Philosophy Commons^™

The Descriptive Problem Of Evil, Brad Kallenberg

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Language is like the cane in the hand of the blind person. The better one becomes at getting around with the cane, the more he or she is apt to forget the cane but through the cane perceive the objects scraped and tapped by the other end. A defective cane may distort the world perceived by the blind person. So too, defective use of language threatens to muddy our understanding of the things we talk about. When discussing something as difficult as natural evils, a frequently undetected defect in our language use is “overly attenuated description.” In this piece, I …

Some Things Are Worth Dying For, Brad Kallenberg

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

In April of 1992, Kristen French, a 15 year-old girl was kidnapped and held as a sex slave in suburban Ontario. For two days she was raped and threatened with death. Surprisingly, on the third day she grew defiant, refusing to perform a particular sexual act even after she was shown pre-recorded videotape of her predecessor, Leslie, being strangled by her captors with an electrical cord. (Leslie's corpse was sawn into 10 pieces before disposal.) A record of Kristen's suffering was preserved on video tape too. Of interest is Kristen's dying claim: "Some things are worth dying for."

Kristen's story …

On Locating Disaster, Brad Kallenberg

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Imagine a man, unknown to you, standing in your backyard calmly clasping and unclasping his hands three times each hour. If we ask "What is he doing?" we would not likely be satisfied with these words: "He's clasping his hands three times per hour." There is something unnerving about the whole scene, not only because we cannot comprehend the point of clasping one's hands three times per hour; we want to know, "What's he doing in my back yard?"

There is a similarly unnerving quality about the description of the Columbia disaster as posed by the case study. By it …

The Strange New World In The Church: A Review Essay Of 'With The Grain Of The Universe' By Stanley Hauerwas, Brad Kallenberg

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Hauerwas's refusal to translate the argument displayed in With the Grain of the Universe (his recent Gifford Lectures) into language that "anyone" can understand is itself part of the argument. Consequently, readers will not understand what Hauerwas is up to until they have attained fluency in the peculiar language that has epitomized three decades of Hauerwas's scholarship. Such fluency is not easily gained. Nevertheless, in this review essay, I situate Hauerwas's baffling language against the backdrop of his corpus to show at least this much: With the Grain of the Universe transforms natural theology into "witness." In the end, my …

Praying For Understanding: Reading Anselm Through Wittgenstein, Brad Kallenberg

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

If Wittgenstein is correct to assert that practice gives words their sense, then it is logically possible that an understanding of the ontological "argument" Anselm presents in Proslogion requires some level of practical participation in prayer. A close inspection of Anselm's historical context shows that the conceptual distance we stand from him may be too great to be overcome by mere spectatorship. Rather, participation in this case likely requires of the modern reader a reproduction of Anselm's conduct in prayer. If so, Anselm's case falsifies, and thus warrants our resistance of, the commonly presumed disconnect between knowledge and practice.

Fresh …

Professional Or Practitioner? What’S Missing From The Codes?, Brad Kallenberg

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Imagine a code of ethics that advocated shady business practices and that the organization proposing the code came under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice. Imagine further, that the investigation came to trial and the stance taken by the organization was found to be illegal by the highest court of the land. Such a scenario, if true, would raise a host of questions about codes of professional ethics, not the least of which would be “What value, if any, do codes of ethics have for the teaching of ethics?”

Sadly, the above scenario is factual. However, I’m not referring …

Live To Tell, Brad Kallenberg

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

In recent years, countless Christians have found evangelism a difficult and even baffling scriptural mandate. Those we encounter, particularly young people, are often entirely unfamiliar with the basics of the Gospel. Traditional means of communicating the faith, from cold-calling to mass-mailings, simply no longer speak the language of the culture.

Brad Kallenberg recognizes that evangelism, even in our own backyard, has become a cross-cultural task. Like missionaries serving in foreign countries, we must become "students of the host culture." Much more than a "sinner's prayer," conversion requires a change of social identity.

Indeed, becoming a follower of Christ involves gaining …

Ethics As Grammar: Changing The Postmodern Subject, Brad Kallenberg

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Wittgenstein, one of the most influential, and yet widely misunderstood, philosophers of our age, confronted his readers with aporias—linguistic puzzles—as a means of countering modern philosophical confusions over the nature of language without replicating the same confusions in his own writings. In Ethics as Grammar, Brad Kallenberg uses the writings of theological ethicist Stanley Hauerwas as a foil for demonstrating how Wittgenstein’s method can become concrete within the Christian tradition. Kallenberg shows that the aesthetic, political, and grammatical strands epitomizing Hauerwas’s thought are the result of his learning to do Christian ethics by thinking through Wittgenstein.

