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Author: Jason T. Eberl
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2006-09-27
Total Pages: 169
ISBN-13: 1135986185
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAlongside a revival of interest in Thomas Aquinas' thought (Thomism) in philosophy, this book reveals its contemporary relevance when addressing certain complex, morally difficult, issues in bioethics.
Author: Jason T. Eberl
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2006-09-27
Total Pages: 304
ISBN-13: 1135986177
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAlongside a revival of interest in Thomism in philosophy, scholars have realised its relevance when addressing certain contemporary issues in bioethics. This book offers a rigorous interpretation of Aquinas's metaphysics and ethical thought, and highlights its significance to questions in bioethics. Jason T. Eberl applies Aquinas’s views on the seminal topics of human nature and morality to key questions in bioethics at the margins of human life – questions which are currently contested in the academia, politics and the media such as: When does a human person’s life begin? How should we define and clinically determine a person’s death? Is abortion ever morally permissible? How should we resolve the conflict between the potential benefits of embryonic stem cell research and the lives of human embryos? Does cloning involve a misuse of human ingenuity and technology? What forms of treatment are appropriate for irreversibly comatose patients? How should we care for patients who experience unbearable suffering as they approach the end of life? Thomistic Principles and Bioethics presents a significant philosophical viewpoint which will motivate further dialogue amongst religious and secular arenas of inquiry concerning such complex issues of both individual and public concern.
Author: Jason T. Eberl
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
Published: 2020-06-25
Total Pages: 545
ISBN-13: 0268107750
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIs there a shared nature common to all human beings? What essential qualities might define this nature? These questions are among the most widely discussed topics in the history of philosophy and remain subjects of perennial interest and controversy. The Nature of Human Persons offers a metaphysical investigation of the composition of the human essence. For a human being to exist, does it require an immaterial mind, a physical body, a functioning brain, a soul? Jason Eberl also considers the criterion of identity for a developing human being—that is, what is required for a human being to continue existing as a person despite undergoing physical and psychological changes over time? Eberl's investigation presents and defends a theoretical perspective from the thirteenth-century philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas. Advancing beyond descriptive historical analysis, this book places Aquinas’s account of human nature into direct comparison with several prominent contemporary theories: substance dualism, emergentism, animalism, constitutionalism, four-dimensionalism, and embodied mind theory. These theories inform various conclusions regarding when human beings first come into existence—at conception, during gestation, or after birth—and how we ought to define death for human beings. Finally, each of these viewpoints offers a distinctive rationale as to whether, and if so how, human beings may survive death. Ultimately, Eberl argues that the Thomistic account of human nature addresses the matters of human nature and survival in a much more holistic and desirable way than the other theories and offers a cohesive portrait of one’s continued existence from conception through life to death and beyond.
Author: Jason T. Eberl
Publisher: Springer
Published: 2017-07-24
Total Pages: 607
ISBN-13: 3319557661
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis volume comprises various viewpoints representing a Catholic perspective on contemporary practices in medicine and biomedical research. The Roman Catholic Church has had a significant impact upon the formulation and application of moral values and principles to a wide range of controversial issues in bioethics. Catholic leaders, theologians, and bioethicists have elucidated and marshaled arguments to support the Church’s definitive positions on several bioethical issues, such as abortion, euthanasia, and reproductive cloning. Not all bioethical issues, however, have been definitively addressed by Catholic authorities, and some Church teachings allow for differing applications in diverse circumstances. Moreover, as new biomedical technologies emerge, Church authorities rely on experts in science, medicine, philosophy, theology, law, and other disciplines to advise them. Such experts continue to debate issues related to reproduction, genetics, end-of-life care, and health care policy. This volume will be a valuable resource for scholars in bioethics or Catholic studies, who will benefit from the nuanced arguments offered based on the latest research. This volume is also instructive for students entering the field to become aware of the founding philosophical and theological principles informing the Catholic bioethical worldview.
