The Aquinas Institute

Thomas Aquinas views the human being as integrally composed of spiritual soul and matter. As in all earthly species, matter is responsible for individuation: for the fact that many instances of ‘human’ can exist. Bodiliness can thus be viewed primarily as something that separates us from each other. Yet no less true for Aquinas are...

People are situated as well as related and embodied creatures; we inhabit physical, social, moral and spiritual worlds each with their action potentials or affordances. Virtue acquisition is thus partly an habitual and social process entailing increasing sensitivity to the moral affordances of situations, the fineness and fittingness of accompanying actions, and their outcomes. It...

Special Lecture by Dr William Carroll. A joint event organised by the Aquinas Institute and the Ian Ramsey Centre, University of Oxford.

AQUINAS INSTITUTE ANNUAL COLLOQUIUM "Development" conveys notions of improving, refining, advancing - change for the better. While Aquinas did not think that eternal wisdom could improve, he did hold - perhaps surprisingly - that natural and divine law could develop in some fashion. The Colloquium will explore the development of human, natural, and divine law...

Special lecture by Prof Andrew Willard Jones, The Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, and author of “Before Church and State: A Study of Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of King Louis IX”.

The Oxford Chapter of the Thomistic Institute, in collaboration with The Aquinas Institute, welcome Prof Ryan Meade This lecture will discuss the vocation of a lawyer from the perspective of virtue, specifically the four cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance. These virtues are the hinges of happiness for every person, but they play...

Passions and the Life of Virtue: Taming the Menagerie Within Sr Catherine Joseph Droste, OP Professor and Vice-Dean of Theology at the Pontifical University of St Thomas in Rome (The Angelicum) The last decades have witnessed renewed interest in virtue and virtue ethics, but an authentic study of virtue requires self-knowledge and a healthy understanding...