Kallenberg argues that …

Praying For A Cure: When Medical And Religious Practices Conflict, Peggy Desautels, Margaret P. Battin, Larry May

Philosophy Faculty Publications

When the children of Christian Scientists die from a treatable illness, are their parents guilty of murder for withholding that treatment? How should the rights of children, the authority of the medical community, and religious freedom be balanced? Is it possible for those adhering to a medical model of health and disease and for those adhering to the Christian Science model to enter into a meaningful dialogue, or are the two models incommensurable? DesAutels, Battin, and May engage in a lucid and candid debate of the issues of who is ultimately responsible for deciding these questions and how to accommodate …

Christian Science, Rational Choice, And Alternative World Views, Peggy Desautels

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Book abstract: A chief aim of this resource is to rekindle interest in seeing health care not solely as a set of practices so problematic as to require ethical analysis by philosophers and other scholars, but as a field whose scrutiny is richly rewarding for the traditional concerns of philosophy.

Chapter abstract: The health-related choices made by Christian Scientists are often criticized as being irrational. It is difficult for those who turn to medical means for healing to understand how Christian Scientists can rationally justify avoiding those medical treatments known to be effective. What is especially confusing to the observer …

Religious Women, Medical Settings, And Moral Risk, Peggy Desautels

Philosophy Faculty Publications

As we think about the ethical issues surrounding women and aging, it is important to ask the following questions. What do women in our society actually experience at various stages of their life cycle? Which of these I experiences put women at moral risk? In what situations are women's senses of moral value and selfhood likely to be ignored or discounted? I, along with a number of feminist philosophers, advocate approaching feminist ethics by starting with women's actual situations and experiences.¹ No doubt, a wide variety of aging women's experiences call for moral analysis. I focus here on the …

Cover And Front Matter, University Of Dayton

University of Dayton Review

Cover, table of contents

Aquinas And The Community Of Human Persons, Michael W. Strasser

University of Dayton Review

For the sake of simplicity, let us ponder on the community of humans considered as the education and the communication of human persons; an education and a communication that spring forth only from an extraordinary kind of friendship. We shall see that with varying degrees of success, Greeks, Jews and Christians understood this friendship to be primordially an act. Through his study of their three traditions, St. Thomas Aquinas was able to say how this act was realized among us.

We should notice first that when we speak of the human community we are always speaking of a community of …

Masked Men: Person And Persona In The Giving Of Justice, John T. Noonan Jr.

University of Dayton Review

May a judge without moral guilt condemn to death a person he knows to be innocent of the crime for which he is condemned? May an executioner without moral guilt put to death a person he knows to be innocent? The answer of St. Thomas Aquinas to both of these serious moral questions is a qualified “Yes.” I propose to examine his answer, its relation to his view of the person, and the relation of his answer to modern Thomistic personalism.

Aquinas And Education For A Just Technological Society, John O. Geiger

University of Dayton Review

There remains in the heart a yearning to return home to the medieval synthesis. Yet whole-hearted acceptance would be inauthentic. At the same time however, it is possible to gain enlightenment from Aquinas. Merleau-Ponty “assumes that we can clarify the choices of others through our own and ours through theirs, that we adjust one by the other and finally arrive at the truth.” This assumption seems valid. It is an opportune time to examine “the choices” of Aquinas. Not only because it is the 700th anniversary of his death, but also because of the time that has elapsed since many …

Aquinas As A Political Theorist, W. Kenneth Howard

University of Dayton Review

That perennial controversy over the role of "normative" theory in social science has apparently abated somewhat; however, it is just such occasions as these that send academic political scientists wringing their hands. The work of St. Thomas Aquinas is hardly considered to increase our knowledge of political phenomena; he was, after all, a friar, hardly a political man, and he wrote philosophy. That latter charge is meant as the clincher. What could he possibly contribute toward an understanding of the political?

The question is fair enough; and here I propose an analysis of his only explicit political work, On Kingship. …

Saint Thomas And Social Justice, William Ferree S.M.

University of Dayton Review

The modern scientific concept of Social Justice is no older than the month of May of 1931 — the date of the publication by Pius XI of his Encyclical Quadragesimo Anno. It is true that the term “Social Justice” had been coming into increasing use since the middle of the 19th century, but its meaning was fuzzy and ambiguous and amounted to little more than “social problems.” In Pius XI, the term is a scientific renaming of the age-old “legal justice,” which comes down to us across the centuries from the golden age of Greek Philosophy but which, through more …

St. Thomas And The Natural Order Of Things, Henry B. Veatch

University of Dayton Review

Surely, it must stand to reason that whatever our respect and even our reverence may be on the occasion of commemorating the 700th anniversary of a particular man's death, the very fact that it is a 700th anniversary must somehow betoken that the man himself is, to say the least, somewhat out of date! And so it is with St. Thomas. Let's face it: In the language of today's slang, he just doesn't seem to be "with it" any more. True, this does not mean that it is not at least conceivable that he might be more "with it" than …

Natural Law: New Clues For Contemporary Issues, Robert B. Mellert S.M.