Author: Jean Porter
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
Published: 2005
Total Pages: 440
ISBN-13: 9780802849069
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis noteworthy book develops a new theory of the natural law that takes its orientation from the account of the natural law developed by Thomas Aquinas, as interpreted and supplemented in the context of scholastic theology in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Though this history might seem irrelevant to twenty-first-century life, Jean Porter shows that the scholastic approach to the natural law still has much to contribute to the contemporary discussion of Christian ethics. Aquinas and his interlocutors provide a way of thinking about the natural law that is distinctively theological while at the same time remaining open to other intellectual perspectives, including those of science. In the course of her work, Porter examines the scholastics' assumptions and beliefs about nature, Aquinas's account of happiness, and the overarching claim that reason can generate moral norms. Ultimately, Porter argues that a Thomistic theory of the natural law is well suited to provide a starting point for developing a more nuanced account of the relationship between specific beliefs and practices. While Aquinas's approach to the natural law may not provide a system of ethical norms that is both universally compelling and detailed enough to be practical, it does offer something that is arguably more valuable -- namely, a way of reflecting theologically on the phenomenon of human morality.
Author: Nicanor Pier Giorgio Austriaco
Publisher:
Published: 2005
Total Pages: 228
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor: Stephen J. Pope
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
Published: 2002
Total Pages: 516
ISBN-13: 9780878408887
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn 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.
Author: Pamela M. Hall
Publisher:
Published: 1994
Total Pages: 176
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWith Narrative and the Natural Law Pamela Hall brings Thomistic ethics into conversation with ongoing debates in contemporary moral philosophy, especially virtue theory and moral psychology, and with current trends in narrative theory and the philosophy of history. Pamela M. Hall's study offers a solid, challenging alternative to rigid, legalistic interpretations of the substantial discussion of law in Aquinas's Summa theologiae and defends Aquinas's ethics from charges of excessive legalism. Hall argues that Aquinas's characterization of the content and relationship of natural, human and divine law indicates that his understanding of the quest for the human good is practical, communal, and historical. Hall maintains that natural law, the ongoing inquiry into what is the human good, is narrative both in terms of its internal structure and its being informed by the specific story of Scripture. According to Aquinas the discovery of natural law is enacted historically and progressively within communities and by individuals through a process of practical reasoning. Hall then goes on to show how natural law requires articulation by human law, and how both are connected to divine law (salvation history) as Aquinas understands it. Aquinas represents inquiry into the human good as a kind of historical narrative or story with stages or "chapters"; thus knowledge of natural law requires time and experience, as well as sustained reflection by individuals and by whole communities. Such learning of natural law implies the operation of prudence and the assistance of the moral virtues.
Author: Richard Berquist
Publisher: Catholic University of America Press
Published: 2019-10-11
Total Pages: 264
ISBN-13: 0813232422
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFrom Human Dignity to Natural Law shows how the whole of the natural law, as understood in the Aristotelian Thomistic tradition, is contained implicitly in human dignity. Human dignity means existing for one’s own good (the common good as well as one’s individual good), and not as a mere means to an alien good. But what is the true human good? This question is answered with a careful analysis of Aristotle’s definition of happiness. The natural law can then be understood as the precepts that guide us in achieving happiness. To show that human dignity is a reality in the nature of things and not a mere human invention, it is necessary to show that human beings exist by nature for the achievement of the properly human good in which happiness is found. This implies finality in nature. Since contemporary natural science does not recognize final causality, the book explains why living things, as least, must exist for a purpose and why the scientific method, as currently understood, is not able to deal with this question. These reflections will also enable us to respond to a common criticism of natural law theory: that it attempts to derive statements of what ought to be from statements about what is. After defining the natural law and relating it to human or positive law, Richard Berquist considers Aquinas’s formulation of the first principle of the natural law. It then discusses the love commandments to love God above all things and to love one’s neighbor as oneself as the first precepts of the natural law. Subsequent chapters are devoted to clarifying and defending natural law precepts concerned with the life issues, with sexual morality and marriage, and with fundamental natural rights. From Human Dignity to Natural Law concludes with a discussion of alternatives to the natural law.
Author: Kevin L. Flannery
Publisher: CUA Press
Published: 2001
Total Pages: 356
ISBN-13: 9780813209883
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"Although most natural law ethical theories recognize moral absolutes, there is not much agreement even among natural law theorists about how to identify them. The author argues that in order to understand and determine the morality (or immorality) of a human action, it must be considered in relation to the organized system of human practices within which it is performed. Such an approach, he argues, is to be found in the natural law theory of Thomas Aquinas, especially once it is recognized that the logical structure of Aquinas's ethical theory is basically that of an Aristotelian science." "The book will be useful to students and scholars interested in ethics, especially from an Aristotelian and/or Thomistic perspective. One appendix reproduces the Leonine text of the De malo (question 6), with facing English translation. Another appendix provides facing Latin text and English translation of the Summa Theologiae I-II (question 94, article 2)."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
