IN THIS PAPER I WANT TO ADDRESS the metaphysical status of concepts in Thomas Aquinas. The need to do so is raised by contemporary criticism of Aristotelian reflections upon how language “hooks up with the world.” Many contemporary philosophers, following upon the later Wittgenstein think that in the opening passages of the De interpretatione Aristotle provides a very bad “theory” of semantic relations, when he sketches how words are related to things via the mind. It is a (...) bad “theory” inasmuch as it seems to involve “mental representationalism” as a constitutive element. Amidst all their disagreements, it is fair to say that the many authors anthologized in Richard Rorty’s The Linguistic Turn come together in a common disdain for any hint of mental representationalism in philosophical discussions of the semantic of language. This is not the place to rehearse in detail all the difficulties posed for mental representationalism within contemporary philosophy, in particular because they are very familiar. Yet it would be good to characterize briefly what I have in mind. Hilary Putnam, one of the most forceful critics, and with the De interpretatione text explicitly in mind, describes the relationship between meaning and mental representationalism in this way. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.1 (2002) 119-121 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Ethics and Political Philosophy The Common Good in Late Medieval Political Thought Arthur Stephen McGrade, John Kilcullen, and Matthew Kempshall, editors. Ethics and Political Philosophy. Vol. 2 of The Cambridge Translations of Medieval Philosophical Texts. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xii + 664. Cloth, $85.00. Paper, $29.95. M. (...) S. Kempshall. The Common Good in Late Medieval Political Thought. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. x + 401. Cloth, $95.00. With the exception of the thought of Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus, late medieval political and ethical philosophy has been neglected. Two recent books attempt to rectify this neglect. One is the second volume of The Cambridge Translations of Medieval Philosophical Texts. A translator of this volume, Matthew Kempshall, has also recently written a thorough analysis of the common good as it is discussed in late thirteenth-century scholasticism. Many of the texts discussed in this second book are translated by Kempshall in the first book.The new volume of translations now makes it possible for the reader unfamiliar with Latin to have some exposure to the medieval reception of Aristotle's ethical and political thought. The selections are deliberately taken from lesser-known figures who are not often translated, such as Albert the Great, Godfrey of Fontaines, and Augustine of Ancona. The selections are carefully chosen to represent a wide variety of literary genres. For example, the selection from Albert is part of his commentary of Book X of the Nicomachean Ethics, [End Page 119] whereas the selection from Godfrey is a Quodlibetal Question, and that from Augustine of Ancona is part of a treatise. Moreover, there are some selections that show developments within a particular genre. For example, a translation from Buridan's commentary on Book X of the Nicomachean Ethics contrasts nicely with that of Albert. The selection from Albert focuses mostly on pleasure, the relationship between the active and the contemplative lives, and the connection between ethics and politics. His discussion of pleasure is philosophically important in light of twentieth-century discussions about reasons for actions. Moreover, these issues are all discussed in at least one of the other selections. Interestingly, Buridan's commentary on the same Book focuses instead on human freedom. Buridan makes fine distinctions that are relevant to contemporary debates about free will. Selections from Henry of Ghent, Godfrey of Fontaines, and James of Viterbo all address the topic of the relationship between self-love and the virtuous life. These passages are relevant to the question of whether there is egoism in ancient and medieval ethical thought.The volume is a companion to The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy and suffers from one of its weaknesses, which is that the selections can seem arbitrary. For example, the passage from Albert takes up nearly one quarter of the volume. Furthermore, sometimes the representation of an author by only one genre is misleading. For example, although Giles of Rome wrote a Quodlibetal Question (Quod 2, q. 20) that is directly attacked in a translation from James of Viterbo, Giles is represented only by a passage from his treatise De regimine principum. Moreover, the moral psychology of the late thirteenth century is not well-covered, which is odd considering the importance of Bonnie Kent's work in this area.One additional problem is that there are few notes to aid the reader. Sometimes the translations can be confusing. For example, in one passage "the Commentator" should be identified, since the name can apply to at least three individuals (262-3). More seriously, readers with little background in medieval thought might confuse the medieval referents signified in the translation by the words "state" or "love" with contemporary referents. The translations themselves are clear and the different translators follow a consistent set of guidelines. Anyone who tries to translate some of these passages for herself will understand that some... (shrink)

What is the nature of law? The question that St. Thomas Aquinas answers in Summa Theologica I-II continues to be a crucial question in contemporary philosophy of law. Various scholars of jurisprudence attempt to identify the necessary features of law. Yet they struggle with the question, what kind of necessity is involved? Is it conceptual necessity? Metaphysical necessity? In this paper, I explore an alternative way of distinguishing different kinds of necessity that is found in Aquinas’ Commentary (...) on Aristotle’s Physics. I argue that the three kinds of necessity simpliciter, from the formal, material, and efficient cause, and hypothetical necessity, from the final cause, are relevant for understanding how Aquinas’ definition of ‘law’—an ordinance of reason, for the common good, made by the one who has care for the community, and promulgated—is a necessary truth. This historically interesting approach offers insights for contemporary jurisprudence. (shrink)

This article addresses three interpretive errors that are common with respect to Thomas Aquinas’s understanding of malice. The first error concerns the interpretation of malice as consisting in the preference or choice of a lesser good over a greater good. I argue that malice instead consists in a disorder of the will, and where that disorder results in the choice of a spiritual evil. The second error occurs when one charges Thomas with inconsistency: it is claimed that (...) Thomas’s view of the will is incompatible with malicious actions. I argue that such claims rest on a mistaken understanding of the role of choice in Thomas’s thought. The third error is one of translation: some scholars caution against translating Thomas’s malitia as “malice.” The reasons that are usually given for this view do not hold up to scrutiny. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A RHETORIC OF MOTIVES: THOMAS ON OBLIGATION AS RATIONAL PERSUASION THOMAS s. HIBBS Thomas Aquinas College Santa Paula, California 'TIHE PROMINENCE of moral obligation in modern hies is l'ooted in an early modern claim, which reached uition in Kant, concerning the primacy of the right ov;er the good.1 Although Kant was not the first to make such a claim, his texts have had the most palpable (...) influence on modern moral discourse.2 Many contemporary moral philosophers, however, have!attempted to discredit the Kantian p11oject.3 In so doing, they often advance wlternative views 1 In his highly influential work, John Rawls comments on the importance of the g-0od and the right in contemporary moral philosophy, "The two main concepts of ethics are those of the right and the good.... The structure Df an ethical theory is... largely determined by how it defines and connects these two basic notions," A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 24. 2 There are numerous precursors of Kant, both in the nascent rationalism of early modern science and -0£ late scholasticism and in the project of the "rationalization" of human life characteristic of classical Protestant moral thought. It was Nietzsche, of course, who saw Kant as a most heinous example of secularized Christianity. On the "rationalization" of the moral life in Protestantism, see Max Weber, Die protestantisohe Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus, in Gesammelte Aufsatze zur Religionssoziologie, Volume l (TU.bingen: Mohr, 1920), pp. 17-206. Given the convergence of these discursive fields in early modern thought and society, one might be inclined to see Kant as providing the theoretical foundations for the common moral consciousness. a I am thinking -0f Philippa Foot, "Virtues and Vices," and "Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives," in Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 1-18, 157-173; Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) and " Ought and Moral Obligation," in Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 293 ~94 THOMAS S. HIBBS characteristic of pre-modern moral philosophy, particularly of rthe 1 writings of Aristotle and Aquill!as. While consensus appears to have exnnerated Aristotle of the taint of Kantianism, the status of Tihomas's moral philosophy is still uncertain in the minds of many.4 Thomas's1 moral iphilosophy is, I believe, pre-modern. Throughout his writings he maintains the primaicy of the good ovier rthe right, the exact inverse of the Kantian position. By modern standards, Thomas's conception of obligation,seems impov;erished, almost naive. He devotes no independent treatise, or.for that matter no single quaestio, to the question of mom1l obligation. Francisco Suarez, one of Thomas's early modern oommenta.tors, found the latter's view to be muddled and unworkable. While Sua11ez criticizes Thomas's view, he fails to note that he 1and Thomas do not sha11e the same universe of discourse. What Suarez is after-a " theory of obligation "--is not extant in Thomas's texts. In fact, Suarez contributes to the deontological turn in the history of ethics. He pp. 114-123; Peter Geach, "Good and Evil," in Theories of Ethics, edited by Philippa Foot (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 64-73; Elizabeth Anscombe, "Modern Moral Philosophy" in her Oolleoted Philosophical Papers. Volume 3, l!Jthios, Religion and Politios (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), pp. 26-42; Alasdair Macintyre, "Hume on 'Is' and 'Ought'," in Against the Self-Images of the Age (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978), pp. 109·129. While all are critical of Kant, none of these writers advocates a straightforward return to Aristotle or Thomas. Williams, in fact, is sceptical about the viability of Aristotelianism. This litany, moreover, of Kantian critics is not intended to give the impression that there is a consensus on the failure of Kant's project. There are formidable contemporary representatives of the Kantian school. See, for instance, William Frankena, Thinking About Morality (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1980); Thomas Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism (Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1970); and Alan Donagan, The Theory of Morality (Chicago: The University of Chicago... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Metaphysics between Experience and Transcendence: Thomas Aquinas on Metaphysics as a Science by Rudi A. te VeldeO.P. Philip-Neri ReeseVELDE, Rudi A. te. Metaphysics between Experience and Transcendence: Thomas Aquinas on Metaphysics as a Science. Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 2021. vii + 246 pp. 38,00€In the opening chapter of Metaphysics 4, Aristotle states not only that there is a science of being as being and its per se (...) properties but also that it is the task of the metaphysician to investigate the principles and causes of such being. Does this mean that metaphysics comes in two parts—namely, an ontology that investigates being and its properties, followed by a theology that investigates the first principle of being? Or does it mean that the very investigation into being and its properties involves an investigation into the first principle of being—that is, that ontology in some sense is theology? The central purpose of Rudi A. te Velde's newest book is to show that, at least for Thomas Aquinas and those who would follow him, the answer is emphatically the latter: Thomistic metaphysics is essentially the resolutio, or tracing-back, of common being (ens commune) to divine being (ens divinum). This process of resolution situates Aquinas's metaphysics "between experience and transcendence." Unlike natural philosophy, metaphysics is not focused on reality as it is given to us in and through sensory experience. Unlike Christian theology, metaphysics is not focused on God as revealed to us in and through supernatural faith. Rather, it is focused on what both of these—experience and transcendence—presuppose, namely, the fundamental truth that all of reality comes from, and points back to, God as its principle and source. For te Velde, Aquinas's metaphysics is etiology or, as he puts it, "the science of presuppositions."Chapter 1 offers the reader a synoptic view of the basic outlines and contours of Aquinas's metaphysics, both positively and negatively. Positively, te Velde points out that Aquinas understands metaphysics to be an Aristotelian science, that is, a discipline unified around its subject. For the properties of a subject are what we aim to demonstrate when we engage in Aristotelian science, and its principles are what we appeal to when doing so. Negatively, te Velde contrasts Aquinas's view of metaphysics with that of his contemporary, Siger of Brabant, and that of our contemporary, John Haldane. Unlike the former, Aquinas's metaphysics takes common being, which is participated and created (and so does not include God), as its subject. Unlike the latter, Aquinas's [End Page 162] metaphysics is unified by the intelligibility of being in light of its principles.In chapters 2 through 5, te Velde focuses in on particular themes that are of central importance to Aquinas's account of metaphysics. Chapter 2 examines the role of separatio in distinguishing metaphysics from physics and mathematics. Where physics considers things that require matter both to be and to be understood, and mathematics considers things that require matter to be but not to be understood, metaphysics considers things that require matter neither to be nor to be understood. It does so by means of a judgment of separation—a judgment that something (for example, substance, form, and so on) can be without matter. Chapter 3 turns to the topic of resolutio, wherein the mind moves "from the concrete particular to its intelligible ground." Aquinas's metaphysics is marked by a twofold resolution: one in which being and its attributes are grasped as the intrinsic principles of all things, and a second in which God and separate substances are grasped as the extrinsic principles of all things. Chapter 4 then investigates the notion of transcendentality, which arises in the first of those two resolutive processes—for insofar as being and its attributes are common to all things, they are not limited to just one of the ten categories (that is, they are transcendental). Nevertheless, the way in which predicates like "one," "true," and "good" cut across the categories that divide common being is different from the way that they cut across the divide between God and creatures. This difference ushers in chapter 5's discussion... (shrink)

This book is the second volume of a two-part study, The Metaphysics of St. Thomas Aquinas in a Historical Perspective. In the first part, the author concentrated on Aquinas's understanding of "common being"; in this part he considers Aquinas's account of the existence and nature of God. Elders largely follows the order of the first questions of Aquinas's Summa theologiae. He begins by examining Aquinas's views about the demonstrability of God's existence and then devotes considerable attention to the (...) Five Ways. Succeeding chapters present and discuss Aquinas's account of standard divine attributes: simplicity, perfection, goodness, infinity, immutability, eternity, and unity. There are then two chapters on knowledge, one on our knowledge of God, and one on God's knowledge of himself and of other things. The last three chapters examine God's creation and conservation of things in the world, His power over creation and His providential guidance of it. (shrink)

