Eastern Christian Books: Alasdair MacIntyre on Ethics Amidst the Conflicts of Modernity

Eastern Christian Books: Alasdair MacIntyre on Ethics Amidst the Conflicts of Modernity

Thomistica.net: Taparelli's magnum opus available from La Civiltà Cattolica

Taparelli is perhaps best remembered (if at all) for his contribution to the concept of subsidiarity and for coining the term “social justice” (giustizia sociale). His understanding of social justice is not exactly the same as our contemporary notion of it. Thomas Burke (one of the few people who write about Taparelli in English — Thomas Behr is another) has this to say about Taparellian social justice:

It is one of the ironies of history that the quintessentially “liberal” idea of “social justice,” as it was to become (in American terminology), should have been originated by an ardent conservative … Unlike the conception of social justice generally accepted in our society at the present time, which is socialist and difficult, if not impossible, to harmonize with our ordinary conception of justice, Taparelli’s conception 1) is simply the ordinary and traditional conception of justice applied in a new area, namely the constitutional arrangements of society, 2) does not apply to states of affairs in society that could exist independently of human actions, 3) constitutes a defense of societal inequality, and 4) is conservative.

I will have to read Thomas Burke's paper.

Google Books: 2 by Edward Grant

The Nature of Natural Philosophy in the Late Middle Ages
A history of natural philosophy: from the ancient world to the nineteenth century

Ite ad Thomam: Scholasticism as Modern Philosophy

In general outline, this division of the history of philosophy is convenient insofar as it accurately represents six general trends in doing philosophy. For example, the way in which the 'ancients' did philosophy is quite distinct from that of the medievals, and medieval philosophy is quite different from the philosophy of Descartes, Locke, and Kant.


But this division also has its problems, particularly in its understanding of the relationship between Scholasticism and Modern Philosophy. It gives the impression that Scholasticism lasted only from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It excludes Scholasticism altogether from Modern Philosophy... as if Scholasticism were an obsolete medieval thing that was only revived by some right-wing papists of the Twentieth Century. It makes you believe that the Franciscans, Dominicans, Carmelites and Jesuits were happily doing their scholastic disputations until they ran out of gas, and then came Descartes and ended the whole thing with his cogito... as if Modern Philosophy got started and Scholasticism completely disappeared. Hence, Modern Philosophy is portrayed as essentially non-scholastic (or anti-scholastic).


This conception of Modern Philosophy is utterly flawed. This is a case where history is completely written by the victors. The philosophy that was taught during this period in the universities was Scholasticism. Hence the name: 'scholas-tic', the philosophy of the schools (of the scholas). Descartes did not end Scholasticism. At no point during his life did Descartes change or even affect the way philosophy was done in the universities. In fact, none of the Empiricists and almost none of the Rationalists (with the sole exception of Wolff, who was himself a Scholastic Leibnitzian) ever taught at a university. They were literally amateurs. What we are being taught today as mainstream Early Modern Philosophy (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, etc.) is really an afterthought of the Early Modern Period, a movement completely peripheral to what the professional scholars of the time were doing. No one at that time saw the thought of these men as being part of the mainstream academic philosophical thinking.

So who were the mainstream, professional scholars--the Scholastics--during the Early Modern Period? There were thousands, but the best known are: Báñez, Molina, John of St. Thomas, Suárez, Contenson, Gonet, De Lugo, the Salmanticenses and Complutenses, etc., etc. Although some of authors place these figures within the Renaissance period, nonetheless John of St. Thomas and Suárez were contemporaries of Descartes; and, in fact, De Lugo, Contenson, Gonet, the Salmanticenses (and the Salamanca school of economics) together with the Complutenses came a generation later. These men rightly belong to Descartes' period but they are typically either completely ignored by historians or dismissed as medieval remnants that do not deserve to be considered 'modern'.


And even much later, after the new philosophy of the Rationalists, Empiricists and Idealists made its way into secular and Protestant academia (Kant was the first to bring this amateur philosophy into the universities), Scholasticism was still being practiced and taught in Catholic universities. Billuart, De Rubeis, St. Alphonsus de Liguori, San Severino, Cornoldi, Kleutgen, etc. were all within a generation of Kant and thus rightly belong to the Later Modern Period.