University of Dayton Review

The composite of ethical concerns facing civilization at this point in history seems to indicate that the fundamental ethical issue is no longer that of interpersonal relationships, but that of the man-nature relationship. This is evident not only with regard to the ecological crisis and our concern for establishing an environmental ethics, but also in the implications of some of the new biological advances and the ethical questions they are beginning to generate.

The Homily At The Mass Commemorating The 700th Anniversary Of The Death Of Thomas Aquinas, Immaculate Conception Chapel, University Of Dayton, March 7, 1974, Joseph L. Bernardin

University of Dayton Review

Thomas Aquinas was a true intellectual. He was intensely interested in science. philosophy and theology — all of which, after a rather long dormant period, were beginning to come to life and to attract attention during his formative years. It soon became evident to Thomas that God had given him great talents, and he chose to serve God and the Church by developing and using those talents to the fullest extent possible. Never did he consider intellectualism to be an obstacle to the Church's mission. On the contrary, by his prodigious research and writing, he proved that the intellectual life …

Introduction, Raymond M. Herbenick

University of Dayton Review

During the week of March 4-9, 1974, the University of Dayton conducted an Aquinas Week in commemoration of the 700th anniversary of the death of St. Thomas Aquinas. Organized by Raymond M. Herbenick of the Philosophy Department, the week's activities were supported by the Marianist Institute for Christian Renewal and the Humanities Division of the College of Arts and Sciences.

Personhood And Respect For Life, Vernon J. Bourke

University of Dayton Review

The problem to be considered here centers on the question: What is a person? The way that we answer this question is very important in practical thinking, for all moral and legal problems involve persons. In particular, discussions of the morality of abortion require some definite view as to whether the fetus is in any sense a person. Indeed, we shall see that many contemporary issues concerning the right to live a full human life receive different solutions, depending on one's view of what a person is.

Many writers today, especially in the field of the social sciences, insist that …

Educational Administration And The Two Types Of Connatural Knowledge: Intellectual And Affective, Ellis A. Joseph

University of Dayton Review

Each administrator, as a thinking self, is to himself not object but subject, a subject in the midst of a world of subjects which he knows only as objects; he alone is subject as subject. When it is said that an administrator is to himself not object but subject, it is meant that this administrator is the only administrator in the world who is in some way aware of his “inexhaustible depth”; of his “operations”; of his “existential complexity”; of his “inner circumstances”; of his free choices, attractions, weaknesses, virtues, loves and pains; and of “that atmosphere of immanent vitality …

Thomas On Mary And Woman: A Study In Contrasts, William J. Cole S.M.

University of Dayton Review

In the age in which we live, try as we might for one reason or another, in no matter what walk of life we might be, we cannot avoid the topic of this last session of Aquinas Week: Womanhood and a Community of Persons. For those who have even a cursory acquaintance with St. Thomas' doctrine on woman, there may very well be wonderment that the two phrases "Womanhood" and "Community of Persons" can be related in any way. You might suspect from what I have said up to now that you are in for an attempted defense of Thomas' …

Aquinas And Process Theology, Benedict M. Ashley O.P.

University of Dayton Review

The powerful influence of Teilhard de Chardin on recent Catholic theology is matched by the similar influence of Whitehead and Hartshorne on Protestant theology. Both tendencies are rooted in the process philosophy of Bergson. It was no accident that the redoubtable Thomist Jacques Maritain battled early and late against this process philosophy and its theological influence. To Maritain it seemed that Thomism and Bergsonianism in both their epistemology and ontology were radically opposed systems.

Whatever the merits of this polemic, my concern and method in this paper are very different. Dialogic ecumenism has provided us with a non-polemical method of …

St. Thomas And The Preambles Of Faith, Ralph Mcinerny

University of Dayton Review

On several occasions St. Thomas makes use of the phrase praeambula fidei in speaking of those truths about God which are accessible to unaided human reason. It is well known that Thomas thought that pagan philosophers, notably Aristotle, had succeeded in proving that God exists and had come to knowledge of many of His attributes. These are the matters the phrase “preambles of faith” is meant to cover, and that is why discussion of it can aspire to cast some light on the notion of Natural Theology, the culminating concern of metaphysics and thus of philosophy.

Thomistic Wit And The Medieval English Hymn, Michael H. Means

University of Dayton Review

It is only fitting that we celebrate the 700th anniversary of St. Thomas Aquinas not only with scholarship and argumentation, but also with music and song and poem. Although he wrote only a few hymns, St. Thomas is one of the greatest and most profound of the Latin hymnodists. To pay homage to that aspect of his life's work, I wish here to single out a distinguishing characteristic of his religious verse and then look for similar characteristics in a rather different body of poetry, the religious lyrics of medieval England.