Because many of Aquinas’s most distinctive philosophical claims are embedded in theological works, in order to see what his philosophy comes to it is necessary to do a great deal of extracting and reconstructing. A major school of interpretation, however, cautions that such efforts are misguided, since Aquinas’ philosophy and theology are inextricably bound together. We respond that some versions of this inseparability thesis are too strong to be true and the remainder too weak to stand in the (...) way of renewed efforts to identify Aquinas’ pure philosophical systems. Nonetheless, a good deal is to be learned about Aquinas (and about other religious philosophers) by pondering the inseparablist challenge to rational reconstruction. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Thomas Aquinas on the Metaphysics of the Human Act by Can Laurens LöweThomas M. Osborne Jr.Can Laurens Löwe. Thomas Aquinas on the Metaphysics of the Human Act. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. 225. Hardback, $99.99.This book is about the way in which Thomas Aquinas understands the human act to be composed of form and matter. It provides a fresh reading of many central texts (...) from Thomas and addresses philosophical concerns that are relevant to the contemporary literature. Although Löwe is not clear about this point, Thomas does not use in this context the terms 'formal' and 'material' in the strictest sense, as when he describes the soul as the form of the body, but in different extended senses, as when he says that charity is the form of the other virtues because it gives them a new character (Summa Theologiae, II–II, q. 23, art. 8).Löwe focuses on choice, which he considers to be antecedent to the human act, and the commanded or exterior act, which he considers to be the entire human act. This focus simplifies his account, since in one and only one text—the Prima Secundae of the Summa Theologiae—does Thomas appear to give as many as twelve acts that are stages or phases of a complete human act. Thomas devotes special attention to three acts of the will concerning the end, namely simple willing, intention, and enjoyment; and three acts of the will concerning the means, namely consent, choice, and use; and two intellectual acts, namely deliberation and command. Four other possible phases or stages are mentioned in passing, such as the judgment of choice. According to the standard interpretation, a human [End Page 152] act such as almsgiving might consist of intending to help an indigent person, deliberating about whether to give food or money, making a judgment of choice about the best means of helping (such as giving money), choosing to give the money, and then commanding the will's use of certain other powers, such as the movement of the hands and feet. In his other writings, Thomas mentions only some of these stages, and he often mentions only simple willing, deliberation, and choice. Scholars disagree over the number and importance of the acts or parts of acts discussed in the Prima Secundae and how to integrate them with what Thomas says in other texts. Löwe argues that the human act is what Thomas describes as the act's execution; he claims that this act has the intellect's command for its extrinsic form, the will's use for its intrinsic form, and the commanded act for its matter.This book has three parts. Part 1 provides a general account of the author's view that choice explains the act's freedom even if it is not part of the resulting act. In part 2, Löwe gives a novel account of Thomas's claim that the judgment of the intellect gives form to the act of choice. He draws on the distinction that Thomists make (although Thomas is less clear) between the composition of terms, or the enunciative proposition, and the judgement, or judicative proposition. For instance, the statement 'carrots are orange' as an enunciative proposition might be entertained as doubtful or likely, or placed in a conditional statement. However, someone might assent to this same composition by judging that it is true. Löwe's account is confusing on this point, as he describes as "judgment" what his Thomists describe as the enunciative proposition, which is the composition of terms (38–41). Terminological difficulties aside, Löwe draws on what he sees as the related distinction between the content of a judgment and the attitude toward the judgment, using this distinction to describe the freedom of the judgment that precedes choice. The intellect composes different precepts and then assents to one of them. According to Löwe, Thomas thinks that the agent's ability to choose between different goods is reduced to the intellect's ability to assent to the content of one precept and not the content of another according to a kind of second-order... (shrink)

I first demonstrate that certain process philosophers and Aquinas hold extremely similar notions of evil. Whitehead and Hartshorne parallel Aquinas in understanding evil as relational, as a conflict of goods, and as a necessary element in a larger good. On this last point, process philosophers contend that traditional theists must either reject the claim of God’s omnipotence or admit that an omnipotent God would be responsible for evil, including moral evil. I respond that Aquinas’s distinction between physical and moral evil (...) moves beyond the process position and avoids the conclusion that God’s omnipotence must be abandoned. I argue that the process position does not take proper account of Aquinas’s claim that the cause of evil is a negation and the initial criticism relies on a distinction between moral and physical evil that process philosophy cannot make. (shrink)

_Using the thought of Christian thinker Thomas Aquinas and Neo-Confucian Zhu Xi, explores how to exercise and limit authority._.

Thomas Aquinas’s thought on how human natural inclinations relate to the cognition of basic human goods has been and continues to be highly disputed. Pointing out the weaknesses of both old and new natural law interpretations, I offer an interpretation that is highly sensitive to Aquinas’s language in key texts on this issue and in addition draws upon texts where Aquinas explicates the relationship between inclination and selective attention. I argue that the natural inclinations primarily play a directive role (...) in drawing an agent’s attention to naturally apprehend basic human goods. This directive role is both externalist and reliabilist—the agent need not be aware of the inclinations and cognitive features that reliably direct her attention. Following a principle he inherits from Aristotle, I claim that for Aquinas, as human beings are by nature, so do the basic human goods seem to them. (shrink)

Thomas Aquinas divides the sensory appetite into two powers: the irascible and the concupiscible. The irascible power moves creatures toward arduous goods and away from arduous evils, while the concupiscible power moves creatures toward pleasant goods and away from non-arduous evils. Despite the importance of this distinction, it remains unclear what counts as an arduous good or evil, and why arduousness is the defining feature of the division. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, I argue that an (...) arduous object is one that is difficult and important for the creature. Second, given this proper understanding of arduousness, I highlight the shortcomings of the standard interpretation of Aquinas’s argument for the irascible-concupiscible distinction and suggest an alternative. I argue that Aquinas grounds the distinction in the distinction between useful and pleasant goods. I explain how these distinct goods allow arduousness to be the defining feature of the irascible-concupiscible division. (shrink)

What is the status of human dignity in bioethics today? Ruth Macklin, Steven Pinker, and Peter Singer are among those who argue that “human dignity” is incoherent rhetoric, improperly smuggled into public discourse by religious people who are opposed to moral autonomy and want to block progress in cutting-edge medical research. In the moral philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, however, dignity is broader and deeper than its critics claim. It cannot simply be replaced by the concept of “autonomy.” Dignity (...) plays a crucial role in building respect for human life. We first discover the dignity of “the other” in the context of family life, and discussion of the common good would be impoverished if we were somehow to eliminate it from our moral vocabulary. The respect we owe to human life in its embryonic stages serves as a paradigmatic case that shows the crucial importance of dignity. (shrink)

In Aquinas, Ethics, and Philosophy of Religion, Thomas Hibbs recovers the notion of practice to develop a more descriptive account of human action and knowing, grounded in the venerable vocabulary of virtue and vice. Drawing on Aquinas, who believed that all good works originate from virtue, Hibbs postulates how epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, and theology combine into a set of contemporary philosophical practices that remain open to metaphysics. Hibbs brings Aquinas into conversation with analytic and Continental philosophy (...) and suggests how a more nuanced appreciation of his thought enriches contemporary debates. This book offers readers a new appreciation of Aquinas and articulates a metaphysics integrally related to ethical practice. (shrink)

The Physics is a most remarkable work, and profoundly influenced Medieval Philosophers. Thomas Aquinas wrote a detailed, impressive commentary. This essay studies in particular the composition of the Physics as Thomas saw it, his thorough study of Aristotle’s way of arguing and the important distinction he made between disputative arguments, which are only partially true, and arguments which determine the truth. Aristotle frequently uses proofs which are wrong when one considers the proper nature of bodies, but possible considering (...) their common nature. Thomas accepts proofs in the field of physics but discards those related to a certain mathematization of nature. Aristotle holds the unlimited possibility of movements becoming faster or slower, but according to Aquinas he is considering things in general : when we consider specific bodies there is a fastest movement. Thomas speaks of a way of reading a text which is according the intention of Aristotle, and proposes an understanding of particular texts based on the general doctrine of the Stagirite. Sometimes he goes beyond the text, as when defending the unity of time as dependent on the unity of the First Mover. The essay shows that in the commentary a coherent philosophy of nature shaping up. In some places Aquinas brings in God’s causality: nature is nothing else but the plan of divine art, placed within things. The study of nature shows that there is a first principle of the whole nature which is above everything, sc. God who gives being to things. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:DISTINGUISHING CHARITY AS GOODNESS AND PRUDENCE AS RIGHTNESS: A KEY TO THOMAS'S SECUNDA PARS JAMES F. KEENAN, S.J. Weston School of Theology Cambridge, Massachusetts HE RESPECTIVE functions of charity and prudence Thomas Aquinas's moral theology provide a key to his nderstanding of the virtues. Charity and prudence serve distinct functions. In Thomas's position, a person can have the acquired virtues without having charity; such a person (...) has a virtuous life, but it is unified by prudence, not by charity. But why is such a person without charity? Is this absence of charity due simply to the absence of faith? Is this person with the four acquired virtues but without charity simply an unbeliever? Or is this person simply a rightly-ordered person whose lack of charity is due to the absence of personal moral goodness? Is such a person simply one who, in common parlance, is a well-integrated person but not necessarily a morally good one? In a word, is moral goodness a necessary condition for the acquired moral virtues? To answer this question we will begin with the contemporary distinction between goodness and rightness and then discuss the two virtues and their functions. In the final section we will relate our findings to present-day problems in the ethics of virtue. I. Goodness an_d Rightness Since Democritus we have realized that living rightly is not necessarily an indication of being good. Democritus noted that being good required not only that we act rightly but that we want 407 408 JAMES F. KEENAN, S.J. to act rightly.1 Over the centuries philosophers and theologians have consistently made reference to the fact that living rightly, or as they called it " doing the good," was not a sufficient condition for describing a person as good. From Ambrose and Augustine to the present, authors have insisted that a moral description of persons is more than a mere deduction from external activity.2 Some writers, however, did not simply make reference to this distinction, but rather spent considerable time in commenting on the insight involved. Kant, for instance, in his Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals distinguished from the beginning between action!> done out of duty (Handeln aus Pfiicht) and dutiful actions (pfiichtmiissiges H andeln). In attempting to describe the only thing which we can call " good," that is, the will, Kant argued that a dutiful act was only good if the act was done out of duty. For example, a state executioner who executes on account of his duty to execute is good and the action is good. But if the executioner performs the dutiful act on some other account, then the action is not good, though it is dutiful. Interestingly Kant did not consider whether an act not dutiful could be called good: Is an executioner who acts out of duty but botches the job still to be called good? George Moore in his Ethics made a similar point but for different reasons. Unlike Kant's interest in goodness, Moore wanted to describe a right action free of any consideration of an agent's motives and his solution was utilitarianism. In the process of separating the agent's action, Moore realized that the right act of a person with bad motivations involves a paradox: " A man may actually deserve the strongest moral condemnation for choosing an action which is morally right." 3 However, like 1 See his Fragmenta M oralia, no. 109, as cited in Stephen Toulmin, An Examination of the Place of Reason in Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 170. 2 Bruno Schuller of Miinster provides ample historical evidence in his Die Begrundung sittlicher Urteile (Diisseldorf: Patmos, 1980), 140. 3 George Moore, Ethics (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1912), 193-5. Cf. H. J. Paton, "The Alleged Independence of Goodness," in The Philosophy of G. E. Moore, ed. P. Schilpp (New York: Tudor, 1952), 113-134; Richard Hare, The Language of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964). GOODNESS AND PRUDENCE AS RIGHTNESS 409 Kant, Moore did not discuss a person who sought to act rightly but who failed actually to perform a right action. Contemporary moral theology has carried the distinction further. Moral theologians like Bruno... (shrink)

