Follow-ups to Thomistic Commentators on-line

The post on “Thomistic Commentators online” drew some cheerful, immediate response. First, Fr Nicholas Austin, SJ, sent the following:

Following your post on the Thomistic commentators online, you and your readers may be interested to know that most of the Leonine edition of St Thomas’ Opera Omnia is online.  All of the Summa Theologiae volumes except one are present, together, of course, with Cardinal Cajetan’s famous commentary.  Some of the other volumes are also there.

To access the volumes, simply go to the following website http://www.archive.org/ and type into the search engine the words “opera omnia iussu leonis”.

Thanks, Father, for this helpful contribution; not having online access to Cajetan’s commentary would have been a loss, indeed.

Second, Meg Keller of Alexander Street Press (the people I mentioned in that early post), wrote me with a special offers for visitors to Thomistica.net:

Many thanks for the mention of Alexander Street’s theology resources. We’re happy to offer your readers free access to all three online theology collections through the month of August at the following URLs (see username and password below): 

• Digital Library of the Catholic Reformation: http://dlcr.alexanderstreet.com
• Digital Library of Classic Protestant Texts: http://tcpt.alexanderstreet.com
• Digital Karl Barth Library: http://bart.alexanderstreet.com 

USERNAME: thomistica

PASSWORD: alexanderstreet

Inquires from libraries regarding pricing or trial access should go to: sales@alexanderstreet.com.

It’s great to have such an informed and responsive readership!

Thomistic commentators online

Huh? How did I not know about this?!? There’s an publishing house called the Alexander Street Press that has a website devoted to literature from the Catholic Reformation, on which you can find the works of classic Thomistic commentators such as Thomas de vio Cajetan, Domingo Báñez, Menchior Cano, Domingo de Soto and Francisco de Vitoria. The main page for Digital Library of the Catholic Reformation is publicly accessible, but further access seems to require some subscription (my access is possible through Marquette University’s subscription).

The site contains the Opuscula omnia of Cajetan, including his De nominum analogia, De conceptu entis and his commentary on Thomas’s De ente et essentia. Alas, it does not contain Cajetan’s commentary on the Summa theologiae. On the other hand, Báñez’s Scholastica commentaria for the Prima pars as well as the Secunda secundae is to be found there, as is Cano’s De locis theologicis, and Soto’s De natura et gratia. De Vitoria’s holdings are simply his Relectiones theologicae, but these contain interesting material on ecclesial politics and power, as well as discussions of war-making in the New World.

In keeping with the Reformation-focus, the Alexander Street Press also has a Digital Library of Classic Protestant Texts, as well as a similar resource on Karl Barth.

Thomistic Scholarship and Plagiarism

Readers may be interested in the article “40 Cases of Plagiarism” appearing in Bulletin de Philosophie Médiévale 51/2009 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), pp. 350-391, compiled by Pernille Harsting, Russell L. Friedman, and me. It presents evidence of plagiarism in a number of publications under the name of Martin W. F. Stone on mainly medieval and Renaissance philosophy.

That Martin W. F. Stone succeeded in publishing the words and research results of Fernand van Steenberghen, Ralph McInerny, Carlos Bazán, John Wippel, and Lawrence Feingold (among others) as his own, in academic journals and in books with reputable publishing houses, must surely cause scholars to take note. Arguably, the situation is especially pressing for Thomists; nine of Stone’s plagiarized pieces are currently listed in the Bibliographia Thomistica, and one piece is listed in Thomistica 2006: An International Yearbook of Thomistic Bibliography. The editor of the Bulletin de Philosophie Médiévale, Kent Emery, Jr., highlights the relationship of Stone’s work to Thomistic scholarship in an editorial in the same issue of the Bulletin, observing:

Or how was it possible that the scrivener hugely plagiarized the essay of an eminent Thomist published in a volume bringing together “Thomistic doctrines and modern perspectives,” and then published his workmanship in a volume bringing together “Thomistic and Analytical Traditions,” edited by another eminent Thomist and crammed full of essays by yet other eminent Thomists (see Case 14, pp. 367-68)? One thing is clear: Eminent Thomists do not necessarily read the essays of other eminent Thomists, which, if they had, they might have been able to detect that someone was ripping-off another person’s essay. (p. xii)

Elsewhere, Emery argues forcefully that the situation demands reflection among members of the scholarly community:

That there are those who commit acts of plagiarism is one thing; that such acts can be repeated successfully, without detection, in 40 articles, over a period of at least 11 years, in the pages of the most “prestigious” journals and at the most “prestigious” presses, is quite another thing altogether, which exposes some pathology in the contemporary body academic that cries out for diagnosis (p. 348)

So far, retractions have been issued by:

• Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie médiévales 76:2 (2009), pp. v-vi
• Tijdschrift voor Filosofie72:1 (2010) pp. 3 and 5
• Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 86 (2010)
• Springer
• The Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies

 Discussion and news reports on the issue include here, and here.

