Abstract

This dissertation is an effort to understand what possibilities remain for moral reflection in the wake of the postmodern critique of metaphysical foundations. I explore this problem through a reading of St. Bonaventure's attempt at an unphilosophical redemption of philosophy in his Collations on the Hexaemeron. Bonaventure countered his contemporaries's enthusiasm for Aristotle with a final series of lectures that effectively denied several of the defining principles of Aristotelian moral thought, beginning with the rhetorical claims that make truth the special purview of philosophical language. I read this critique of Aristotle as an effort to save moral philosophy by writing Aristotle's virtue ethics into a moral narrative dominated by Christic exemplarity. In particular, Bonaventure draws on his metaphysics of exemplarism and a conception of language formed by Scripture to show how the virtue of prudence must be sublimated to the virtue of understanding if there is to be any possibility of freeing moral rationality from the restrictions imposed on it by prudence's slavish dependence on the life of the polis. Bonaventure further shows how an organization of the discourses of moral reflection that places a moral writing in imitation of the mythic structure of Scripture, like the Collations on the Hexaemeron, at its center makes it possible for moral rationality to resist the demythologizing force of logic and escape the threats of foundationalism and nihilism which have shown the potential to undermine the enterprise of moral philosophy entirely. Bonaventure's thirteenth century critique of Aristotle allows me, in conclusion, to consider briefly the limitations of Alasdair MacIntyre's tradition-based rationality in charting a course between these extremes of speculative thought