Technological advancements, especially with regard to enhancements of human capacities and powers, have instigated a collision between opposing views of the human person. I begin with the premise that the predominant classical view of the human person attained its clearest and most cogent expression in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and can be termed the theory of the homo integralis. The human person is, for Thomas, the integrated being par excellence: he is a union of the material (...) (body) and the immaterial (soul); his freedom is guided by a normative nature; he is himself a product of and participant in nature; he is a member of a common species from which he draws his identity; and he balances the needs of his embodied state with a recognition that his existence is not limited to it. Due to the philosophical and technological revolutions of the modern period, themselves an outgrowth perhaps of earlier attitudes, a contrasting view of the human person emerged: the homo technologicus. Technological man, unlike his classical predecessor, is marked by fundamental disintegration: he is divided in himself, between mind and body; he is dissociated from a normative human nature; he is divided from nature itself as he sets himself against it through technological means; he is divided from the human community in radical, self-determining autonomy; and he is severed from any sense of transcendent purpose or value aside from that which can be attained through his own powers, technological or otherwise. By recovering a sense of the homo integralis as articulated by Thomas Aquinas, a fresh appraisal of contemporary issues regarding the human relationship to technology, human capacities and powers as evaluated by movements like transhumanism, and ultimately, human meaning and value, is made possible and is shown to provide a consistent and appealing rejoinder to the disintegrated vision of man that emerges in a technologized world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:What Makes the Common Good Common?Key Points from Charles De Koninck1Aquinas Guilbeau, O.P.In even the most capable philosophical hands, the common good remains a slippery concept. Its essence eludes the grasp of those who reach for it. This is due in part to the concept's complexity. "Common good" is composed of two rich, philosophically pregnant notions: goodness and commonness. Reflection on these two notions is (...) ancient, of course. How a thing is good has preoccupied philosophers since the dawn of time. How a thing may be common has exercised philosophers less throughout history, but even the ancients recognized that the question of a thing's commonness remains as intricate as the question of a thing's goodness. Despite their long philosophical history, however, the notions of goodness and commonness evade quick and easy description. Because they represent elemental characteristics of being itself, they share in being's fundamental mystery. As a result, millennia of reflection have not exhausted these notions' meanings. Like being, goodness and commonness require careful study by each generation, so that its intellectuals and teachers might clarify these notions' remaining secrets. Thus does each generation contribute to the perennial philosophy.When we modern and post-modern thinkers try to describe the common good, and thereby grapple with its notions of goodness and commonness, we find one of these two notions more elusive than the other. Which of the two might surprise us. It is not the common good's goodness. [End Page 739] Despite the philosophical confusions of our age, we more or less still agree publicly as to what constitutes a good, and as a result what constitutes an evil. We deem health a good, for example, while we deem disease an evil. We embrace one as perfective; we repulse the other as destructive. To my knowledge, no one has yet extolled COVID-19 as a good. So, we moderns and post-moderns have not completely lost hold of reality. We still share a sense of goodness, even if our generation mislabels some evils as goods.When it comes to describing the common good, therefore, it is not the common good's goodness that eludes us. Rather, it is its commonness that we have difficulty grasping. What does it mean for a good to be common? How is a common good common? Are all common goods common in the same way? How is the example of health common? Is health a common good properly speaking, or does it only appear to be common? How do we know the difference? Is there a difference? Unfortunately, few of us can answer these questions well. The reasons may not all be our fault, but we should admit that, along with our secular contemporaries, we remain largely unversed in commonness. A sign of our inexperience with the concept is that we seldom ask questions about commonness. Instead, we take it for granted that we know what commonness involves. When pressed to describe it, however, we quickly discover just how uncommon understanding of commonness is.In the first half of the last century, Charles De Koninck was well aware of modernity's inexperience with commonness. He recognized that individualism and its philosophical prerequisites had so captured the popular imagination, even among Catholics, that the common quality of the common good was disappearing from view. As a result, political discourse—to say nothing of political life—had entered serious difficulty. Between the World Wars, De Koninck spoke up among Catholic philosophers to remind them of the "primacy of the common good," not simply as a practical concept but as a speculative one, in accord with its classical conception.De Koninck recalled for his contemporaries not only that but also how commonness, like goodness, is primarily something objectively real and metaphysically constituted, and only secondarily something subjectively perceived and practically useful. To revive the objective and metaphysical notions of goodness and commonness among Catholic intellectuals—many of whom had traded these for easier subjective and practical notions2—De [End Page 740] Koninck composed his famous essay The Primacy of the Common Good, Against the Personalists.3 In it, De Koninck spends eighty pages reviewing the objective... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Trinity by Thomas Joseph White, O.P.:A Model of Living ThomismSerge-Thomas Bonino O.P."The human being naturally seeks wisdom." From the very first line of the magisterial work we are dealing with, Fr. Thomas Joseph White's 2022 The Trinity: On the Nature and Mystery of the One God, it is all about wisdom. Wisdom was already at the heart of a previous work by Fr. White devoted (...) to the natural theology of St. Thomas, his 2009 Wisdom in the Face of Modernity. Wisdom is more than the accumulation of information or the juxtaposition of knowledge. It is an eminent form of knowledge that, on the one hand, involves the person of the thinker in all its dimensions, intellectual, emotional, existential, and on the other, seeks to understand its object in the light of the most fundamental causes, which are simultaneously the most enlightening and explanatory principles because they are the most universal. The Trinity: On the Nature and Mystery of the One God is undoubtedly a work of wisdom. Fr. White grasps the entire Christian mystery from its Trinitarian source, since, as we shall see, the entire Mystery (in the Pauline sense of the economy of salvation in Jesus Christ as the fulfillment of the Father's benevolent purpose) is at the same time rooted in the eternal mystery of the triune God and makes it known to us as it unfolds its truth and saving power in time.But the sapiential nature of the object studied has some effect on the form of the work itself. Indeed, if Fr. White were not Rector Magnificent of the Angelicum, he would be a magnificent architect, because he possesses a sense of order to the highest degree and knows how to introduce unity in diversity. The presentation of The Trinity is perfectly structured, and therefore very [End Page 461] clear and didactic. Among many other factors that create its unity, I was especially interested in the highlighting of what the philosopher André de Muralt calls "structures of thought": similarities of proportionality between the ways in which authors from even very different theological epochs have treated a problem.1 I am thinking for instance of how Fr. White shows the strong structural similarities between contemporary Trinitarian theologies and the three types of medieval Trinitarian theology (the Franciscan, the Thomist, and the Nominalist). "My claim here is that the modern Trinitarian tradition tends to reproduce various elements of the medieval traditions, … albeit in creative and unexpected ways" (399). So it is a conceptually well-unified work, and where there is unity, there is being, goodness and beauty.The introduction, as I said, is placed under the sign of wisdom. Fr. White takes up there the neo-Scholastic theme of the "three wisdoms": philosophical wisdom, theological wisdom, and mystical wisdom.2 The book's perspective is explicitly that of theological wisdom, as a scientific form of the intelligence of faith, but (we shall return to this point in connection with the place given to philosophy) it puts into practice in an exemplary manner the collaboration, without confusion or separation, between the three wisdoms.3My purpose, of course, is not, nor can it be, to "summarize" the contents of a book of more than seven hundred pages, which manages to be both a comprehensive handbook for higher theological education and a true personal theological essay. I will therefore limit myself to highlighting three partial but significant aspects.(1) The first is the explicit and overt Thomistic character of the book (see 6–7). The Trinity is in fact a vibrant plea in favor of the relevance of the theology of St. Thomas, as indicated by the very last sentence:The Church today can and should still have recourse to the theology of Thomas Aquinas, and to the living Thomistic tradition, as a privileged means of interpreting and advancing her own understanding of the mystery of God.(690) [End Page 462]The Trinity is the demonstration in actu exercito of the truth of this concluding statement. I therefore propose to reflect, in the first part of my paper, on the nature of Fr. White's Thomism, which depends, as we... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 329 I find Farley's theory of tragic existence and divine compassion distressing and depressing. To sufferers, it says: "C'est la vie!" Put more learnedly, "created perfection is fragile, tragically structured.. •. And yet, without creation, divine eros remains merely potential, inarticulate. The fragility of creation and the nonabsolute power of God culminate in the tragedy and rupture of history" (p. 124). Thank God, I can now have (...) God,to blame. Of course, God is trying to repair the damage, but even God's efforts are ultimately vain since "absolute evil " will ever play havoc with history and since God himself is responsible for suffering. Furthermore, since the author does not offer any extensive discussion of the suffering and death of God.on the cross (she dismisses the idea: "The compassionate God is... to he distinguished from the benevolent but impotent deity who ' suffers with ' the world" [p. 112]), nor of the resurrection of Jesus as divine vindication of innocent suffering, nor of hope for a life beyond,· her tragic vision sheds no real light on the problem of suffering nor can it pro-.vide impetus for the struggle against evil or hope for victims-especially when demons whisper that life is futile, suffering meaningless, and the cosmos void. The book is repetitive (suffering: pp. 23-24, 30-31, 51-59, 115-119; tragic vision: pp. 31-37, 78-79, 98-99, 106-110, 124-125; compassion: pp. 37-39, 79-81, 92-94, 110-114, 114-119, 126-128). It is oracular ("theologians have been uncomfortable about directly attributing love to God " [p. 96], self-contradictory (it speaks of God's " aseity " and divine " relationship " in the same breath [p. 105]), and misleading in its use of sources (e.g. its appeal to Thomas for its peculiar understanding of analogical language about God [pp. 101-103]). Mercifully, the hook is brief. The Catholic University of America Washington, D.C. PETER c. PHAN Time, Freedom, and the Common Good. By CHARLES M. SHEROVER. New York: State University of New York Press, 1989. Pp. xiii+ 314. $59.50 (cloth) ; $19.95 (paper). Guided by the insights of traditional political philosophy and contemporary phenomenology and animated by 'the spirit of Tocqueville, Sherover's book is an attempt " to secure the foundations of a public philosophy adequate for our time" (p. xii). Like Tqcqueville, Sherover is preoccupied with the " universal appeal of freedom," with its com- 330 BOOK REVIEWS plications, its paradoxes, and especially its possibilities. Sherover faults liberalism for its simplistic conception of freedom and its " superficial view of the nature of human existence" (p. 8). In an attempt to find a more adequate account of human experience, Sherover appeals to three existential categories: sociality, temporality, and freedom. The project of the book, which moves from the establishment and articulation of these categories to :their practical application, is ambitious. Yet the argument is lucid and persuasive. Following Aristotle, Sherover argues for the primacy of the social in human life. He effectively argues not only that moral norms and linguistic practices are socially rooted phenomena, but also that " social membership is prior... to any notion of differentiating individuality " (p. 20). Social atomism is but a theoretical abstraction, and individualism is as incoherent as a private language. Sherover points out that the defense ·of the social nature of human existence has at least one negative result: it undermines political theories that are rooted in a radically individualistic conception of human nature. Yet the emphasis on sociality does play a positive role in Sherover's essay: it serves as an initial justification of the relevance of the idea of the common good to political discourse. The existential category of sociality surfaces, for instance, in Sherover's cogent account of rights, wherein he argues that particular rights should not be seen as innate and absolute. The claim that rights are innate renders unintelligible the prevalent notion of "newly dis· covered" rights (p. 79). Instead, particular rights are socially recog· nized, justifiable claims which cannot he isolated from the social and political context in which they are recognized and exercised. Particular r.ights come into being over time and in intimate connection with con· crete... (shrink)

This article considers the positions of Gabriel Marcel and Thomas Aquinas on self-knowledge and argues for a synthesis between them. The basis of this Marcelian-Thomistic synthesis is their common understanding of the self as inherently in relation to that which is other and in the necessity of activation for self-knowledge to occur. The divergence between these thinkers occurs in regard to the process of activation. While Aquinas presents an Aristotelian account of activation rooted in his understanding of cognition, (...) Marcel offers a broader vision of activation that gives pride of place to intersubjectivity. A Marcelian-Thomistic synthesis preserves the Aristotelian systematization of Aquinas, while adding Marcel’s expanded understanding of activation and his prioritization of intersubjectivity. Such a synthesis allows for a treatment of self-knowledge that is metaphysically systematic and true to lived experience. (shrink)

The far reaching changes in man's social and personal life taking place in our lifetime underline the need for a sound ethical evaluation of our rights and duties and of human behaviour both on the individual level and in the political society. On many issues judgments of value vary widely and a consultation of the thought of Thomas Aquinas on the basic questions will be helpful, the more since he is not only one of the greatest philosophers but also (...) succeeded in integrating in his moral philosophy the wisdom of the ancients, in particular of Aristotle and the Stoa. This book presents Aquinas's thought on such central questions as man's happiness, how to determine the morality of our actions, the natural law and the main virtues, as well as on the common good, war, human labour, love and friendship. Throughout the book the intellectual character of this moral philosophy is pointed out and problems are set in a historical perspective. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Recovering Aquinas's Common-Good-Oriented Right of RebellionNathaniel A. MoatsIntroductionAs recent events have woefully displayed, armed rebellion is not a topic of merely theoretical interest.1 While theory seemingly has very little impact on the citizens participating in armed rebellions, theory still remains of paramount importance, providing crucial criteria to evaluate, restrain, apply, and respond to such force. Criteria such as legitimate authority, just cause, right intention, necessity, proportionality, and likelihood (...) of success have been offered by thinkers advocating "just war" theory from across diverse political, philosophical, and religious backgrounds, garnering widespread agreement over the centuries. Contemporary scholars who identify as "historically oriented" just war thinkers have continued to defend that historical tradition as a sufficient and substantial guide for contemporary practice.2 Yet some have questioned whether the it can provide useful aid for dealing with contexts of political tyranny. In a 2013 article, Valeria Morkevičius describes [End Page 175] Western culture as divided over the moral permissibility of armed rebellion, with advocates basing their views on the Enlightenment ideas found in John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whereas traditional just war theorists have generally denied a right to armed rebellion.3 In Morkevičius's perspective, she argues that there can be justified use of armed force against tyranny and calls upon other scholars to help create a "just rebellion theory" that would "radically reimagine" traditional just war thinking.4 She claims that there is a "lack of a systematic and rigorous ethical framework for evaluating the justness of rebellions"5 and that "a new theory of just rebellion—a systematic way of evaluating the justness of real world rebellions, of determining appropriate state responses to domestic rebellions, and of weighing the pros and cons of intervention" is needed.6In line with Morkevičius' sentiments, the last ten years has seen the increasing rise of self-proclaimed just war revisionists.7 Jeff McMahan, the figurehead for this movement, claims that the classical just war criteria "can no longer stand."8 McMahan argues that traditional just war theory has [End Page 176] depicted war as a morally sui generis category of violence in which unique moral principles apply.9 The moral asymmetry of war is also reinforced by a "statist" and "collectivist" orientation that overrides the importance of individuals and their rights of life, liberty, property, and other fundamental goods. Instead of seeing war as a distinct category of violence, McMahan argues that war and self-defense are morally symmetrical. Further, he argues that combatants should be depicted as individuals distinct from their political or collective identity.10 In other words, McMahan offers a theory of war oriented around individuals and their rights based in the concept of justified self-defense.11 Extending McMahan's theory, Cécile Fabre has particularly targeted the criterion of legitimate authority as morally problematic.12 Rejecting the exclusive authorization of armed force by political authorities, she argues in favor of an individual's right to war, and by extension the right to rebellion.13 Therefore, given the historical just war tradition's emphasis on the criterion of legitimate authority (i.e., the restriction of armed force [End Page 177] to established authorities) and resistance to support armed rebellions due to the lack of recognized political leaders, revisionists conclude that traditional just war thinking is inadequate for providing contemporary guidance in the context of rebellion.14To challenge revisionist claims, I analyze Thomas Aquinas's ingenuity and relevance for future "just rebellion" thinking. First, I argue that classical just war thinking is not as antithetical to armed rebellion as suggested.15 One just rebellion theory has coexisted alongside the classical formation of just war theory, albeit often neglected or ignored by contemporary thinkers.16 It is well known that Aquinas formalized the Augustinian classical just war theory revolving around the criteria of legitimate authority, just cause, and right intention. Much less known, however, is the fact that Aquinas also crafted criteria for justified armed rebellions. While Aquinas's just war thinking rearticulates Augustine's perspective, Aquinas appropriated his mentor's views to allow for justified armed rebellions. Aquinas's originality was displayed not only in allowing justified armed... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:706 BOOK REVIEWS struments of redemption for others. Mary is the primary exemplar of receiving her Son's redeeming love in freedom and of wholeheartedly mediating his graces to all he has redeemed. The final essay, "Mary and Modernity," is most timely for American Christians and ecumenists. It is a very worthwhile attempt to compare and contrast the secular triad of virtues, liberty, equality, and fraternity with the Christian triad (...) of theological virtues, faith, hope, and love, especially as they are exemplified in Mary. Although this approach perceives Mary more as a " sign of contradiction " to our secularistic culture, she will help us to avoid the extremes of confusing true freedom with licence, genuine equality with egalitarianism, and authentic fraternity with collectivism by helping inspire in us the really liberating values of her Son's Gospel. Everyone can benefit immensely from the intelligent reading of this book. Mt. St. Mary's Seminary Emmitsburg, Maryland FREDERICK M. JELLY, O.P. Dieu et l'etre d'apres Thomas d'Aquin et Hegel. By EMILIO BRITO. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1991. Pp. 422. 245 francs. Sprung from premature fears of post-modernity or from an ignorant nostalgia for a monoform Catholicism which never existed, universal dismissals of " modernity " still appear occasionally in Catholic j ournals. They recall,the neo-scholastic te:xitbooks prior to Vatican II in whose pages the " moderni " (among whom were numbered not only "Kantiani" but "Hegeliani ") were dismissed by authors who, having read a few pages, were incapable of grasping the basic directions of philosophy from Herder to Heidegger. Emilio Brito, S.J., however, follows in the line of the French and German Jesuits: through this century they have sustained a varied dialogue, in philosophy and theology, between Thomas Aquinas and the important figures of modern philosophy. His two works on Hegel's Christology, and a third large study of God and creation in Schelling are now followed by this comparative work. The theology of Aquinas and the philosophy of Hegel are like two galaxies. Do they move past each other at a distance, or do they move through each other guarding a proper identity with similar forces and shared motifs? Brito has chosen one theme within these two vast realms of thought: his topic (and the book's title can mislead) is God; 'being' BOOK REVIEWS 707 is present as a stimulus to our reflection about God. After an introduction on recent interpretations of Hegel, particularly by Catholics, pages which should be read by all interested in contemporary theology, there are three sections: " the knowledge and naming of God," " the divine substance and the cycle of its attributes," and " the operations of absolute spirit." The chapters in each of the three areas present Aquinas's and then Hegel's thought, and sometimes a section of further comparison. At the end of the work Brito offers a conclusion ("God's Goodness") and a postlude ("God's Beauty"). Finally there is a "Resume." According to Brito, Aquinas's thought is clear (his Aristotelian logic is readily understandable), and his emphasis lies with the divine transcendence. Despite the process-format of the Summa theologiae and the traces of history in the headship of Christ, the diversity of sacraments, and the theologies of faith and natural law, his modest description of movement in God and in God's world of beings stands in contrast to the unleashed and unresolved development penetrating Hegel's Geist. The concluding " Resume " of nine pages is particularly valuable as it brings together the author's synthetic insights into Aquinas and Hegel (one might hope that at least it would appear in translation). The following excerpt displays its balance and clarity. The God of the Summa tends to stay back from mediation, letting itself exist in a certain exteriority, while the Hegelian absolute " raises out" the determinations it posits only by also absorbing them negatively. In the same vein, the Hegelian parousia of the negative abolishes absolutely the distance maintained by the inexpressible in language. In an opposite direction, the originating positivity of the God of Thomas grounds the irreducible presence of a reality represented in discourse. If he is a stranger to this approach and more... (shrink)

