v. I. Graeco-Roman to early modern ethics -- v. 2. Modern and contemporary ethics.

It is usual to classify the moral thinking of St. Thomas Aquinas as a theory of natural law. The purpose of the present article is to challenge such a classification. While the notion of natural law does play a part in Aquinas’s teaching on morality, this does not seem to me to be a central role. Indeed there are many reasons why it might be better, today, to stop talking about natural moral law, both in the context of Thomistic philosophy (...) and in the broader context of contemporary ethics. What I now advocate is the position that right reason is the key theme in the ethics of Aquinas. (shrink)

In recent years attention has been redirected to the significance of the ethical rule that “good should be done and evil avoided.” It may be called the synderesis rule or principle, since in its most influential presentation it was associated by Thomas Aquinas with the intellectual habit called synderesis. In 1965 Germain Grisez published an article on this subject which attracted much interest in America and England. He argued that the principle as found in Aquinas’s treatise on laws in the (...) Summa of Theology has been misinterpreted in the common Scholastic tradition. In particular Grisez maintained that the common interpretation is wrong in restricting the good and evil, as used in this formula, to the moral order. Further, he suggested that the SR does not have the obligatory force of an imperative. (shrink)

Augustine's Love of Wisdom is an analytical and interpretive focus on the first thirty chapters of book ten of Augustine's autobiographical Confessions. Bourke provides a rich synthesis of key tenets of Augustine's psychology in the context of his philosophical system and selects the most intensive writing of Augustine on the intricacies of the human psyche, providing the reader with insight on an Augustinian explanatory method, introspection. The first part of Augustine's Love of Wisdom establishes the context of Augustine's writings with (...) a biographical sketch of Augustine from his early life and career and an exploration of his background and methodology. Part 2 provides the reader with the original Latin and an English translation of the first thirty chapters of book ten of the Confessions. Part 3 is Bourke's analysis and commentary of these chapters. (shrink)