The Second-Person Perspective in Aquinas’s Ethics
The Second-Person Perspective in Aquinas’s Ethics

Author: Andrew Pinsent

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-18

Total Pages: 173

ISBN-13: 1136479147

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Thomas Aquinas devoted a substantial proportion of his greatest works to the virtues. Yet, despite the availability of these texts (and centuries of commentary), Aquinas’s virtue ethics remains mysterious, leaving readers with many unanswered questions. In this book, Pinsent argues that the key to understanding Aquinas’s approach is to be found in an association between: a) attributes he appends to the virtues, and b) interpersonal capacities investigated by the science of social cognition, especially in the context of autistic spectrum disorder. The book uses this research to argue that Aquinas’s approach to the virtues is radically non-Aristotelian and founded on the concept of second-person relatedness. To demonstrate the explanatory power of this principle, Pinsent shows how the second-person perspective gives interpretation to Aquinas’s descriptions of the virtues and offers a key to long-standing problems, such as the reconciliation of magnanimity and humility. The principle of second-person relatedness also interprets acts that Aquinas describes as the fruition of the virtues. Pinsent concludes by considering how this approach may shape future developments in virtue ethics.

Aquinas's Ethics
Aquinas's Ethics

Author: Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung

Publisher:

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13:

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This work places Thomas Aquinas's moral theory in its full philosophical and theological context in a way that makes Aquinas accessible to students and interested general readers.

Aquinas's Eschatological Ethics and the Virtue of Temperance
Aquinas's Eschatological Ethics and the Virtue of Temperance

Author: Matthew Levering

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess

Published: 2019-11-30

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 0268106355

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In Aquinas’s Eschatological Ethics and the Virtue of Temperance, Matthew Levering argues that Catholic ethics make sense only in light of the biblical worldview that Jesus has inaugurated the kingdom of God by pouring out his spirit. Jesus has made it possible for us to know and obey God’s law for human flourishing as individuals and communities. He has reoriented our lives toward the goal of beatific communion with him in charity, which affects the exercise of the moral virtues that pertain to human flourishing. Without the context of the inaugurated kingdom, Catholic ethics as traditionally conceived will seem like an effort to find a middle ground between legalistic rigorism and relativistic laxism, which is especially the case with the virtue of temperance, the focus of Levering’s book. After an opening chapter on the eschatological/biblical character of Catholic ethics, the ensuing chapters engage Aquinas’s theology of temperance in the Summa theologiae, which identifies and examines a number of virtues associated with temperance. Levering demonstrates that the theology of temperance is profoundly biblical, and that Aquinas’s theology of temperance relies for its intelligibility upon Christ’s inauguration of the kingdom of God as the graced fulfillment of our created nature. The book develops new vistas for scholars and students interested in moral theology.

The Ethics of Aquinas
The Ethics of Aquinas

Author: Stephen J. Pope

Publisher: Georgetown University Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 516

ISBN-13: 9780878408887

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In this comprehensive anthology, twenty-seven outstanding scholars from North America and Europe address every major aspect of Thomas Aquinas's understanding of morality and comment on his remarkable legacy. While there has been a revival of interest in recent years in the ethics of St. Thomas, no single work has yet fully examined the basic moral arguments and content of Aquinas' major moral work, the Second Part of the Summa Theologiae. This work fills that lacuna. The first chapters of The Ethics of Aquinas introduce readers to the sources, methods, and major themes of Aquinas's ethics. The second part of the book provides an extended discussion of ideas in the Second Part of the Summa Theologiae, in which contributors present cogent interpretations of the structure, major arguments, and themes of each of the treatises. The third and final part examines aspects of Thomistic ethics in the twentieth century and beyond. These essays reflect a diverse group of scholars representing a variety of intellectual perspectives. Contributors span numerous fields of study, including intellectual history, medieval studies, moral philosophy, religious ethics, and moral theology. This remarkable variety underscores how interpretations of Thomas's ethics continue to develop and evolve-and stimulate fervent discussion within the academy and the church. This volume is aimed at scholars, students, clergy, and all those who continue to find Aquinas a rich source of moral insight.

Aquinas's Ethics
Aquinas's Ethics

Author: Thomas M. Osborne Jr

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-05-07

Total Pages: 119

ISBN-13: 110858683X

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This Element provides an account of Thomas Aquinas's moral philosophy that emphasizes the intrinsic connection between happiness and the human good, human virtue, and the precepts of practical reason. Human beings by nature have an end to which they are directed and concerning which they do not deliberate, namely happiness. Humans achieve this end by performing good human acts, which are produced by the intellect and the will, and perfected by the relevant virtues. These virtuous acts require that the agent grasps the relevant moral principles and uses them in particular cases.