Perfectionism is one of the leading moral views of the Western tradition, defended by Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Leibniz, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Green. Defined broadly, it holds that what is right is whatever most promotes certain objective human goods such as knowledge, achievement, and deep personal relations. Defined more narrowly, it identifies these goods by reference to human nature, so the human good consistsin developing the properties fundamental to human beings. If it is fundamental to humans to be rational (Aristotle), (...) to labor (Marx), or to exercise power (Nietzsche), developing these traits is best. This book tries to formulate the most defensible version of perfectionism using contemporary analytic techniques. It first examines narrow perfectionism, asking what kind of properties human nature consists in (distinctive? essential?); how these properties are identified; and what they are. It then explores issues relevant to both broad and narrow perfectionism, including whether each person should pursue just his own perfection or everyone's; how perfectionist goods are compared and aggregated; and in what particular times they are. On the last topic it develops an “Aristotelian” theory of the value of theoretical and practical rationality, as embodied in beliefs and ends with specified formal properties. The book closes by examining perfectionism's implications for political questions about liberty and equality. (shrink)

This article provides an analysis of how the philosophy of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, particularly their treatment of the "Problem of the One and the Many," can help inform Sam Harris's attempt to ground ethics in the empirical sciences in his 2010 book The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. -/- The paper shows how Aristotle and Aquinas's thought can: • Explaining how the sciences are organized and why they will not produce multiple, competing measures (...) of goodness and well-being; • Resolving the “moral paradoxes” that Harris finds himself unable to find a solution to, by demonstrating how the human good essentially involves a “common good,” and how goodness always relates to the whole; • Providing us with a better explanation for why selfless behavior is good and why it is “good for us” to be virtuous; • Providing Harris with a better definition of freedom as self-determination; and • Showing how neither a recognition that the sciences must play a major role in ethics, nor naturalistic explanations of human behavior, need to preclude our orientation towards a transcendent good. (shrink)

This paper attempts to show that if we carefully distinguish between the biological and metaphysical assumptions of Thomas Aquinas, it is possible, with the help of contemporary systems biology, to find good reasons for the thesis that the animation of a human individual takes place at conception. Systems biology is able to identify crucial events on the molecular level. The same would hold also for the possible human clone. In the paper I try to show that it is (...) possible to maintain the notion of simultaneous animation along with the metaphysical assumptions of Thomas Aquinas, despite the fact that Thomas Aquinas himself advocated successive animation, due to his biological knowledge and the common opinions held in his times. (shrink)

The essay on thirteenth-century ethics will trace the history of three major themes in moral philosophy and theology, namely the morality of individual acts, virtue, and happiness. Both Peter Lombard’s rejection of Abelard’s focus on intention and the Fourth Lateran Council’s remarks on confession caused thinkers such as William of Auvergne and Philip the Chancellor to develop a way of classifying acts and determining responsibility for such acts. Thomas Aquinas and clarified and changed the technical vocabulary but adopted (...) much from their views on knowledge and moral responsibility. A similar development took place in the understanding of virtue. Philip and others discussed the nature and unity of the virtues in the context of a patristic inheritance that was largely influence by Stoicism. Thomas Aquinas was among the first to discuss the connection between specifically distinct virtues, bringing to bear Aristotle’s description of prudence in Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics. Moreover, whereas previous thinkers had primarily distinguished between political and theological virtues, Thomas distinguished more carefully between both infused and acquired moral virtues, and theological virtues that are only infused. He explained that the intellectual virtues, although better in themselves, are inferior to the moral virtues when it comes to making a good human being. Debates over the role of happiness in ethics were related to such distinctions. Early generations had focused primarily on the role that moral and theological virtue plays in its role as leading to happiness in heaven. In contrast, some Aristotelians seem to emphasize the priority of intellectual virtue over moral virtue, and consequently the life of the philosopher over the life of the citizen. Thomas Aquinas distinguished between the different perfections of intellectual and moral virtue, and distinguished carefully between the imperfect happiness of this life and the perfect happiness of the next. Although Thomas brought these issues together in an admirable synthesis, few of his contemporaries thought that he had successfully addressed these issues. (shrink)

Outstanding among the social problems facing urban centers of the world in general and Nigeria is the problem of crime. The increasing rate of criminal activities has become a major concern across the globe. Today, lives and properties are no longer safe for both the rich and the poor. All seem to live one day at a time. Content Analysis is used as the method of data analysis. The method adopted was more of an exposition, critical analysis and evaluation. More (...) specifically, this paper gave a general background about violence, urban violence and the question of self-defense. Furthermore, a philosophical answer was given in the light of the medieval thinker St. Thomas Aquinas. It was concluded that there is a need for social living. A good citizen is one who has an unselfish love for the common good of his state; a love issuing forth in an efficacious desire to see that good is procured and furthered. Thus, a good citizen realizes that he is part of a social and political society. Thus, his personal goodness, and the goodness of his actions contributes to the good of all. KEYWORDS: Sociology, Urban Violence, Self-defense, Thomas Aquinas, Qualitative Research,Nigeria. (shrink)

