia L. Colish. Remapping Scholasticism. Etienne Gilson Series 21. 2000; 21 pages. ISBN 0–88844–721–3. Available in a PDF version.
• 2002: Francis Oakley. Omnipotence and Promise: The Legacy of the Scholastic Distinction of Powers. Etienne Gilson Series 23. 2002; 28 pages. ISBN 0–88844–723–X. Available in a PDF version.
• 2004: Karl F. Morrison. The Male Gaze and Other Reasons for the Hypothetical End of Christian Art in the West. Etienne Gilson Series 26. 2005. 36 pages. ISBN 0–88844–726–4. Available in a PDF version.
• Related Lecture (NOTE: not a Gilson Lecture, but a fine one, indeed): Anthony J. Celano. From Priam to the Good Thief. The Significance of a Single Event in Greek Ethics and Medieval Moral Teaching. EGS 22 / Studies in Medieval Moral Teaching 2. 2001. 24pp. ISBN 0–88844–722–1. Available in a PDF version.

Of related interest is this: PIMS has republished nine of these lectures in a single volume as part of its Spring 2008 catalog of publications. This volume includes the lectures of the well-known Thomists, Leonard Boyle, Edward Synan, James Weisheipl, Mark Jordan, and James P. Reilly.

Another follow-up on Mieczysław Albert Krąpiec, OP

Thanks now to Weronika Hansen for her update:

From KUL website:

Born 25 May 1921 in Berezowica Mała in Podole. Fell asleep in the Lord while correcting the article "Christianity" 8 May 2008 in Lublin.

The coffin with the body of Fr Krąpiec will be laid in the basilica of the Dominican fathers on Thursday, 15 May at 3 pm, when the Chaplet of the Divine Mercy will be recited. A book of condolence will be set out at the same time.

The funeral ceremonies will take place 16 May 2007, beginning with a Funeral Mass at 10 am in the Basilica of the Dominican Fathers (ul. Złota 9).

We will then process solemnly to the University Church, where the Final Commendation will be made.

The body of Fr Krąpiec will be buried in the cemetery on ul. Lipowa.

(link)

[an extract, excuse the limping English, done in a hurry]

Hardly "limping English"! Thanks, Weronika.

An obituary in German on the death of Mieczysław Albert Krąpiec

Thanks to Rauhut Robert for sending along the following, regarding the death of Mieczysław Albert Krąpiec, OP:

For all those interested in Father Krapiec I refer to the obituary I wrote in German and which was published this week in the Germany daily "Die Tagespost" (link). One year ago I visited Father Krapiec and did one of the last interviews with him. The Portrait which I did out of this material is also available online (link).

Viele Grüße

Mieczysław Albert Krąpiec, OP: RIP

This just in, from Fr Lawrence Dewan, OP, who heard the news from Anna Zhyrkova at Kalamazoo: Fr Mieczysław Albert Krąpiec, OP, long-time leader of the Lublin School of Thomism—associated in the public mind most especially with Karol Wojtyla (the late pope, John Paul II)—has died. I’ll try to get more particular information as I’m able, and would be grateful for information from anybody.

Journée d'étude (May 15 2008): L’Institut de Recherche et d'Histoire des Textes

Thanks to Adriano Oliva, OP, for this information about an upcoming event in Paris. While it might be difficult for people in the USA to attend, Adriano provided the program of the event, so we can see what's going on these days in Paris, at the Institut de Recherche et d'Histoire des Textes:

Journée d'étude, jeudi 15 mai 2008
Les innovations du vocabulaire latin à la fin du moyen âge :
autour du Glossaire du latin philosophique (philosophie, théologie, sciences)

Le Glossaire du latin philosophique, un fichier d'environ 230.000 fiches consacré au vocabulaire philosophique du moyen âge, se trouve désormais à l'Institut de Recherche et d'Histoire des Textes, où il est consultable à la Section latine.

A l'occasion de l'arrivée du Glossaire du latin philosophique à l'Institut de Recherche et d'Histoire des Textes et pour marquer un nouveau départ, nous organisons une journée d'étude consacrée à ce fichier, le jeudi 15 mai 2008, à l'IRHT, 40 avenue d'Iéna, 75016 Paris.

