Annotation. Against the background of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Bradley provides a detailed differentiation between Aristotle's and Aquinas's view on moral principles and the end of man.

In the ten dense chapters of his new book, John Finnis examines and sometimes amends what he takes to be the key moral, legal, social and political doctrines of Thomas Aquinas. Finnis correctly stresses that neither ethics nor politics, in the Arstotelian tradition to which Aquinas belonged, are theoretical sciences. They are ‘practical’ or action‐guiding sciences. Since societal order originates in free choice, it is subject to moral norms. The latter are more firmly grounded by Aquinas than Aristotle because the (...) former unlike the latter has an explicit and coherent account of universal or exceptionless moral principles.Finnis natural law ethics derives from a set of self‐evident precepts that focus practical reason on the pursuit and protection of basic human goods. Finnis expanding list of the latter now include marriage. Finnis equates – implausibly, in my view – attaining the ensemble of basic human goods with Aquina's notion of beatitudo imperfecta or this‐worldly happiness.Throughout the book, Finnis' exegesis of Aquinas is slanted towards bolstering Finnis' own Thomist philosophical ethics. Accordingly, Thomistic historical scholarship, which carefully traced Aquinas' biblical and patristic sources and which locate Aquinas' theological ethics within the conditions of his own life and times, has little weight in Finnis' interpretation. Overall, Finnis shows little concern for the internal logic of the Summa theologiae and, consequently, he does not adequately clarify how Aquinas' own ethics, according to its proper principles, can be both integrally theological and rational without thereby becoming a philosophical ethics. (shrink)

In the ten dense chapters of his new book, John Finnis examines and sometimes amends what he takes to be the key moral, legal, social and political doctrines of Thomas Aquinas. Finnis correctly stresses that neither ethics nor politics, in the Arstotelian tradition to which Aquinas belonged, are theoretical sciences. They are ‘practical’ or action‐guiding sciences. Since societal order originates in free choice, it is subject to moral norms. The latter are more firmly grounded by Aquinas than Aristotle because the (...) former unlike the latter has an explicit and coherent account of universal or exceptionless moral principles.Finnis natural law ethics derives from a set of self‐evident precepts that focus practical reason on the pursuit and protection of basic human goods. Finnis expanding list of the latter now include marriage. Finnis equates – implausibly, in my view – attaining the ensemble of basic human goods with Aquina's notion of beatitudo imperfecta or this‐worldly happiness.Throughout the book, Finnis' exegesis of Aquinas is slanted towards bolstering Finnis' own Thomist philosophical ethics. Accordingly, Thomistic historical scholarship, which carefully traced Aquinas' biblical and patristic sources and which locate Aquinas' theological ethics within the conditions of his own life and times, has little weight in Finnis' interpretation. Overall, Finnis shows little concern for the internal logic of the Summa theologiae and, consequently, he does not adequately clarify how Aquinas' own ethics, according to its proper principles, can be both integrally theological and rational without thereby becoming a philosophical ethics. (shrink)

Is Aquinas’s Sententia libri Ethicorum to be classified as a theological or philosophical commentary? In embracing the latter answer, Doig promotes Hermann Kleber’s view that Aquinas, in the SLE and other Aristotelian commentaries, searches for the “intentio Aristotelis, while keeping in mind the veritas rei”, a truth that, if it is reached through a demonstration that does not incorporate any premise formally based on Christian faith, Doig unhesitatingly calls “philosophical reasoning”. Although R. A. Gauthier dates the SLE 1271–72, Doig argues (...) that it was written after both parts, and was not, therefore, “preparatory to the ‘moral part’ of the Summa [theologiae, ]”. Instead, Doig argues that Aquinas, in the SLE, presents a different genus of moral science: his own philosophical “vision of correct moral philosophy”, that is a personally reworked version of Aristotle. (shrink)

Antecedent to the present volume, the author had already published an important historical study of Aquinas’s metaphysical theory of human action, and had written, for the benefit of his students at the Gregorian University, an unusually distinguished, in-house textbook, which, in French translation, was more widely accessible.

Why, after two centuries of secularization, does biblical religion not only survive but, recently, even find support from some philosophers, among them notably Derrida, who maintains that “citations from religious traditions are more fundamental to the structure of language and experience” than all the reductionist “genealogies, critiques, and transcendental reflections” of post-Enlightenment thought? The western religious tradition survives because, from the beginning, it has internalized a radical critique: the theological via negativa which, by strenuously qualifying religion’s factual, logical, and ontological (...) claims, brings about religion’s death but simultaneously and perpetually assures its resurrection whether “in its present guise or in another”. (shrink)