PHILOSOPHY OF HUMAN RIGHTS: HUMAN RIGHTS IN LIGHT OF THEIR INTERNATIONAL PROTECTION Summary The book consists of two main parts: in the first, on the basis of an analysis of international law, elements of the contemporary conception of human rights and its positive legal protection are identified; in the second - in light of the first part -a philosophical theory of law based on the tradition leading from Plato, Aristotle, and St. Thomas Aquinas is constructed. The conclusion (...) contains an application of the results of the analysis conducted in the second part. The first part comprises four chapters. The first aims at revealing characteristics of human rights on the basis of an analysis of historical conditioning of the inter-national law of human rights and its development. The historical context displays the practical, vindicative, and critical character of the positive legal protection of human rights. Moreover, the process of change of positive human rights law is distinguished from the process of change of human rights as such. In the second chapter the content of human rights - a topic which is only auxiliary to the conducted analysis - is discussed. Basic typology and catalogues of rights proclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and protected in the International Covenants of Human Rights are presented. The review of the content of rights aims at a more precise limitation of the field of research. The examination shows a diversity of rights which poses a serious challenge to the coherence of every philosophical theory of human rights. In the third chapter, central in the first part, international law is analyzed with regard to the characteristics of rights and the foundations of them. The analysis of documents shows a number of solutions referring to the anthropological foundations of rights. The inherent dignity of the human person is the source of all human rights. Each human being is recognized as free, and endowed with both reason and conscience. In the propounded conception of man individuals are not rivals but create a community which is a condition for their development. International law characterizes the rights as universal, inherent, inalienable and inviolable. The reconstructed conception also comprises the following basic elements: on the level of the structure of rights, a recognition of their equality, interdependence, and comprehensiveness; in the grounding of these rights, a recognition of the anthropological foundations of law; in the conception of positive law, a recognition of the secondariness of the positive law of human rights to human rights themselves, and a recognition of human rights and justice as the basis for legal order; in the conception of state, a recognition of the well-being of the individual as the fundamental aim of actions undertaken by political institutions, and recogni¬tion of rights which form an impassable boundary to the power of the state, includ¬ing its legislative actions. The characterization of the international legal paradigm serving for the under¬standing of human rights is supplemented by analyses of the structure of their posi¬tive legal protection. Various meanings of the terms "right" and "freedom" are distinguished. Subjective right, as basic structure of the positive legal protection of human rights, is understood as a complex relation formed by various legal situations of the subject of a right which create a functional whole in respect of the subordi-nation of human person to its good. Subordinating person to a good proper for it, expressed usually in a proclamatory norm, is the central element of particular rights around which further elements aiming at the realization of this good are built. In the second part of the book a philosophical theory is developed which allows for the location of a coherent foundation for the presented characterization of human rights and their positive legal protection. This part consists of two chapters. The first includes a review of some - not entirely satisfactory - means of founding of human rights; the second presents philosophical conceptions of law and man which may form a basis for the constructed theory. The review of arguments contained in the first chapter does not aim at a detailed analysis of various specific ways of argumentation encountered in works on this subject but rather at a concise presentation of the main possible lines of argumentation. These analyses also serve to emphasize the positive solutions which are pro¬posed later and to underscore the explanatory power of the elaborated theory. This theory, retaining accurate intuitions contained in the presented types of argumenta¬tion, helps in avoiding their consequences which are difficult to reconcile with the reconstructed paradigm of human rights. Efforts to base human rights on the norms of international law rightly take into account the necessity of determining the content of the rights and their positive legal protection as a means for the realization of man's good. These attempts, how¬ever, do not properly take into account the inherent character of human rights, which are independent of positive law and provide grounds for applying specific legislative measures and not others. Founding human rights on freedom accurately points at the freedom of an indi¬vidual as a constitutive element of some rights; however, absolutization of freedom leads, to a loss of an important element of the contemporary paradigm of under¬standing human rights. This foundation undermines recognition of the fact that human rights may set limits to both the freedom of others and the freedom of the subject of rights itself. Additionally, attempts at the so-called axiological justification of human rights are discussed. This type of justification has a few variants depending on the as¬sumed conception of value. Subjectivistic conceptions have similar advantages and disadvantages to the conceptions basing human rights on freedom; objectivistic conceptions while providing for the universality of human rights place, the fundamental aim of human rights protection beyond the individual human being - in the idealistically existing world of values; finally, conceptions rooting values and human rights in culture, while accurately noting that human rights are learned through the medium of culture, place the source of human rights beyond a concrete individual - in culture and processes which take place in it - which leads to difficulties in finding a basis for the universality of rights. Furthermore, attempts to ground human rights in specific characteristics of the human being are presented. This type of approach points to an important problem of dependence of the content of rights on what man is. However, recognition of specific characteristics of a human being as an ontic foundation of the existence of rights poses a danger to their universality since one has to accept that it is not enough to be a man to be a subject of rights, but a man possessing specific charac¬teristics. The second chapter aims at outlining solutions worked out by Saint Thomas Aquinas. For a fuller understanding of his propositions selected elements of Plato's and Aristotle's philosophy are presented. It was them who formulated the founda¬tions for reflection on law and justice in the ontological context. A qualification is made that Stoicism is not be analysed in depth. Although Thomas' concept of law was undoubtedly developed under the influence of the Stoic doctrine as well, it is not in this that one should look for the tools to understand the ontic foundations of human rights and law in general since the Stoic moral philosophy and philosophy of law were developed in the context of a theory of being which assumed monistic and pantheistic premises as foundations, leading to the recognition of a total subor¬dination of the human individual to a larger unity of which man is only a part. The analysis of Plato's and Aristotle's texts concentrates on problems of justice. Plato seems to be the first philosopher who reflected on the formula basic in the history of European thought: to render to each his due. It appears that justice as both a characteristic of man and his acts is understood in the perspective of that which is just, that which is a good for another man - the recipient of the act. The basis for determining what is just is the relation of correspondence between some¬one and something. While in the case of Plato this relation is based on something beyond its terms, namely on ideas, in the case of Aristotle the relation occurs on account of the elements of the relation itself. Something is just when it contributes to the develop¬ment of the recipient of an act realizing that which is just. At the same time, the realization of that which is just is a good for the agent. In the analysis of the just two types of relation are revealed: the relation of due-to-recipient occurring on account of the compatibility of that which is due, with the recipient of the act; and - a "superstructure" - a relation of obligation-of-subject occurring on account of the compatibility of the acting subject with the thing which should be done. The basis for being that which is due is formed by various potentialities of development of man - the recipient of agency; the basis of being that which is an obligation is the possibility of development of the subject of action. Aristotle distinguishes various types of freedom and points to the necessity of taking them into account in the discussion of justice. Among other things, as the core of man's freedom, he considers life for its own sake, which can be seen as his expression of the basic indices of the autotelic character of man - which is funda¬mental for later conceptions of dignity. The freedom which is described by him is not, however, inherent and inalienable; being free is conditioned by a factual possi¬bility of undertaking actions, which are not solely means to the realization of aims set by others. Thomas Aquinas takes over the Aristotelian research perspective both in his conception of man and of law. At the same time, however, he significantly enriches it. In anthropology he develops a conception of personal being. Drawing upon his distinction between existence ("that something is") and essence ("what something is"), he sees the basis for being a person in the dignity of personal being which is a certain way of existence of a rational being more perfect than that of non-personal beings. The person is a being which, by virtue of its act of existence, is individual¬ized in a specific way. It is an aim in itself. Expressing it in a negative way, one may say that it does not exist as a means for the realization of the aims of others and, in this sense, that it is free. As distinct from Aristotelian conclusions, being a person is not conditioned by the specific actions of a being. Dignity is inherent, based on that which is the foundation of the factual existence of every rational being. Although freedom requires that a being is rational, dignity still encompasses all being, all its properties and potentialities. Thus an act conforming with dignity has to take into account a whole human being. Among different types of that which is just, ius, the first place, from the point of view of understanding law, falls to "the just thing itself ("ipsa res justa"), which is right in the full meaning of the word. On the one hand, it is that which is due; on the other hand, it determines the way of acting in the utmost degree, since the course of every act is determined in the fullest extent by its aim. The content of ius may be determined both by elements independent of free decisions - ius naturale - and by free decisions taking into account the state of things - ius positivum. Recognition of the objective structure of being as the basis of law does not entail that it is possible or desirable to determine unequivocally "the only right" patterns of conduct. This concept is very well justified within the system proposed by Saint Thomas. Individualization of being is a significant element of the develop¬ment of a person as a person. It is attained by the realization of individual aims which are not unequivocally determined by circumstances and the nature common to all people. By virtue of free choices made in the sphere of that which is not by its nature unjust, the object of action becomes ius. Since in the realization of the person the individualization of human being is central, Aquinas clearly sees the need for the protection of the sphere of "dominion of will". This sphere itself constitutes ius naturale, something which is due to man independently of the acts of will. Therefore "law should forbid nothing which is not unjust" ("nihil debet lege prohiberi quod licite fieri potest", In 3 Sent., dist. 40, q. I, a. 1, 3). Besides the relation of due-to-recipient, ius also includes the relation of obligation-of-subject which is superimposed on the relation of due-to-recipient. As far as the ontic foundations of obligation are concerned, in explaining why man is subordinated to realization of the good of others, Aquinas generally follows Aristotle in accepting that this basis is the subordination to moral good - to actions conforming with the learned truth about reality. Aquinas' systemic solutions allow, however, to reach deeper and understand why moral development is also a development of the whole human being. This was difficult within Aristotle's system, since he was reluc¬tant to decide whether precedence should be given to intellectual or moral develop¬ment. The inclination to realise good of another appears to be a transcendental characteristic of being, based on its very existence. Morality understood as rational and free subordination to realize the good of another is a specifically personal way of the realization of this inclination. Thus just actions contribute to the actualization of being in the aspect of its existence and therefore to the actualization of being as a whole. Thomas' conception of natural law (lex naturalis) as participation in eternal law (lex aeterna), offers possibilities for grasping that which is just as something which is basically accessible cognition, independently of Revelation and independently of faith in God, and at the same time as something based in eternal law, understood as a design of God's wisdom. Eternal law, embracing all particular actions, is not, from the human perspective, accessible cognition directly. It is enacted in the struc-ture of the created being and - in case of human beings - in free choices taking this structure into account. In the concluding remarks, the results obtained earlier are applied directly to the contemporary conception of human rights. Human rights are understood in the first place as "just things" - concrete goods of man; as that which is due because of subordination, based on dignity, to the personal development of man. That which is just is understood as a relational - actual or potential - state of things, which exists by virtue of existing relations. Evaluations referring to that which is right are true when respective relations of due-to-recipient take place; norms of conduct are true when respective relations of obligation-of-subject take place. Examples of the application of the sketched theory outside the field of human rights are also presented. Procedural consequences of the developed theory are shown, such as the discrimination of two types of legislative procedures which differ significantly in the structure of argumentation: the first aims at recognition of that which is just independently of the will of the legislator, and the second, at making individual or collective "projects" of development compatible. Finally the possibilities of applying the theory to the increasingly important problems of the protection of the environment and the "rights" of animals are mentioned. The central issue is a philosophical conception of man and his freedom and a conception of law. It is also indispensable to turn to a general theory of being. The search for a comprehensive theory of human rights requires attention to the Abso¬lute Being - God - as well. This is important for at least two reasons. First, a conception of the Absolute Being is integral to philosophy of the systemic type -of which the present book is a piece. A conception of the Absolute Being is signifi¬cant for understanding all being, including, first of all, man as a personal being. Second, every theory of human rights which does not comprise the problem of the Absolute may be questioned as to whether solutions adopted in it do not lead, in consequence, to eliminating God from the perspective of the understanding of law. It is desirable that a philosophical theory should deal with this problem directly. A theory which eliminates God from the perspective of the understanding of rights will be unacceptable for all those who, for philosophical reasons or relying on faith, consider God as the author of inherent rights. Nevertheless, a theoretical approach to rights from the perspective of the Absolute Being should only be a possible extension of a philosophical approach which bases rights on something which is cognizable independently of the acceptance of the existence of God so that the theory is also acceptable for those who reject the existence of God or suspend their judgment on this subject. The pursued theory should therefore contain, on the one hand, reference to natural, faith-independent foundations of human rights, but on the other hand, point to a possible extension accounting for the Absolute Being. The analyses contained in this chapter have undoubtedly some historical value since they are based on source texts. Nevertheless, the use of these texts and not critical works was dictated, first of all, by a conviction that analyses embrace a given theory in the aspect selected by the interests of the researcher. Therefore to find out what past thinkers say on the subject characterized in the first part it is simpler to reach to the sources than to adopt the existing critical works. The pre¬sented reconstruction of Aquinas' views on philosophy of law incorporates proposi¬tions of supplementing and developing some of the ideas undertaken by him. Obligation to act in this and not an other way arises because human actions are subordinated to the conformity, on the one hand, of aims realized by these actions and, on the one hand, the order of being determining that which is favourable to man or destroys him. The content of the order of being is, on the one hand, determined by the structure of being independent from man's will and, on the other, by free decisions of man. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Natural Law and Thomistic Juridical Realism: Prospects for a Dialogue with Contemporary Legal Theory by Petar PopovicPius Pietrzyk O.P.Natural Law and Thomistic Juridical Realism: Prospects for a Dialogue with Contemporary Legal Theory. By Petar Popovic. Foreword by F. Russell Hittinger. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2022. Pp. xv + 307. $75.00 (hardcover). ISBN: 978-0-8132-3550-9.About a decade ago the former Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago, (...) H. E. Francis Cardinal George, one of the great theologian bishops of the American episcopate, issued a letter on a piece of pending legislation in the state of Illinois. The focus of the letter was on the teaching of the natural law, and why adherence to the natural law required opposition to the proposed legislation. In response, a well-known law professor at a prestigious secular [End Page 710] law school in the state wrote a public response for an online political website. The focus of his argument was to criticize the notion of natural law according to his understanding of the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas. It is not necessary to describe the details of his argument, other than to say it tended to understand natural law as mere naturalism that evinced a fairly glaring misreading of the Angelic Doctor. That is, the secular legal scholar argued, in essence, that since the activity in question was observable by animals in nature, that it was therefore part of the natural law, and could be defended as a right. To this, a Thomistic sed contra is perhaps the most fitting response.As this story makes clear, there is a great ignorance of what constitutes the natural law in the secular consciousness, even among the most respected of secular legal scholars, to say nothing of the application of the natural law to the juridic world of law and politics. Perhaps the last hurrah of natural law, at least in the American public consciousness, was then Sen. Joseph Biden’s famous grilling of Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas on the subject in 1991. Since then, legal positivism has become nearly universal, divorcing legal norms from any realistic understanding of a common human nature. It has become the dominant ideology in America’s legal academies, even if some adherents of natural law remain in positions of authority in the judicial system.Although it has faded from the world of secular law in the United States, the tradition of natural law has retained a firm hold in Catholic thought, especially by that religious order dedicated to the teachings of its most brilliant adherent, St. Thomas. Not only Thomistic natural law, but proponents of the so-called new natural law continue to provide a vibrant source of debate and insight into the understanding of the natural law in evaluating the goodness of human action. Pope John Paul II’s famous encyclical Veritatis Splendor represents the magisterial commitment to the natural law approach in moral thinking, even if some might believe that commitment has weakened in recent years.To a lesser degree, there has remained a strong current of natural law thinking within the currents of legal philosophy in canon law, even if the precise connection between natural law and its juridic instantiation has not always been the focus. Among recent ecclesiastical legal theorists, arguably the most influential proponent of a robust natural law approach to legal philosophy was the Spanish canonist Javier Hervada Xiberta, and especially his Introducción crítica al derecho natural, currently in its tenth Spanish edition. A disciple of Jose Maria Escriva’s Opus Dei movement, Hervada was a long-serving and internationally respected dean of the School of Law in Navarre. Through his teaching and the various journals he founded, he insisted on the link between law and justice—lex and ius. Hervada was firmly convinced of the realism of law: law is nothing less than the ipsa res iusta. That notion of ius was not simply an idea, but recognized a real relationship of debt and obligation between persons. [End Page 711]In this, Hervada saw himself as the proponent not of some novel theory, but merely of one... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Philosophy of Belonging: Persons, Politics, Cosmos by James GreenawayThomas W. HolmanGREENAWAY, James. A Philosophy of Belonging: Persons, Politics, Cosmos. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2023. xii + 326 pp. Cloth, $125.00; paper, $50.00“Belonging” is a common theme in contemporary political discourse, but it has not yet garnered much sustained attention in terms of its philosophical significance. James Greenaway’s new book (...) aims to address this issue by offering an original and penetrating exploration into the philosophical meaning of this difficult and laden term. At the heart of his approach lies the concept of the metaxy. As explained in Plato’s Symposium and expanded by Eric Voegelin, it is a state of being-in-tension between two static states or “poles,” which can represent wisdom and ignorance, need and plenty, transcendence and immanence, eternity and time, and so forth. This becomes the foundation for Greenaway’s “hermeneutic of belonging,” which consists of two forces: “existence-from” and “existence-toward.” Existence-toward is a sort of intentionality, a consciousness of “someone or something with whom I am experiencing some kind of an affinity.” It is the “where” or “with whom” I desire to be. Existence-from is an awareness [End Page 717] of the other that a person carries within him- or herself: persons, communities, places, times that are “so significant that I cannot be who I am without them.” Greenaway argues that belonging in the abstract hinges on the metaxic tension between these two poles, variously conceived depending on the context.The second section of the book examines the different contexts in which existence-from and existence-toward play out within each person: between oneself, other persons, and the cosmos. These constitute the various aspects of what Greenaway calls “presence.” Belonging on this level means each person participates “in the grand, continual emergence of reality in all of its variety.” Presence to myself, to others, and to the cosmos as a whole reflects the metaxic tension of the hermeneutic of belonging.In the final section, Greenaway turns to explaining how belonging works in community. He begins by differentiating between the communion, or “bond and order” of a community, and communitas, the “shoulder-to-shoulder stance” that permeates political existence. Communion is a manifestation of the aforementioned hermeneutic of belonging within and among persons and the cosmos. It is the more fundamental principle of community that reflects the primordial intersubjectivity of Buber’s I–Thou: In some sense, each person is or must be involved in or available (in the sense of Gabriel Marcel’s disponibilité) to the other. Without some sort of grounding in communion, communitas becomes impossible. By contrast, communitas is the jostling, back-and-forth movement associated with the practical discernment and attainment of common political goods that Greenaway conceives, with St. Augustine, as objects of common love. These are sought out, argued about, and even fought over in everyday political life, which is marked by a shared commitment to achieving the goals associated with common political goods. The communitas is centered in the tension of belonging between the more fundamental recognition of each person as a bearer of meaning in the cosmos and the everyday business of collectively discerning and implementing the common good.But communion carries a further meaning. In addition to the more fundamental respect for myself and all others in the community as bearers of presence, it is also an awareness of all possible transcendent perfections of the community as a whole. Greenaway calls this second sense “sacramentality.” Yet this mysterious perfection is not necessarily for the here-and-now. It is, rather, another example of the hermeneutic of belonging where transcendent principles intersect with temporal reality. Thus, every community is sealed with seeming contradictions that, far from being irresolvable paradoxes, illustrate its belonging-in-tension alongside mystery. An example of one such paradox is the ideal of universal humanity: we are aware of the claims placed on us by our shared universal humanity, but we are also necessarily situated within a particular place or country or community. The idea of a universal brotherhood of man reflects one way in which transcendent perfection [End Page... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:318 BOOK REVIEWS ture. But when it comes to love, " we should measure the love of different persons according to the different kinds of union." Thomas underscores what Outka calls the " inclusive " conception of universal love. God is to be loved as the supreme good, as the source of all happiness; the neighbor is loved as sharing in the happiness we receive from God. Charity (...) eviscerates neither our natural inclination for happiness nor our natural associations with others. Rather, it " commands each act of other sorts of friendship " in relation to our friendship with God. Charity is inherently prudential and thus an account of " special relations,'' which Werpehowski and others address, is incorporated into the discussion of charity. Of course one might make the same objection against Thomas's appropriation of Aristotle that I have leveled against the appropriation of modern notions. But Aristotle is not so much a secular rival of Christianity as he is a philosopher of human nature. A return to Christian Aristotelianism is suggested by Kierkegaard's dictum that we have forgotten what it means to be Christian because we have forgotten what it means to be human. THOMAS s. HIBBS Boston College Chestnut Hill, MA The Trinity: An Analysis of St. Thomas Aquinas' Expositio of the "De Trinitate" of Boethius. By DOUGLAS C. HALL. Studien und Texte zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters 33. Leiden/New York: Brill, 1992. Pp. vi + 131. $40 (cloth). Aquinas's expositio of the De Trinitate of Boethius is an admirable paradigm of profound analysis and interpretive genius. Adhering closely to a literal reading of the short sexpartite Boethian tractate, but breaking off his analysis (for reasons unknown) just before the end of section two where Boethius begins his ex professo treatment of the Trinity, Aquinas ends up mainly plumbing the depth of Boethius's prefatory remarks about the epistemological status of theology, and thus in six questions (comprising 24 articles) constructs the most extensive treatment in all his works of the nature and method of theology. Little wonder, then, that Leo Elders titles his introduction to the expositio of Aquinas Faith and Science (Rome, 1974) or that Armand Maurer names his two volume translation of it Faith, Reason and Theology and The Division and Methods of the Sciences (Toronto, 198687 ). In Thomas's commentary, only the fourth article of question three treats the doctrine of the Trinity directly, though the four articles of BOOK REVIEWS 319 question four also discuss the cause of plurality, a crucial topic for trinitarian theology. I was mildly surprised, then, that Douglas Hall gives the title The Trinity to what professes to offer a " careful textual analysis and criticism " (112) of the methods and contents of Aquinas's commentary. In this slender book of four chapters, Hall inserts, between a short introduction and a conclusion, a second chapter on all five of Boethius's tractates and a third on Aquinas's commentary on the De Trinitate. He has some interesting things to say about the dating and contents of the Boethian works, and also makes some good points about Thomas's commentary, especially as regards questions five and six. But the title is a misnomer, for Hall skips over lightly the five articles mentioned above where Aquinas treats trinitarian issues, devoting only three pages to them. Hall's main concern, like Aquinas's, is theological methodology and epistemology. Hall attempts a rather Hegelian, dialectical appraisal of Aquinaswhich stresses Aquinas's reconstruction of Boethius by highlighting their common methodological theme of agnosia-and links it with an integrative approach which grounds itself in " a transcendental reading of Aquinas, while retaining themes from participationist and analogical literature" (112). The first chapter discusses the participationist, analogical, and transcendental strains of contemporary Thomism, and evinces a certain predilection for Rahner (his influence is also evident on pages 50, 58, 92-95). In sum, Hall combines a Rahnerian and dialectical reading of Aquinas. Due to his presupposition, however, he frequently does not engage Aquinas on his own grounds but burdens him with false problems and dubious theses as he seeks to sort out Aquinas's " dialectical tensions." Often the result is a rather gratuitous reading encumbered with unsubstantiated non sequiturs that... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Light That Binds: A Study in Thomas Aquinas's Metaphysics of Natural Law by Stephen L. BrockBrian BesongThe Light That Binds: A Study in Thomas Aquinas's Metaphysics of Natural Law by Stephen L. Brock (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2020), xv + 277 pp.Fr. Stephen L. Brock is arguably one of the most important contemporary contributors to the Thomistic understanding of natural law. Hence, the publication of (...) his updated and revised doctoral dissertation on the topic [End Page 289] of the metaphysics of natural law in St. Thomas will be gladly received by Thomistic scholars and moral theorists alike. In The Light That Binds, Brock's central task is to explain the metaphysics of the promulgation of natural law in man. Put differently although extant literature on natural law may be useful for action analysis—why lying is always wrong, say—less attention has been paid to the way in which natural law has been promulgated by God and is present in the human intellect. What literature is available, either as an explanation of St. Thomas or as criticism of the same, has failed to do Aquinas justice, so Brock argues.The book comprises seven chapters and an introduction. In the first chapter, Brock's central goal is to survey the ways in which (especially more recent) commentators of Aquinas have distorted the sense in which natural law constitutes genuine law, as well as the relationship between natural law and God. For, there is a line of thought on natural law, particularly prominent in the "new natural law" tradition, according to which the principles at the heart of the theory do not fully satisfy the four criteria of legitimate law given by Aquinas. Rival views have natural law constituting a real law, but in virtue of an epistemically explicit reliance on God as lawgiver, among other distortions. Figureheads surveyed in the chapter include Dom Odon Lottin, Ernest Fortin, and Francisco Suárez, among others.In the second chapter, Brock outlines and defends his positive view regarding the legal status of the natural law by way of continued discussion of Lottin, particularly Lottin's contention that St. Thomas was heavily influenced by a mid-thirteenth-century Franciscan tract, De legibus et praeceptis. Brock argues that St. Thomas conceives of natural law as having an even closer relationship to eternal law than is posited by the earlier Franciscan tract, and the rest of the chapter is largely focused on unpacking this close relationship. In sum, natural law is law because it involves a rational ordering by God of our intellect to the goods of our nature, a human participation in an eternal ordering of all things to their ends (i.e., the eternal law). We need not discover the source of the ordering—namely, God—in grasping the first principles of his ordering, as Brock explains here and elsewhere. But the strictly legal status of the principles requires that natural law comes from a legitimate authority, among other essential elements.Chapters 3 and 4 tackle the more human side of the metaphysics of natural law. More concretely, in these chapters, Brock explains the wheres and the whats of our possession of the natural law. For, not all ordering of objects to ends implies the sort of normativity we see in the natural law. Brute animals, among others, have natural inclinations too, and yet they are not governed through these instinctual drives by a natural law. Natural law [End Page 290] is present preeminently in the human intellect, Brock argues, and is not to be confused with the prerational drives that we share as part of our animal nature. God instills these rational drives—the light, as it were—into reason in such a way that an individual can grasp its force autonomously, as basic conceptional truths about what right and wrong consist in (72). Here it would have been nice for Brock to reflect briefly on how Aquinas's views on moral knowledge fit within his broader epistemological commitments, as the natural (conceptual) knowledge of right and wrong at first glance shares common ground with the Franciscan tradition on divine illumination as found in figures... (shrink)