Programme:

9.00-9.30 Accueil des participants
9.30 introduction par Louis Holtz
9.40-10.20 Jacqueline Hamesse, Le « Glossaire du latin philosophique médiéval » : histoire, buts et utilization
10.20-11.00 Anne Grondeux, Parler de grammaire en philosophie : l'enrichissement du vocabulaire médiolatin de la pensée grammatical

pause

11.10-11.50 Alfonso Maierù, Sur la « suppositio vaga » au XIII^e siècle
11.50-12.30 Charles Burnett, The Enrichment of Latin philosophical vocabulary through translations from Arabic

déjeuner

14.00-14.40 Ruedi Imbach, Experiri et experiential chez Albert le Grand et Thomas d'Aquin
14.40-15.20 Monica Calma, La "rhetorica viatoris » dans les commentaires des Sentences au XIV^e siècle
15.20-16.00 Ana Gómez Rabal, Exemples de termes philosophiques dans les glossaires médiévaux et leur survivance/ oubli chez un humaniste, Michel Servet

16.15-17.30 Table ronde : discussion générale sur l'avenir du Glossaire et une éventuelle version informatisée, avec la participation de Bruno Bon, Dragos Calma, Monica Calma, Anita Guerreau, Caroline Heid, Louis Holtz, Adriano Oliva, Jacqueline Hamesse, Jean-Pierre Rothschild, Mariken Teeuwen, Olga Weijers.

Inscriptions et renseignements : aoliva@nerim.net, olgaweijers@hotmail.com

Follow-up on Fr Pinckaers

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).

Servais Pinckaers, OP: RIP

Some terribly sad news, from Michael Sherwin, OP:

Dear Colleagues,
I just received the following note from Fr. Benoît-Dominique de La Soujeole, prior of the Albertinum:

"Fr. Pinckaers left us this evening at 2 AM to go receive the recompense of faithful servants. We were able to keep vigil at his side without interruption beginning Sunday afternoon, when his situation became grave."

Fr. de La Soujeole had taken him to the Cantonal Hospital on the Friday before Holy Week, because Fr. Pinckaers was looking more tired than usual. On Tuesday of Holy Week, he suffered an intestinal hematoma (internal bleeding). On Easter Sunday he suffered a heart attack, and had another one on Saturday, April 4^th. Throughout it all, Fr. Pinckaers maintained his good humor and a spirit of confidence in the Lord.

This is a sad day for us, but a happy day for Servais.

Pax,
P. Michael Sherwin, o.p

Pinckaers has left behind prodigious output, and a useful collection of his articles is available in English, from CUA Press.

An undergraduate book on perennial philosophy

John W. Carlson (Creighton University) has published a book for undergraduates on perennial philosophy (PDF). Here is CUA's blurb:

The Catholic University of America Press is pleased to announce publication of Understanding Our Being: Introduction to Speculative Philosophy in the Perennial Tradition by John W. Carlson.

In the encyclical Fides et ratio, Pope John Paul II called upon teachers of philosophy "to recover, in the flow of an enduringly valid philosophical tradition, the range of authentic wisdom and truth." Understanding Our Being responds to this call with a much-needed introduction to speculative philosophy.

Written as an undergraduate textbook, Understanding Our Being treats central topics about our knowledge of being, the being of the natural world, and, via the latter, being as such. It then treats the special character and implications of our human, personal being—in particular, our intellect, free choice, and reason-conditioned sociality. Finally, it considers God as Source and End of being and it discusses the "problem of evil" and the nature of religious faith.

In addition to presenting essential elements of the "perennial" philosophy, as developed in the tradition of Thomas Aquinas (especially as interpreted by Jacques Maritain and others), this book discusses contemporary challenges to the critical realist approach. These include scientism, historicism, and nihilism, as well as religious fideism. The author also encourages students to think for themselves, and he offers them resources to do so, via questions for reflection at the end of each part, a comprehensive bibliography, and a glossary of key philosophical terms.

More about the book can be found on the CUA website (link), or on Carlson's website.

Quid Analytical Thomism?

Been wanting to know more about "Analytical Thomism"? The people at Ashgate Publishing have put out a book on the subject (link), and have provided PDF files of the book's Introduction and Table of Contents. With authors such as Hilary Putnam, Anthony J. Lisska, John C. Cahalan, Stephen L. Brock, and, of course, John Haldane (plus many more), it's bound to be about as effective an overview as one can get.