The Future of Catholic Philosophy/Academia?

A panel discussion with Elizabeth C. Shaw, Mark Spencer, and chaired by Robert McNamara.

Representing Aristotelianism, Thomism, and Phenomenology (Edith Stein).


Part of the problem is due to the format -- less than 40 minutes, divided up among 3 speakers of 3 different traditions, meant to complement each other and provide the foundation for the next speaker. Instead, we end up with no single account that is developed satisfactorily.

I didn't bother to take notes. Off the top of my head:

1. The Aristotelian presentation focused on the mean and that it is relative to us. A good point but she didn't go any further because of time constraints.

2. Re: the Thomistic presentation. He jumped to a metaphysical account of sex differences, without looking at the physical or biological account execept superficially, was a mistake.

3. (2) Reminds me that the Aristotelian categories of being needs to be reconsidered in light of everything that has been discovered since then about natural substances of all degrees of complexity.

4. The account of the relation of soul to body as form to matter is wrong. While the proposition that biological sex is rooted in matter (taken from Aquinas), this does not mean that sex is not related to form. It depends on how one understands the relation of matter to form, and I have to say again that natural philosophy, physike, has been neglected by Catholic academic philosophers for too long.

5. The Phenomenological presentation: Virtues are the same for men and women but they are colored for men and women (or perceived? to be different). But why resort to univocal naming when analogous naming is possible? As for a sort of unitary quality, manliness or womanliness, well I would prefer to use those words to talk about subrational or corational differences.


Just my quick response to the above: Differences in sex are ordered to differences in function or role, and differences in function or role yield different virtues, as virtue is ordered to function, enabling the individual to perform his function well. Do women have the exact same virtues? No. But they have those virtues analogously. The requirements of courage for women is not same as the requirements of courage for men, and similarly the sort of prudence that is needed by a man is not the same as the prudence needed or exercised by a woman, if they can even be said to have prudence. (Differences in male and female moral psychology.)

The golden age of Catholic higher education, if there ever was one (perhaps some time between the 30s and the mid 60s) is past. (That was the high point of Catholic, that is Thomistic, inquiry into the natural sciences, with the last representative of the River Forest school, Fr. William Wallace, passing away not too long ago.)

In comparison with that video of the Hildebrand Project, even this would be more useful...