흔히 법은 정의를 지키기 위해 존재한다고 한다. 그러나 실제로우리가 살고 있는 이 사회의 질서를 유지하는 법은 정의보다는 법적 안정성을 위해 존재하는 경우가 많다. 법실증주의의 물결 속에서 이렇게 목적이 전치(轉置)된 법은 공동의 이익이나 정의보다는강자의 이익을 대변하는 수단으로 전락하고 있다. 이 글에서 논자는 현대 법 개념에서 공동선이라는 목적이 간과되고 있다는 사실을 지적하고 이에 대한 대안으로 토마스 아퀴나스의 법 개념에서공동선을 분석한다. 이를 위해 제2절에서는 라드브루흐를 따라 현대 법의 이념이 정의, 합목적성, 법적 안정성이라는 세 목적에 이바지하고 그 중 정의는 법의 형식만을 규정하고 내용에 있어 (...) 합목적성은 방법, 법적 안정성은 주체의 측면을 담당한다는 점을 살펴본다. 그리고 이 세 목적 간의 우선순위에 있어 법적 안정성이 가장 중요하다고 하여 법의 현실성과 실정성이 공공의 복리보다 더중요하다는 법실증주의에 편중되어있다는 점을 지적한다. 제3절에서는 ‘공동선을 위해 공동체를 책임지는 자가 공포한 이성의 명령’ 이라는 아퀴나스 법 개념을 목적인, 형상인, 작용인으로 분석하고그 안에 자연법적인 요소 뿐 아니라 실정법적인 요소가 조화를 이루고 있다는 사실을 보여준다. 그리고 법의 본질(형상인)과 주체(작용인)도 법의 목적(공동선)을 충족해야 성립할 수 있다는 점과개인의 이익과 민주주의, 면책특권의 필요조건이 공동선이라는 사실도 지적한다. 제4절에서는 아퀴나스의 공동선 개념이 현대 법 개념이 노정하는 자연법주의/실정법주의 간의 대립을 해소하고 자기애와 공동체의 이익 간의 조화의 단초를 제공하며 존재와 가치의영역의 괴리를 메워줄 수 있는 이점이 있다는 사실을 보여준다. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS The Recovery of Virtue: The Relevance of Aquinas for Christian Ethics. By JEAN PORTER. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990. Pp. 208. $24.95 (cloth). On Faith: Summa Theologiae 2-2, qq. 1-16 of St. Thomas Aquinas. Translated by MARK D. JoRDAN. Readings in the Summa the· ologiae, Vol. 1. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990. Pp. 208. $9.95 (paper). Two recent publications well serve (...) the growing interest in what Aquinas has to say about virtue, human and divine. First, Jean Porter carefully studies the general " moral theory of Thomas Aquinas's Summa theologiae in the light of the problematics of contemporary Christian ethics, Protestant as well as Catholic " (p. 13). Her work incorporates a readable introduction to the main components of Aquinas's moral philosophy: a realist conception of the good, the instantiation of that good in the world of human actions and goals, and the ordering of choice towards the good through virtue. Secondly, Mark Jordan introduces a new translation in a " spare but accessible English" (p. 18) of the treatise on faith (Summa theologiae Ha-Hae qq, 1-16). Since both volumes concern the secunda pars of Aquinas's Summa theologiae, we can suitably examine their merits in this single review. The Recovery of Virtue aims at drawing the thought of Aquinas into a clearer dialogue with those who write about theological ethics in the English-speaking world. Accordingly, Porter prefaces her fine study with a fair, though brief, survey of Catholic moral theology since Vatican II and summary accounts of the dominant themes in the works of Gene Outka, James Gustafson, and Stanley Hauerwas. She th.en turns to a " reconstruction of the more strictly philosophical components " of Aquinas's moral theory as contained in the Summa theologiae. In chapter 2, Porter explains some basic notions which undergird Aquinas's general theory of morals, for example, his notion of goodness as something real; the premise that what is good or best for anyone is so in virtue of its being of a certain kind; the assertion that the self remains a legitimate " object " of theological charity; the view that one discovers intelligibility and organization within the created order; and finally, the conviction that the final perfection of the ra141 142 BOOK REVIEWS tional creature transcends the limits which creatureliness itself imposes. In chapter 3, Porter gives a fine account of Aquinas's action theory, illustrated by the sorts of good examples that Aquinas himself would have used today. Thomas Gilby once remarked that end so dominates the secunda pars that it should he read through to say what it means. Porter's first three chapters render a clear, organized analysis of Aquinas's moral teleology. Still, I would like to raise two small issues which may suggest lines for further inquiry. First, Porter asks whether Aquinas's teleological frame of reference allows for performing actions " without reference to any wider aim" (p. 76). As examples of those things which one can simply desire for themselves, she proposes engagement in or with: " fine music, a life of service, chocolates, children, religious ecstasy, sexual ecstasy... the list is endless" (loc. cit.). First of all, this list of examples seems to ignore a basic distinction between a finis cui and a finis cuius gratia, or the difference between something that is sought for itself and something which is sought for the sake of a further end. A person may never virtuously subordinate children and (service to) other people to his or her own goals or purposes (including delight). We can render them their due according to the diverse types of justice, even expect to receive something good from them in theological hope, and above all love them in theological charity. But we can never turn them into a finis cnius gratia. On the other hand, fine music, chocolates, and ecstasy both sexual and religious (if by the latter one means created thoughts and feelings about God and not union with God himself) always remain instrumental, that is, they can never virtuously serve as a finis cui. If we take Porter's example, Aquinas's teleological framework includes the chocolate ice-cream... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Ethics as a Work of Charity: Thomas Aquinas and Pagan Virtue by David DecosimoTravis KroekerEthics as a Work of Charity: Thomas Aquinas and Pagan Virtue David Decosimo stanford, ca: stanford university press, 2014. 376 pp. $65.00 / $29.95If "debeo distinguere" represents the programmatic scholarly agenda for "prophetic Thomism," over against the more mystical narrative "exitus et reditus" itinerary of Dionysian Augustinianism, David Decosmio should be considered (...) a virtuous practitioner of this Thomistic craft in the domain of political ethics. To put it more accurately, Decosimo provides a complex, lucid account of his reading of Thomas as one who tutors Christians and especially Christian ethicists through "fraternal correction" in what it means to provide a generous, charitable account of "pagan virtue" via the making of distinctions. For Decosimo the word "pagan" refers to non-Christian "outsiders"—that is, "all those without charity" (11). While that may seem to be a noncharitable way to put it, Decosimo means it to bespeak that form of charity that allows non-Christians to be and to speak as non-Christians, absent (or refusing) those virtues that Thomas calls "theological"—those habits infused supernaturally by God through the "redemptive grace" that orders and unites humans "in loving friendship with the God revealed in Jesus Christ" (11). Thomas's representative pagan is, of course, Aristotle. Decosimo insists that a correct reading of Thomas opposes both "hyper-Augustinian Thomism" (on which account non-Christians are incapable of true virtue) as well as a "public reason Thomism" (which avoids theological claims). At the same time, Decosimo claims that Thomas remains fully Augustinian in his theological account of charity and yet "unites and transforms Aristotle and Augustine alike to teach charity toward outsiders and their virtues" (1). To put it in terms of the formula Decosimo reiterates throughout the book, Aquinas "strives to be Aristotelian by being Augustinian and vice versa" (41, 70, 181 253, etc.). In so doing, he offers resources for a prophetic Thomism that more charitably navigates the church's relations to secular politics by welcoming the contributions of pagan virtue to its own Christian virtue.If "charity's scholarly work is the multiplication of distinctions" (8) then Decosimo's book is a model of charity. Decosimo works as an analytic philosopher at a high level of erudition to elucidate the linguistic and syllogistic puzzles in Thomas's accounts of virtue in a close reading of a range of works to show that, for Thomas, natural human virtue oriented toward the shared human and political good (the highest good attainable without charity) is true [End Page 199] virtue in which Christians and non-Christians, Augustinians and Aristotelians, may fully share and participate together. Indeed, the theological virtues must be devoted to the charitable interpretation of all contributions dialectically considered and ordered to the highest human good. Only by adhering to such a vision of virtue that welcomes pagan virtue will Christians practice the ethics of charity, and prophetic Thomism provides a model for how the church may engage difference in a way that honors others while being faithful to its own vision of the gift of grace.I hope it will not be taken as uncharitable or (ugh!) "hyper-Augustinian" to suggest that Decosimo's account of prophetic Thomism is more attuned to Aristotelian logic and the dialectic of definitional distinctions than it is to Augustine's more Platonic account of pagan virtue as a Dionysian erotic dialectic in which the "logos is wild." But I am in full agreement with Decosimo's claim that ethics as a work of charity ought to be open to both (and "all") in providing resources to Christian and non-Christian ethicists alike for engaging contemporary political challenges concerning otherness and difference in the service of justice.Travis KroekerMcMaster UniversityCopyright © 2018 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

This book begins and ends with a defense of an interesting and provocative thesis. Right actions, choices, intentions, and the virtues which dispose one to right actions are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for being a good person. As Keenan defines it "goodness is the measure of persons, their habits of conduct, and their acts as proceeding from one who strives openly out of love to realize right living" ; and "rightness is the measure of acts and the proximate sources (...) of acts, that is, choices, intentions, and virtues, according to their fittingness to reason". Since an agent's failure to conform to rational standards of conduct does not mean that the agent is not striving to do so, rightness is not a necessary condition for goodness. Since an agent's actually conforming to rational standards does not mean that the agent is striving out of love to become more rightly ordered, rightness is not a sufficient condition for goodness. (shrink)

