Abstract

Insights about moral personhood arising from contemporary feminist moral theory are similar to some aspects of Thomas Aquinas's theological anthropology. Specifically, the developing tradition of religious feminism has identified relationality and embodiment as core aspects of women's experience of moral personhood. Thomas Aquinas addressed cognate aspects in his treatments of natural love, the passion of love, and the virtue of love. I offer that some of his views may be retrieved for feminist use from the Summa Theologiae. The thesis of this dissertation is that the developing feminist understanding of moral personhood can be enriched, extended, and, in certain aspects, corrected by constructive engagement of its principles of relationality and embodiment with Thomas's anthropological treatises. At the same time, a renewed appropriation of Thomas's theological anthropology can be enriched, extended, and, in certain influential aspects, corrected by serious engagement of its traditional rationale of the subordination of women with emerging feminist insights about women's moral personhood experienced as embodied relationality