por Aquinas Institute
Part of a special colloquium on reading the Scriptures with St Thomas Aquinas.
“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 as well as the contrast with eternal law. The speakers will discuss how theories of law treat changes in law itself or in the understanding of law.
“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 as well as the contrast with eternal law. The speakers will discuss how theories of law treat changes in law itself or in the understanding of law.
“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 as well as the contrast with eternal law. The speakers will discuss how theories of law treat changes in law itself or in the understanding of law.
“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 as well as the contrast with eternal law. The speakers will discuss how theories of law treat changes in law itself or in the understanding of law.
A lecture given as part of the 2019 Aquinas Seminar Series
A lecture given as part of the 2019 Aquinas Seminar Series
A lecture from the 2019 Aquinas Seminar Series
Part of the 2019 Aquinas Seminar series.
A paper delivered to the 2019 Aquinas Seminar 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, and hinges on the virtue of prudence – the habit of knowing the right thing to do and the right way of doing it. One cooperates with sins against prudence when one either encourages voluntarist and sentimentalist tendencies, or fails to discourage them when one has a special obligation to do so. In this paper I set out Aquinas’s account of the nature of prudence and of the vices opposed to it. It turns out that there is a special connection between these vices and sins against chastity. Aquinas’s account can in turn be developed into an account of the various ways one might fall into cooperating with sins against prudence. And it turns out that there is also a special connection between such cooperation and cooperation with sins against chastity. The key to understanding the special connection between sins against prudence and sins against chastity lies in Aquinas’s account of the “blindness of mind” that is among what he calls the “daughters of lust.”