The book reconstructs the history of Western ethics. The approach chosen focuses the endless dialectic of moral codes, or different kinds of ethos, moral doctrines that are preached in order to bring about a reform of existing ethos, and ethical theories that have taken shape in the context of controversies about the ethos and moral doctrines as means of justifying or reforming moral doctrines. Such dialectic is what is meant here by the phrase ‘moral traditions’, taken as a name for (...) threads of moral discourse, made in turn of other interwoven threads, including transmission of shared codes, appeals to reform of prevailing custom, rational argument about the justification of some precept on the basis of some shared general teaching or principle, and rational argument about the ultimate basis for principles and justification of authoritative teaching. That is, the approach adopted to the reading of ethical texts depends on a firm belief in the fact that philosophers hardly created any ethical doctrine out of nothing. The main point this book tries to highlight is how different philosophical theories emerged and followed each other as a result of attempts at accounting for what was going on in the world of moral traditions. Changes were propelled by controversies between different schools, and highly abstract arguments were the unintended effects of moves made by controversialists forced to transform (and occasionally to turn upside down) their own doctrines in order to face the challenge posed by other arguments. This is the reason why the book examines not only texts that already enjoy pride of place in the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), but also other texts usually treated in the histories of religions (the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran), and others considered to be much less philosophical (Plutarchus, Pufendorf). -/- 1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism. Two different traditions of morality in VI-V century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates answer to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy. Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistence in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The chapter illustrates then the relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater familias, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexis, or ‘disposition’. Prudence, or better practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with bouleusis or deliberation is examined, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a way of life. The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. -/- 4. Epicurus and ethics as self-care. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of a science of well-being aiming, more than at pleasure as in the popular view, at reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. Cicero is treated, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is chosen as the best example of what the Stoic tradition could yield, an art of living based on sophisticated introspection, in turn aimed at making a kind of cognitive therapy possible, dismantling obnoxious passions at their root by systematically correcting false representations. -/- 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism. A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torā (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Leviticus is stressed as the turning point when emphasis mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, is combined with the legal tradition, yielding the change in sensibility of the Second Temple time. Philo of Alexandria is described as one of the three leading figures – together with Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Yeshua – at the apex the emergence of the mentioned new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, two eventually identical precepts whose meaning is arguably more sober and sensible than the long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine has made us believe and no novelty vis-à-vis so-called Ancient-Testament teachings. -/- 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism. The first section examines the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirqé Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deòt, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexeis and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was ‘the tool by which the world was built’; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous , but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure Judaism. The third section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manichaeism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. The last section summarizes the turbulent history of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and a few topics from the Stoic-Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua had been influenced by cynic preachers, is a proof of the necessity felt by Christian preachers to translate the original ‘Christian’ teaching into a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where an early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 8. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism. The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. Al-Farabi wrote an enjoyable remake of the Platonic Republic, arguing that the citizen’s virtues were the basis on which the political building needs to rest. The secular lawgiver is enlightened by the light of reason in his everyday practice of governance, but room is made for the Prophet as the voice of revealed truth that confirms and completes the rational truth that philosophy may afford. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 9. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelian ethics. The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place a first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed just less striking traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Torah and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirké Avot could be translated. -/- 10. Thomas Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian morality and Aristotelian ethics. In the first section the fresh start is described of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium. In a first phase, Anselm and Peter Abelard built on a Platonic and Augustinian legacy. In this phase. remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. Aquinas’s ethics is a theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract a self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave "pure nature" incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones, such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too demanding and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Ia-IIae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas could reduce the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethic, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is not ethical ‘absolutism’, as both traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularist enemies of dogmatic morality tend to believe. It is instead an ethic of prudential judgment. Exceptions to this approach – or better results of logical fallacies – are such claims as the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of "intrinsically evil acts", claims that simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences Thomas did not live long enough to draw or was not consistent enough to dare to draw. -/- 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry. The first topic illustrated is the discussion about the notion of pura natura, namely the human condition after the original sin and before divine revelation. The core notion was already there in Aquinas but was later developed by Caietanus (Thomas de Vio) with a number of interesting implications: firstly a view of human nature as such much more positive than Augustine’s and his followers’ view, including both Calvinists and Jansenists; secondly, the implication that the philosopher’s morality, as opposed to the Christian’s morality, is a quite respectable kind of morality; thirdly, that theocracy and prosecution of the unfaithful lacked justification, with more far-fetching consequences than Aquinas himself had dared to draw. The second topic is casuistry, a new name for a comparatively older way of thinking, which was already there in late Stoicism and Cicero as well as in the Talmudic literature. This is an approach aimed at yielding probable enough solutions for doubtful cases even in absence of completely safe staring points. The genre developed from medieval reference books for confessors and became by the sixteenth-century a sophisticated tool-box for dealing with various fields of applied ethics. Francisco Vitoria, the main authority of Baroque Scholasticism, was a controversial figure, among the proponents of the new discipline of casuistry and a consistent proponent of more separation between the religious and the civil authority, stricter limits to the legitimacy of war, innate rights of non-Christian nations in the New World based on the notion of pura natura, providing a standard of ‘natural’ goodness, previous to revelation, on which the Indian nations were judged to live in a naturally good condition, provided with the institutions of family, justice, and religion had accordingly a right to full respect by Christian sovereigns. Bartolomé de Las Casas, arguing along similar lines, was the leader of a historical battle in defence of the rights of the Indios. -/- 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living. A short description of one of the Renaissance Phyrronism, one of the classical philosophies revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Montaigne combines the sceptical epistemology with an understanding of ethics – indeed of philosophy as a whole – in terms of an art of living inspired by two basic ideas, sagesse, that is, practical wisdom as the only kind of rationality available after theology, science, and tradition have declared bankrupt, and an aesthetic ideal of self-transformation through the art of writing and introspection. -/- 13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism. The chapter illustrates first the vicissitudes of Augustinianism newly born after the late medieval triumph of Thomist Aristotelianism in the alternative Protestant and Catholic versions processed by the Calvinists and the Jansenists. Then it illustrates the doctrines of Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal’s best disciple, on the impossibility of introspection, on the ubiquity of self-deception, on the incurably evil character of the passion of love, and on the two moralities, the one of the man of the world, the morality of honesty which is indispensable for granting peace and order but devoid of any true value for eternal salvation, since the same external behaviour may be prompted by opposite motivations, and the morality of charity, the only true one but also useless to society. The third topic is Pierre Malebranche’s view of self-deception as a ubiquitous phenomenon accounting for human action and responsibility and his reformulated theory of self-love, no less ubiquitous than for Nicole and yet not as incurably evil, given the distinction between morally indifferent and even necessary amour de soi and vicious amour proper, a distinction on which the whole of Rousseau’s moral and political theory rests. -/- 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality. The chapter is dedicated to the discovery of the idea of a ‘new moral science’. Hugo Grotius is discussed first highlighting the real character of his project, much closer to the Thomist idea of a natural law accessible to non-corrupted human reason when human beings are living in a state of pura natura. Then Hobbes’s combination of scepticism, voluntarism, and conventionalism is described and both the continuity with Grotius’s new science, in the search for non-revealed rational morality, and the break with him, in the adoption of voluntarism and refusal of an intellectualist view of natural law, are illustrated. Pufendorf’s work is illustrated as a synthesis of the two previous attempts and the – up to Schneewind underestimated – paradigmatic example of the new science of morality. -/- 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism. The chapter gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology – and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown, elaborated on Cumberland’s (and Malebranche’s, as well as Leibniz’s) strategy for finding a third way between intellectualist view and voluntarist view of the laws of nature. The result of their elaboration was a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number possible sets of laws on a maximizing criterion, and God’s maximandum is happiness for his creatures. The chapter notices also how such a solution aimed at solving at once the problem of evil and that of the foundation of moral obligation by proving how God’s choice was justified as far as it was the one minimising the amount of suffering in the world. 16. Richard Price and intuitionism. The chapter describes first the doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists, an example of hyper-rationalist reaction to Calvinism. Secondly it describes the sophisticated and universally ignored – from Sidgwick to Anscombe –version of what was later labelled ‘ethical intuitionism’ – showing how it escapes familiar objections and misrepresentations of intuitionism – from Mill to Rawls – in grounding its argument on transcendental arguments while carefully avoiding recourse to introspection and psychological evidence, which has been taken as a too easy target by critics of intuitionism. Thirdly, the chapter discusses Whewell’s ‘philosophy of morality’, as opposed to ‘systematic morality’, not unlike Kant’s distinction between a pure and an empirical moral philosophy. Whewell worked out a systematization of traditional normative ethics as a first step before its rational justification; he believed that the point in the philosophy of morality is justifying a few rational truths about the structure of morality such as to rule hedonism, eudemonism, and consequentialism; yet a system of positive morality cannot be derived solely from such rational truths but requires consideration of the ongoing dialectics between idea and fact in historically given moralities. Whewell’s intuitionism turns out closer to Kantian ethics than commentators have made us believe until now, and quite different from what Sidgwick meant by intuitionism. -/- 17. Adam Smith and the morality of role-switch. The chapter describes first, Hutcheson’s attempt at basing the ‘new science’ of natural law on different bedrock than Pufendorf and the English Platonists, namely a moral sense, a faculty whose existence is assumed to be proved on an empirical basis. The second step is a reconstruction of Hume’s rejoinder in terms of a new science of man including morality on an ‘experimental’ basis, that is, a ‘Newtonian’ hypothetical-deductive approach, distinguished from Hutcheson’s allegedly uncritical descriptive approach to human nature. The third step is a reconstruction of Adam Smith theory of morality understood as emerging from a spontaneous interplay of exchanges of situations (the most basic meaning of the word ‘sympathy’ as construed by this author). -/- 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. The Enlightenment spirit that suggested the idea of a new morality, free from religion, is illustrated. The notion of utility is illustrated as well as the subsequent formulations of the principle of utility. The idea of felicific calculus is discussed, showing how its inner difficulties prompted several reformulations of the principle of utility in order to avoid undesirable implications of proposed formulations. The role of the thesis of spontaneous convergence between interest and duty is discussed, showing how it left numberless questions open, and the distinction between the virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence is described as a way out of the deadlocks of classical utilitarianism. After Bentham, Mill’s reformed utilitarianism is reconstructed, showing how it is a kind of mixed system – as closer to common sense as it gives up Bentham’s claims to consistency and simplicity – resulting as unintended consequences from the controversies in which Mill was too keen to engage. The hidden agenda of the controversy between Utilitarianism and Intuitionism, going beyond the image of the battle between Prejudice and Reason, is described, showing how both competing philosophical outlooks turn out to be more research programs than self-contained doctrinal bodies, and such programs appear to be implemented, and indeed radically transformed while in progress thanks to their enemies no less than to their supporters. -/- 19. Immanuel Kant, practical reason and judgment. The chapter argues that Kant took from Moses Mendelssohn the idea of a distinction between geometry of morals and a practical ethic. He was drastically misunderstood by his followers precisely on this point. He had learned from the sceptics and the Jansenists the lesson that men are prompted to act by deceptive ends, and he was aware that human actions are also empirical phenomena, where laws like the laws of Nature may be detected. His practical ethics made room for judgment as a holistic procedure for assessing the saliency of relevant moral qualities in one given situation; this procedure yields the same results as the geometry of morals does for abstract cases but does so immediately and without balancing conflicting duties with each other, since what makes for the salient quality of a situation is perceived from the very beginning. Kant's practical philosophy is richer than the received image, making room for an ‘empirical moral philosophy’ or moral anthropology including treatment of commerce, needs, value and price, happiness and well-being; the overall social theory and philosophy of history is less different from Adam Smith's than the received image makes believe; the paradox of happiness is central to Kant's philosophy; a distinction between happiness and well-being is clearly drawn; the distinction plays a basic role in establishing a link between the economic and the moral life. -/- 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the critique of abstract universalism. The chapter describes first the Romantic movement and the implications some of its concerns, rescuing passions, community, tradition, the individual as the bearer of a unique destiny, and the longing for organic unity between the individual, mankind and nature. Hegel’s contribution is discussed then, highlighting how, on the one hand, he shared a number of these concerns and on the other he had more rationalist leanings. The notion of morality is the pivotal point of the reconstruction, highlighting how Hegel construes this notion as a key to his own diagnosis of the malaise of modernity – the separation of individual and Gemeinschaft – and how his attack on Kant turns around this very idea. -/- 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment. The chapter illustrates first the idea of deconstruction of the back-world of values. Nietzsche claims to be legitimate heir of the French moralists, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, in so far as he allegedly carries out to its deepest implications their discovery of what lies behind traditional naïve belief in the existence of an objective realm of values just waiting for description by the philosopher. The two exemplars form which genealogy draws inspiration are the classical philologist’s historical reconstructions of lost meanings and the chemist’s decomposition of elements. Then the genealogy of the notions of good and evil carried out in the first dissertation of Genealogy of morals is illustrated with its paradoxical conclusion that will to power is in fact the only ‘genuine’ kind of goodness. The third point illustrated is the dialectic of ascetism and self-realization with its ambiguous outcome. The suggested interpretation of such outcome is that Nietzsche’s normative ethics is a kind of virtue ethics taking an aesthetic ideal as a normative standard -/- 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism. The chapter discusses the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences to reach, also in ethics, the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of a naïve positivist starting-point, Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations. Then it reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore’s early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. I stress the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of rather diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. I add a comparison with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different way, one that manages to pave decisive objections in a more plausible way. I end by suggesting that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe, and that the wheat (or some other gluten-free grain) of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, should be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused and mutually incompatible legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism. -/- 23. Edmund Husserl and the a-priori of action. The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl’s project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the a priori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy carried out in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach’s theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that basically sketches the very ideas ‘discovered’ later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section is dedicated to Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of ‘values’ – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler who claimed to Husserl’s legitimate heirs. -/- 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism. The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of ‘good’, its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with ‘emotive’ meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell’s ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of a rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson’s theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. Last of all, the discussion from the Forties about Hume’s law is described, mentioning Karl Popper’s argument and Richard Hare’s early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics. The chapter discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. I argue that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. A short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current is given trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot’s and Peter Geach’s critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre’s grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly unavoidable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism. The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick’s and Moore’s fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine definitely refuted. A glimpse at this uproarious process is given through two examples. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of Utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This results in preference utilitarianism combined with a ‘Kantian’ version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare’s two-level preference utilitarianism where act utilitarianism plays the function of eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of action-guiding practical device. -/- 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy. The post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named ‘Rehabilitation of practical philosophy’ is described. Among the actors of such rehabilitation there were a few of Heidegger’s most brilliant disciples, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is chosen as a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle’s lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger’s lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the central role of the notion of phronesis. -/- 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics. Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This started, instead than the rehabilitation of prudence, with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. An examination of his argument is some detail is offered, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration on Apel’s theory. -/- 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics. Rawls’s distinction between a “political” and a “metaphysical” approach to one central part of ethical theory, namely the theory of justice, is interpreted as a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and neo-casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter, namely that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls’ view never will be close – on the basic criteria for judgment. -/- 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics. The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin’s new casuistry. -/- . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:MARITAIN ON RIGHTS AND NATURAL LAW THOMAS A. FAY St. John's University Jamaica, New York T:HE WAY RIGHTS a11e viewed in our time creates urmoil in our society. But this one-sided view of rights ad ]ts origin in the philosophy of Jean Jacques Rousseaiu, in which the" Rights of Man" were divinized and hence made unlimited. In contrast, Maritain based his notion of rights on the natu:rail (...) law, and this phifosophic base can ground a more balanced view of rights, one which can protoot both against those who would assert arbitmry rights without any restraints whatever and against an authoritarian State which would subordinate an individual rights to its requirements. I. Maritain's Notion of the Natural Law For Marita:in, the ultimate groundiing of human rights is in the natural law.1 But just what does he mean by the term "natural law? " It is by no means obvious. Certa:inly from antiquity man has had some gmsp of a narturaJ faw, rthat is, of a law which transcends merely positive law, the law fashioned by men. In!J1an and the State, Maritain cites the case of Antigone, the heroine in Sophocles' pJ.ay of the same name. She breaks a positive faw in giving buriaJl to her brother 'and justifies her act by making an appeal to a law higher than any merely human law. And so she says " Nor did I deem Your ordinance of so much binding force, As that a mortal man could overbear The unchangeable unwritten code of heaven; 1 Les droits de l'homme et la, loi naturclle (New York: Editions de la Maison Frnncaise, Hl42), p. 84. 439 440 THOMAS A. FAY This is not of today and yesterday, But lives forever, having origin Whence no man knows...2 The Stoic philosophers spol{'e of a natural law; so did tnpian in the ancient Roman period, and St. Augus:tine in the early Middle Ages. The se-y;enteenth and eighteenth century saw the classical Law of Nature philosophers, such as Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, Benedict Spinoza, and John Locke. And of course, by no means least on our list, there was Thomas Aquinas. Mal11'tain takes Thomas's to be the most perfect statement of natural law. But even here there are certain ambiguities and problems. For example, with 11egard to the "primary " and " seconda,ry" precepts of natural law, the statements of St. Thomas in early work The Commentary On The Sentences are at variance with the vocabulary and the teaiching of the Summa theologiae, I-II, q. 94. Maritain attempts to clarify these obscurities by introducing what he rtakes to he the key to Thomas's 1 doctrine of natUl"al law-the notion of knowledge through inclination.3 As Maritain sees it, there are two aspects of natural law, one ontological and the other gnoseologicaL4 The ontological.aspect of natural law means that man has a being-structure which is the locus of inrtelligible necessities, that he possesses ends which necessarily correspond to his essential constitution and which are common to all men. This means that there is, by virtue of human nature itself, an order or a disposition which human reason can discover and accol'lding to which the human will should act if lit is to attain the necessary and essential ends of being human. This order or disposition is what he means by nrutural law. From this it follows that 001y being in nature, be it a tree or a dog or whatevier, has its own na.tural law, which is the normality of its funotioning, the proper way in which, by reason 2 Man and the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), p. 85. s Ibid., p. 91. 4!bill., pp. 85-94. MARITAIN ON RIGHTS AND NATURAL LAW 441 of its specific structure and specific ends, it " should " achieve the fullness of its being, The " shou1d " here is not a moral imperative but rather an ontological one, just as we say that a "good" eye" shou1d" be :able to perceive certain objects with clarity at a certain disrtance. But as soon as we enter the realm of free... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Ministers of the Law: A Natural Law Theory of Legal AuthorityThomas J. BushlackMinisters of the Law: A Natural Law Theory of Legal Authority Jean Porter Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2010. 368 pp. $30.00Jean Porter’s most recent book is the fruit of her participation with the Emory Center for the Study of Law and Religion since 2005. In this project she undertakes two interrelated tasks. First, she provides compelling (...) reasons for Christian ethicists to engage in questions internal to the discipline of jurisprudence. Second, she demonstrates how a natural law theory grounded in the work of the medieval scholastics can address some of the questions of contemporary jurisprudence. Readers familiar with her previous work will be delighted that she has extended her constructive account of natural law into the realms of jurisprudence and in the process also engages cultural psychology, rhetoric, political philosophy, and international law.Porter begins her engagement with jurisprudence in chapter 1 by noting a paradox recognized by many legal philosophers in the Anglophone world. Legal systems, as they have developed in the West, are characterized by a high degree of autonomy and independence vis-à-vis other social dynamics such as politics or morality. At the same time, however, no legal system can function in complete isolation from considerations of politics and morality. How can we account for the paradoxical autonomy of legal authority? Porter suggests that a scholastic account of natural law can provide a rationally defensible solution to this paradox by developing an account of natural authority (in chapter 2).The force of Porter’s argument rests on the capacity of her account to justify political and legal authority as a natural expression of the authority that any community exercises vis-à-vis its individual members. A community’s authority over its members is justified on the grounds that in prescribing or prohibiting particular acts, it must appeal to claims that could potentially be recognized as justifiable by any rational member of that community. The concept that creates this important hinge between an individual’s good and the good of the community is, of course, the common good. Scholars interested in the concept of the common good will find that her reflection upon it is both rooted deeply in the Christian tradition and applied with fresh insight to the realm of politics (chapter 3) and law (chapter 4). [End Page 210]One potential objection to Porter’s account of natural law could arise in response to her insistence that natural inclinations “underdetermine” the normative content of a natural law morality, leaving her account open to charges of cultural relativism or of being merely descriptive as opposed to normative. However, in this work she is able to turn these criticisms into assets for her account of natural law. She shows (successfully, I believe) how her theory of natural law is able to account for the plurality of moral, political, and legal systems that exist in our world today while still providing normative grounds for critiquing existing social systems. And in chapter 5 she demonstrates how nonderogable, jus cogens principles can be developed from her account of natural law and applied to the field of international law and human rights. In fact, the final section left me hungry for further development of her insights regarding the relationship between natural and international law.This book is written with the same rigorous logic and careful research that has made Porter one of the leading scholars of natural law theory in the field today. As such, this book would be suitable for academics in a wide variety of fields, such as law, political theory, and of course Christian ethics, or for advanced graduate students. It is most certainly a groundbreaking work for demonstrating how a theological account of natural law can engage in constructive dialogue with legal theory and politics at both a theoretical and a practical level.Thomas J. BushlackUniversity of St. ThomasCopyright © 2012 The Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Aquinas, Aristotle, and the Promise of the Common Good, first published in 2006, claims that contemporary theory and practice have much to gain from engaging Aquinas's normative concept of the common good and his way of reconciling religion, philosophy, and politics. Examining the relationship between personal and common goods, and the relation of virtue and law to both, Mary M. Keys shows why Aquinas should be read in addition to Aristotle on these perennial questions. She (...) focuses on Aquinas's Commentaries as mediating statements between Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Politics and Aquinas's own Summa Theologiae, showing how this serves as the missing link for grasping Aquinas's understanding of Aristotle's thought. Keys argues provocatively that Aquinas's Christian faith opens up new panoramas and possibilities for philosophical inquiry and insights into ethics and politics. Her book shows how religious faith can assist sound philosophical inquiry into the foundation and proper purposes of society and politics. (shrink)