Aquinas and the Nicomachean Ethics
Aquinas and the Nicomachean Ethics

Author: Tobias Hoffmann

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013-07-25

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 1107276403

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Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is the text which had the single greatest influence on Aquinas's ethical writings, and the historical and philosophical value of Aquinas's appropriation of this text provokes lively debate. In this volume of new essays, thirteen distinguished scholars explore how Aquinas receives, expands on and transforms Aristotle's insights about the attainability of happiness, the scope of moral virtue, the foundation of morality and the nature of pleasure. They examine Aquinas's commentary on the Ethics and his theological writings, above all the Summa theologiae. Their essays show Aquinas to be a highly perceptive interpreter, but one who also brings certain presuppositions to the Ethics and alters key Aristotelian notions for his own purposes. The result is a rich and nuanced picture of Aquinas's relation to Aristotle that will be of interest to readers in moral philosophy, Aquinas studies, the history of theology and the history of philosophy.

Virtue and Grace in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas
Virtue and Grace in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas

Author: Justin M. Anderson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-07-30

Total Pages: 343

ISBN-13: 1108617824

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Throughout his writings, Thomas Aquinas exhibited a remarkable stability of thought. However, in some areas such as his theology of grace, his thought underwent titanic developments. In this book, Justin M. Anderson traces both those developments in grace and their causes. After introducing the various meanings of virtue Aquinas utilized, including 'virtue in its fullest sense' and various forms of 'qualified virtue', he explores the historical context that conditioned that account. Through a close analysis of his writings, Anderson unearths Aquinas's own discoveries and analyses that would propel his understanding of human experience, divine action, and supernatural grace in new directions. In the end, we discover an account of virtue that is inextricably linked to his developed understanding of sin, grace and divine action in human life. As such, Anderson challenges the received understanding of Aquinas's account of virtue, as well as his relationship to contemporary virtue ethics.

Compassion in Healthcare
Compassion in Healthcare

Author: Joshua Hordern

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-10-30

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 019250827X

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Compassion in Healthcare gives an account of the nature and content of compassion and its role in healthcare. While compassion appears to be a straightforward aspect of life and practice, Hordern's analysis shows that it is plagued by both conceptual and practical ills, and stands in need of some quite specific kinds of therapy. Starting from a diagnosis of what precisely is wrong with 'compassion'—its debilitating political entanglements, the vagueness of its meaning, and the risk of burnout it threatens—three therapies are prescribed for these ills: an understanding of patients and healthcare workers as those who pass through the life-course, encountering each other as wayfarers and pilgrims; a grasp of the nature of compassion in healthcare; and an embedding of healthcare within the realities of civic life. Applying these therapeutic strategies uncovers how compassionate relationships acquire their content in healthcare practice. The form that compassion takes is shown to depend on how doctrines of time, tragedy, salvation, responsibility, fault, and theodicy make a difference to the quality of people's lives and relationships. Drawing on the author's real-world collaborations, the way in which compassion matters to practice and policy is worked out in the detail of healthcare professionalism, marketization, and technology. Covering everything from conception to old age, and from machine learning to religious diversity, Compassion in Healthcare draws on philosophy, theology, and everyday experience to expand our understanding of what compassion means for healthcare practice.

Ecological Ethics and the Human Soul
Ecological Ethics and the Human Soul

Author: Francisco J. Benzoni

Publisher:

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13:

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Caroline Beer's new book explores the consequences of democratic politics in Mexico. Focusing on struggles at the subnational level, she assesses how increased electoral competition alters the long-term distribution of power across political institutions in ways that shift power away from established elites and into the hands of ordinary citizens. Electoral Competition and Institutional Change in Mexico includes compelling case study comparisons of three states with very different experiences with electoral democracy: Guanajuato, Hidalgo, and San Luis Potos . These cases are then situated within a broader quantitative analysis of all thirty-one Mexican states. Beer's research reverses the causal arrow of many standard studies by focusing on the causes of institutional change rather than the consequences of institutional design. Her analysis reveals that the process of increasing electoral competition has unleashed new forces that have slowly eroded the power of centralized, authoritarian elites in Mexico. Utilizing a theoretical framework that draws on insights from classic democratic theory, new institutionalist literature, and current critiques of contemporary Latin American democracy, Beer's important work represents the first comparative study of state legislatures and governors in Mexico and offers compelling insight into the bottom-up dynamics of Mexico's transition to democracy.

The History of Evil in the Medieval Age
The History of Evil in the Medieval Age

Author: Andrew Pinsent

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-06-14

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 1351138502

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The second volume of The History of Evil explores the philosophy of evil in the long Middle Ages. Starting from the Augustinian theme of evil as a deprivation or perversion of what is good, this period saw the maturation of concepts of natural evil, of evil as sin involving the will, and of malicious agents aiming to increase evil in general and sin in particular. Comprising fifteen chapters, the contributions address key figures of the Christian Middle Ages or traditions sharing some similar cultural backgrounds, such as medieval Judaism and Islam. Other chapters examine contemporaneous developments in the Middle East, China, India and Japan. The volume concludes with an overview of contemporary transpositions of Dante, illustrating the remarkable cultural influence of medieval accounts of evil today. This outstanding treatment of the history of evil at the crucial and determinative inception of its key concepts will appeal to those with particular interests in the ideas of evil and good.