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University of Dayton Review

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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.