Democratic theorists stress the importance of free and equal discussion and debate in a well-functioning democratic process. In this process, citizens attempt to persuade each other to support legislation by appealing to considerations of justice, liberty or the common good and are open to changing their minds when hearing the arguments of others. They are concerned to ground policy and legislation on the most defensible considerations of morality and the best empirical evidence. To be sure, majority rule remains important (...) in democratic decision making because of the persistence of disagreement. But many have argued that debates over legislation that appeal to moral considerations ought to be given a much larger place in our understanding of the ideals of democracy than theorists have given them in the past. This emphasis on the importance of moral debate and discussion in democracy is characteristic of what I call the wide view of deliberative democracy. (shrink)

[Encyclopedia entry] Born in Italy in 1225, and despite a relatively short career that ended around 50 years later in 1274, Thomas Aquinas went on to become one of the most influential medieval thinkers on political and legal questions. Aquinas was educated at both Cologne and Paris, later taking up (after some controversy) a chair as regent master in theology at the University of Paris, where he taught during two separate periods (1256-1259, 1269-1272). In the intermediate period he helped (...) establish a studium for his Order in Rome, beginning work on the Summa Theologiae, the masterwork for which he is still well-known. Subsequent to an experience (traditionally, a vision) Aquinas had on the feast of St. Nicholas in 1273, Aquinas intentionally refrained from further work on that text, so that it remained incomplete at the time of his death a year later in 1274. Apart from his own contributions, the Thomistic school – including followers within and without the Dominican Order to which Aquinas belonged – has had profound and far-reaching influence upon the history of legal thought in the West. Many of the classical developments of Thomistic thought are written as commentaries on the Summa Theologiae (hereafter, ST), including the works of Tomasso de Vio (Cajetan) and those of Domingo Banez, Francisco de Vitoria, Bartholome de las Casas, and the other highly influential members of the School of Salamanca who are noteworthy for developing Aquinas’ political and legal thought in the 16th century. Specifically, the ways in which Aquinas synthesized classical political and legal themes around the law, morality, and the common good provided a touchstone for what has come to be called ‘natural law jurisprudence.’ Natural law thinkers, in short, appeal to objective facts about what is good for human beings, and the social or political nature of the kind of creatures that we are, as a standard against which we measure the legal and social institutions created by human institutions. What is crucial here is that facts about human beings as social animals constitute reasons for individuals and groups to act or be structured in certain ways, such that ‘nature’ is the proper source for jurisprudential and political principles. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE CONCEPT OF PERSON IN ST. THOMAS AQUINAS: A Contribution to Recent Discussion* ST. THOMAS AQUINAS accepted and consistently defended Boethius' definition of person: "persona est substantia individua rationalis naturae." St. Thomas' analysis of this definition necessarily involves metaphysical questions because of the implications of the terms " substance" and " nature" and moreover it manifests the inescapahle imprint of the theological problematics which surrounded the (...) issue (e.g. the Trinity and the hypostatic union). Both of these influences, metaphysical and theological, have engendered problems of interpretation and criticism. Contemporary discussions of person largely either continue the scholastic controversies or adopt a modern perspective from which to expose apparent contradictions in St. Thomas' doctrine. The purpose of this article will be limited to a consideration of the metaphysical problems concerning the relationship between individual substance, universal, nature, and existence. It is hoped that such a clarification will resolve not only the neoscholastic controversies, but also some of the contemporary problems. I. BOETHIUS' DEFINITION OF PERSON AND ST. THOMAS' EXPLANATION A. BOETHIUS' DEFINITION Boethius develops his definition of person in the Liber contra Eutychen et N estorium after a careful consideration of na- * I have to thank cordially Father Brian Shanley, 0.P. for having revised completely this English version, devoting much time and energy to fit the text and the footnotes to the style of The Thomist. He adapted the version in good style and verified the Latin quotations. 435 436 HORST SEIDL ture and substance.1 In the first chapter he sets out to define nature and discovers four possible meanings. The first and broadest definition, embracing both substances and accidents, describes nature as belonging to all things which by their being can be in some way or another be comprehended by reason: "natura est earum rermn quae, cum sint, quoquo modo intellectu capi possunt." A second definition, comprising substances alone both corporeal and incorporeal, describes nature as anything that can effect or suffer something: " natura est vel quod facere vel quod pati possit." A third sense, taken from the Aristotelian analysis of the motion of natural substances, describes nature as the immanent principle of movement : "natura est motus principium per se et non per accidens." Finally, nature can also refer to the formal cause which provides the specific difference: " natura est unam quamque rem informans specifica differentia" (cf. ST Ia. 29, I ad 4). It is this last sense which is most important. In sum, "nature" is a broad term encompassing both composite beings and their causes. Boethius continues in chapter two by first narrowing the relevant sense of nature to substances (thus excluding accidents ) and then presenting a complete division of substances. The major distinction is between corporeal substances and incorporeal substances. Corporeal subdivides further into inanimate and animate, with animate dividing. into insensitive and sensitive and the latter dividing finally into irrational and rational. Incorporeal subdivides into rational and irrational (the life-principle of animals), with rational incorporeal substances being further distinguished into those that are immutable by nature (the Creator) and those that are not so by nature (the human soul and angels) but may become so by virtue of the immutable substance. Boethius then argues that person cannot be affirmed of inanimate beings or irrational animals. A 1 All citations from Boethius are taken from the Loeb text in Boethius: Theological Tractates and the Consolation of Philosophy, ed. H. F. Stewart and E. K. Rand (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1918). THE CONCEPT OF PERSON IN ST. THOMAS AQUINAS 437 final distinction of :substance into universal and particular leads to the conclusion that person must refer to an individual. Thus the background is set for the definition of person which opens the third chapter: " naturae rationalis individua substantia." Person must be an individual substance of a certain nature, namely rational, which nature accounts for the form or specific difference of the particular substance (the fourth meaning of chapter 1). The connection of this definition with Aristotle 's definition of man as a rational animal is unmistakable. It should also be noted that this definition of person is applicable not only to man, in whom the rational nature is not identical with his substance, but also to the... (shrink)

The ethical authority carried in the conventions of fairness and human well-being has been widely adopted under the idea of “moral economy,” forming an eclectic and interdisciplinary debate. Significant, though external to this debate, is a corpus of medieval thought which exhibits a fundamental interest in legitimate market protocols, and the political rights and obligations of agents in relation to the common good of the community. This article asserts the imperative status of a customary basis for understanding not just (...) the analytic version of moral economy but the legacy contained in what might be termed the “the moral economy of Aquinas.”. (shrink)

The most striking feature of Leo Elders’s book is the broad context with which he surrounds Thomas’s doctrine of nature. For example, his discussion of the soul provides a good review of the doctrine before and after Thomas, his discussion of “time” takes us from Parmenides to Einstein. Because Elders wants to refute those who think the doctrine of Thomas is simply of historical interest, he consistently relates Thomas’s teaching to the contemporary state of the (...) question. He does a credible job of discussing everything from general field theory, to quarks, to cell biology. (shrink)

A number of philosophers have recently become increasingly interested in the potential usefulness of fictitious and illusory beliefs.As a result, a wide variety of fictionalisms and illusionisms have sprung up in areas ranging anywhere from mathematics and modality to morality.1 In this paper, we focus on the view that Saul Smilansky has dubbed “free will illusionism”—for example, the purportedly descriptive claim that the majority of people have illusory beliefs concerning the existence of libertarian free will, coupled with the normative claim (...) that because dispelling these illusions would produce negative personal and societal consequences, those of us who are unfortunate enough to know the dangerous and gloomy truth about the nonexistence of libertarian free will should simply keep quiet in the name of the common good. (shrink)