In modern times there is a tendency to pit morality against intelligence, either in a voluntarist way that makes morality primarily a matter of the will or in a sentimentalist way that makes it primarily a matter of feeling. From the Thomist point of view, this is a mistake. Morality is an essentially cognitive enterprise,...
Communities of the Metaxu: Interdependence beyond Dependence and Independence In modernity we tend to identify the meaning of freedom with the idea of autonomy. By comparison with autonomy, we find problematic the idea of heteronomy, or variations of it. Autonomy stresses the nomos of to auto, the law of the self/same; heteronomy stresses the nomos...
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...
Why Did God Die? Salvation According to St. Thomas Aquinas The Oxford Chapter of the Thomistic Institute, in collaboration with The Aquinas Institute, welcome Dr. Rik Van Nieuwenhove (University of Durham) About the Speaker: Rik Van Nieuwenhove lectures in Medieval Thought at Durham University, UK. He has published scholarly articles on medieval theology and spirituality,...