Aquinas Lecture in Philosophy – serie

This lecture is MacIntyre’s most explicit defense of his approach to Thomistic metaphysics.This lecture follows MacIntyre’s argument in After Virtue that modern philosophy has very literally lost its way, and the problems it faces are insoluble. The difficulties are twofold, and stem from the Cartesian turn to the self in the XVith century. Modern philosophy cannot reestablish contact with the outside world when our starting point is self-knowledge, and modern philosophy also cannot accept that any principle could be 'first' in any absolute sense of the word, because final causality has been rejected.MacIntyre claims that Thomism does not suffer these defects, but he cautions against a premature victory, because Thomism has been decisively rejected by modern philosophy and modern science, so that there is no chance of effective dialogue between Thomism and other traditions. The very vocabulary of Thomism is a stumbling block. However, modern philosophy has not been able to completely eliminate the Aristotelian roots of all philosophy and science, and so keeps returning to themes that it cannot adequately address.Thus MacIntyre proposes to use the tools of modern philosophies, such as the genealogical narrative, to help reconnect modern philosophy and Thomism. A historical approach might make the rejection, and the reasons for it, evident, and allow fruitful dialogue by allowing for the fruits of modern philosophy to be discussed in a context that will allow them to finally flourish. Essentially, the goal is to enable contemporary philosophy to become more itself by freeing it from the tension created by the premises that cast doubt upon the philosophical enterprise.

Augustine established that ""the distension of the mind is a necessary condition of our perceiving temporal wholes"". At the same time, as Teske explains, this condition is unnatural to the rational soul and results from original sin.

The 2008 Aquinas Lecture, Aristotle's Divine Intellect, was delivered on Sunday, February 24, 2008, by Myles F. Burnyeat, Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford University, and Honorary Fellow of Robinson College, Cambridge University.

Garber (philosophy, Princeton U.) was invited to deliver the 2009 Aquinas Lecture, an annual event sponsored by the Wisconsin-Alpha chapter of Phi Sigma Tau at Marquette University. He explores the consequences of French philosopher Blaise Pascal's (1623-62) famous conclusion that believing in a God that did not exist was safer than not believing in one that did. Among the aspects he ponders are self-deception and deciding to believe, non-cognitivity and contingency, and rationality and history.

In Omnisubjectivity: A Defense of a Divine attribute, Linda Zagzebski reflects on how the modern discovery of subjectivity should influence the way we think about God's attributes. Her examination of recent conceptions of omnipresence and omniscience reveals that if God truly has all possible cognitive perfections, then a new attribute should rightly be applied to God which the 'traditional attributes' do not address: omnisubjectivity. Zagzebski describes omnisubjectivity as the complete and accurate grasp of every conscious state of every conscious being from that being’s first person perspective. Thus, God is not only omniscient, knowing that Mary sees red. But God is omnisubjective, knowing, from the first person perspective, the quality, qualia, and phenomenal consciousness of what it is like for Mary to see red. In this intriguing lecture, Zagzebski examines exactly why God must be omnisubjective and addresses the possible moral and ethical concerns of what it means for God to be fully present in His creatures' subjectivity.

The 2014 Aquinas Lecture, Moral Sprouts and Natural Teleologies: 21st Century Moral Psychology Meets Classical Chinese Philosophy, was delivered on Sunday, February 23, 2014, by Owen J. Flanagan, James B. Duke Professor of Philosophy at Duke University, USA.Dr. Flanagan received his B.A. in Philosophy from Fordham University, USA in 1970 and his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Boston University, USA in 1978. He taught as Wellesley College, USA from 1977-1993 before moving to Duke University in 1993. He has had Visiting appointments as Distinguished Professor, University of Vienna, Austria the Jack Lynch Visiting Professor, Wake Forest University, USA a Templeton Distinguished Research Fellow, University of Southern California, USA Distinguished Fellow in Psychology & Biology of Morality, Dartmouth College, USA and the John Findlay Distinguished Visiting Professor, Boston University, USA. As a Templeton Distinguished Research Fellow, he gave six lectures on the topic “Human Flourishing in the Age of Mind Science.” In 1998-99, he earned the Romanell Phi Beta Kappa Award, giving three Lectures on “Science and the Human Image.” In addition to his position as Professor of Philosophy at Duke University, he is also Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, Professor of Neurobiology, a Faculty Associate at the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, and an Associate in the Graduate Program in Literature.

This study elaborates and defends an account of the experience of self-identity that underwrites the possibility of authenticity (being true to oneself), only accessible with humility.

Demonstrates that Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit points the way to a new, post-modern form of normativity, and so self-consciousness. The lecture shows that its practical aspect is a magnanimous form of agency exercised by self-conscious individuals, who thereby create a new kind of recognitive community structured by rationalising recollection in the form of confession, forgiveness, and trust.

A discussion of Plato’s evaluation of mathematics as an intellectual discipline, and his reasons for training his philosopher-rulers to be mathematical experts.

This study contends that resisting oppression requires participating in a community of resistance whose counter-practices abolish unjust social arrangements and engages in alternative world-making; prefiguring alternative futures and more just societies. The first section lays out an account of protest as a communicative mechanism for the creation of communities of resistance that makes it possible to break silences and overcome communicative and epistemic injustices that exist under conditions of oppression. Building on that account, section two elucidates the subversive potential of the counter-cultures and resistant imaginations developed by communities of resistance. In particular, that communal practices of resistance should be understood as prefiguration or the performative anticipation of social change. Connecting queer theory and queer activism with the neo-Marxist literature on prefiguration and counter-communities, the text conceptualizes resistance acts as performative mechanisms of prefigurative politics, showing how protest actions enable resistors to anticipate in their actions the social world that they want to bring about. Finally, drawing from women of color feminist scholarship, section three examines how resistant imaginations function in protest actions both (a) as a way of opposing injustices, and (b) as a way of transforming the world and transforming ourselves through alternative world-making (world-disclosure or prefiguration). Upon this view of prefigurative politics, resistant imaginations become embodied and alive in the subversive practices of communities of resistance that performatively prefigure the possibility of a world without injustice.