And Scholasticism kept being taught in Catholic universities throughout the 19th and 20th Centuries. So how do anti-scholastic histories of philosophy deal with this point? They have interpreted the so-called Neo-Scholastic / Neo-Thomist movement as bearing a discontinuity with what they disparagingly call 'Barroque Thomism' (or Second Thomism). They portray it as a resurrection of Thomism, passing strictly from a completely defunct state to a vibrant Catholic trend in the late 19th Century thanks to Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Aeterni Patris, long after Descartes has put the last nail on the coffin of 'Barroque Scholasticism'. But in fact, 'Neo-Scholasticism' (which is really a misnomer because it was not really discontinuous with traditional scholasticism) was a 'revival' in the sense of giving Scholasticism more life, not in the sense of giving life to something that was dead. Pope Leo XIII's Aeterni Patris does not call for a resurrection of something that had been long defunct, but rather, for greater efforts to keep it going. "Neo-Scholasticism," then, is nothing other than Scholasticism as it regained vigor in the 19th-20th centuries. But it is given that name to make us think that it is something new. As the Catholic Encyclopedia's article on Thomas Zigliara states, "in some universities and seminaries, the teaching of St. Thomas had never been interrupted...." Even today, Scholasticism is not entirely dead, although we must fight to revive it once again.


It is due time for someone to write a history of philosophy that portrays things the way they really are: Scholasticism as a continuous whole that throughout modern times represented the mainstream mode of Catholic thought and that lasted from the time of St. Anselm up until today.

Moral and political philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre, honoured at UCD -- the page has an embedded video of his lecture, “On having survived the academic moral philosophy of the twentieth century.” (via The Hermeneutic of Continuity)

Edward Feser, The Newspeak of the moderns

Henry of Ghent website

at UNC Ashville

David Gordon's lectures on the history of political philosophy

The History of Political Philosophy: From Plato to Rothbard (A Steve Berger-Kenneth Garschina Seminar)

No idea about the quality of the lectures.

Francis Hutcheson, A Sytem of Morals

e-book through BC

See his definition of rights in Book II, Chapter 3.
Book III, Chapter 4: the motives to constitute civil government

(civil government necessary because of men's imperfection or depravity or both)

see also Johannes Althusius, Politica

In Our Time programs

"In Our Time" is a program on BBC4. While I can't say all of the experts invited on to the show are good, there are some of interest:

GREYFRIARS AND BLACKFRIARS (audio file)
Contributors
Henrietta Leyser, medieval historian and Fellow of St Peter's College, Oxford

Alexander Murray, medieval historian and Emeritus Fellow of University College, Oxford

Anthony Kenny, philosopher and former Master of Balliol College, Oxford

AVERROES (audio file)
Contributors

Amira Bennison, Senior Lecturer in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the University of Cambridge

Peter Adamson, Reader in Philosophy at King's College London

Sir Anthony Kenny, philosopher and former Master of Balliol College, Oxford


HEROISM (audio file)
Contributors

Angie Hobbs, Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Warwick and author of Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good (Cambridge University Press, 2000)

Anthony Grayling, Reader in Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London

Paul Cartledge, Professor of Greek History at the University of Cambridge

DUTY (audio file)
Contributors

Angie Hobbs, Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Warwick

Annabel Brett, Fellow of Gonville and Caius and Lecturer in History at the University of Cambridge

Anthony Grayling, Reader in Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London

FREEDOM (audio file)
Guests
John Keane
Professor of Politics, University of Westminster, author of a forthcoming history of democracy

Bernard Williams
Professor of Philosophy, University of California, author of the forthcoming Truth and Truthfulness (Princeton Press, October 2002)

Annabel Brett
Lecturer in History, University of Cambridge, editor with Quentin Skinner of Liberty, Right and Nature (Cambridge University Press).

VIRTUE(audio file)
Guests
Galen Strawson, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading
Miranda Fricker, Lecturer in Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London
Roger Crisp, Uehiro Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at St Anne's College, Oxford.

MACHIAVELLI AND THE ITALIAN CITY STATES (audio file)
Contributors:
Quentin Skinner, Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge
Evelyn Welch, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London
Lisa Jardine, Director of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at Queen Mary, University of London

THE OATH (audio file)
Contributors:
Alan Sommerstein , Professor of Greek at the University of Nottingham
Paul Cartledge , Professor of Greek History at the University of Cambridge
Mary Beard , Professor in Classics at the University of Cambridge

The rest of the archive.