The most recent issue of the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly (94.2, 2020) features several articles that may be of interest to Thomists and readers of this site. On offer are a range of essays generally concerned with ethical and natural law themes.
What appears to be the most relevant to contemporary Thomistic interests is Justin Matchulat’s “Thomas Aquinas on Natural Inclinations and the Practical Cognition of Human Goods: A Fresh Take on an Old Debate.” Matchulat promises to break new ground in the “old” vs. “new” natural law debate over Aquinas’ understanding of how our natural inclinations relate to knowledge of human goods. Central to his case are that the natural inclinations play a “directive role” in our attending to basic human goods, such that as someone is, so does the end seem to such a one.
Of course, one of those natural inclinations is to seek knowledge of God. However, would the Philosopher tell us to worship the prime mover or “Thought Thinking Itself”? In his “Aristotle on the Proper Attitude Towards True Divinity,” Mor Segev analyzes possible grounds for an Aristotelian virtue of religion, and finds them in the virtue of magnanimity, which, in the face of the divine, resembles humility. He argues that Aristotle would have endorsed a “total devotion to the divine.”
Now, if you fail to be a virtuously religious philosopher, the bad news is that even the natural law demands that you be punished. Scott J. Roniger’s “Is There a Punishment for Violating the Natural Law?” proposes to examine that neglected question in Thomistic natural law theory. Augustine, Aristotle, and Plato’s Gorgias all assist Roniger’s elaboration of a Thomistic account of a three-fold punishment proper to the natural law (remorse of conscience, and a failure of friendship both to oneself and to others).
As the saying goes, traduttore, traditore. But can one be traitorous for a good end? José A. Poblete examines the influence of Grosseteste’s Latin translation of the Nicomachean Ethics 1134b18–35b5 in “The Medieval Reception of Aristotle’s Passage on Natural Justice.” Grosseteste’s interpretive transmission of what is “immutably just” influenced the commentaries of St. Albert the Great and St. Thomas Aquinas.
Also digging into the historical roots of the scholasticism in Aristotle’s Ethics is Henrik Lagerlund’s “Willing Evil: Two Sixteenth-Century View of Free Will and Their Background.” A ensemble cast of well-known and “virtually unknown” philosophers are ranged to debate the controversial apparent proposal of 16th-century Aristotelian commentator John Mair that “we can will evil for the sake of evil.” (What natural inclination leads to such a view, or what punishment the natural law demands, I leave to the readers of the ACPQ.)
Last but not least, Robert McNamara considers a more contemporary topic, “The Concept of Christian Philosophy in Edith Stein.” McNamara examines the key factors that contribute to Edit Stein’s account of a “positively Christian and specifically Catholic philosophy,” and then contrasts this proposal with the Thomistic one defended by Jacques Maritain.
- Reviewed by John Brungardt, PhD