Allow me to repeat two requests made in the introduction to “40 Cases of Plagiarism.” First, as the great majority of Stone’s pieces examined in the article have not, at present, been retracted by the editors and publishers of these pieces, we encourage the many authors, editors, and publishers whose legal copyright and intellectual property rights have been infringed, to seek retractions of all the pieces plagiarizing their original work. Secondly, we caution that the evidence published in the Bulletin article is not exhaustive, and urge other readers to supplement our findings.

Michael Dougherty joins the Thomistica.net team

Michael V. Dougherty will begin contributing posts to our website. Currently in the Philosophy Department at Ohio Dominican University (faculty webpage), Dougherty earned his PhD in Philosophy from Marquette University, and is the author of a wide range of articles concerning Thomistic philosophy, and Christian philosophy generally (personal website). In addition (sotto voce) he’ll have a book coming out from Cambridge University Press. Welcome aboard, Michael, and thanks in advance for your efforts.

Michael’s first post will appear today. It concerns the plagiarism scandal surrounding M.W.F. Stone.

James F. Ross (1931-2010)

From the website of Edward Feser comes the news that philosopher, James F. Ross, has died (here, and here). Thomists will know of him for many reasons, one of which would surely be his work on analogy. Ross’s website has links to things that he has written, some of which are available online.

Three happy words: Lawrence. Dewan. iTunes.

Here are three words that made my day: Lawrence. Dewan. iTunes.

The Dominicans are hard at work bringing the recorded contents of their recent conference in Warsaw to iTunes. As of this writing at least three are available. To make sure that I get it all I’ve simply subscribed to the entire podcast feed for the Dominican House of Studies - Priory (Washington, DC, USA). This morning I discovered that the presentation at the conference of my teacher and mentor from PIMS in Toronto, Lawrence Dewan, O.P., has been inserted into the podcast stream. His paper was entitled “Saint Thomas and Philosophia perennis.”

While you’re at the iTunes podcast section don’t forget to subscribe to the equally informative Lectures in Dominican History podcast stream, which contains lectures given by Fr. John Frederick Hinnebusch, O.P.

Dominicans gather in Poland for conference: "Dominicans and the Challenge of Thomism"

As we speak, an international conference is taking place at The Thomistic Institute in Warsaw (Poland), entitled “Dominicans and the Challenge of Thomism.”

On invitation of the Polish Province of the Dominican Order, some 80 Dominican Thomists are gathered there to “discover the depth and diversity of Thomistic inquiry in our Order today, particularly for younger scholars immersed in the thought of St. Thomas.”

Take a look at the website to discover the impressive program but also listen to some of the talks. From what we can gather in reading the program, we cannot but eagerly await the proceedings of what looks like the single most important event in recent years in the ongoing “renaissance of Thomism” (A. Nichols).



Job in moral theology at Marquette

Hop over to my personal site to learn more about a job in moral theology at Marquette University’s Department of Theology (here).

English translation of Aquinas's Sermons

Mark-Robin Hoogland C.P. (1969), Passionist priest and member of the ‘Thomas Instituut’ in Utrecht has just published his English translation of twenty sermons of Thomas Aquinas at The Catholic University of America Press.

The critical edition of these sermons, prepared by the late Father Bataillon, is about to be published in the Editio Leonina.

Download here the PDF from the Catholic University of America Press.

We thank the Fathers Bataillon and Hoogland for this inestimable service to the Thomistic community!

Thomas Instituut (Utrecht, The Netherlands)

Our friends of the ‘Thomas Instituut’ in Utrecht (The Netherlands) launched their new website. Have a look around here.

RIP Leonard Kennedy, CSB, former head of the Center for Thomistic Studies.

Thomas Osborne of the University of St. Thomas in Houston shared with me over the weekend the sad news that Leonard Kennedy, CSB, died at 9:30 a.m., on Thursday, April 1, 2010. Fr Kennedy made many contributions to medieval philosophy, edited some texts (including Aquinas’s short disputed question on the immortality of the soul) and left behind an especially useful Catalog of Thomists. Importantly, he was also the head of the Center for Thomistic Studies at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas.

More news of his passing as it becomes available.

Job opening (moral theology) in Fribourg

In from the esteemed Fr Michael Sherwin, OP (in Fribourg): 

Mark,

I want to give you and your web readers a heads up about a post here in Thomistic moral theology. My colleague, Luc-Thomas Somme is returning to France and thus we are looking for his replacement. Ideally we would like a Dominican, but any qualified Thomist moral theologian who can speak French and English would be seriously considered and very much encouraged to apply.

Fr Sherwin included a PDF with more details.