Incommensurability and tragic conflict -- The business of order -- The real thing -- Virtue and the twofold order -- Practical reason and final ends -- Natural hierarchy and moral obligation -- Conflict -- The virtues of conflict.

Robert McKee, in his widely-esteemed screenwriting manual, Story , speaks of storytelling in general, and the screenplay in particular, as 'the creative demonstration of truth.' But what could it mean to think of the screenplay as a 'demonstration,' that is, as an argument? In this article I explore this question, taking my cue from McKee's own description of screenplay narrative as 'dramatized dialectical debate.' McKee's reference to dialectic suggests a connection to the dialectical inquiries in Aristotle's major treatises, especially the (...) dialectical inquiry into the nature of human happiness found in the first book of the Nicomachean Ethics . I argue for an analogy between this dialectical inquiry in Aristotle's ethics, and the dialectical trajectory of popular screenplays. Such an analogy helps us understand how films do work as kinds of argument, arguments that aim at the truth of what it means for human beings to achieve their good. (shrink)

Concerned with the trendy, technocratic, and at times sophistical character of contemporary education, the authors seek to reinvigorate a Thomistic approach to ...

As Aquinas makes explicit, the argument of the Summa contra gentiles is ordered according to the twofold mode of truth in what we profess about God. The first three books thus concern the wisdom which revelation announces but which nonetheless is available to natural human reason, while the fourth is devoted to that revealed wisdom incommensurate with human rationality. Interpreters of the SCG have been divided, however, on the question of how these two modes of truth are related in regard (...) to the structure and method of the work. Thomas Hibbs's provocative and engaging new study of the SCG proposes that the unity between them is found primordially in God Himself ; it is found, more precisely, in God as Author of the narrative of Christian revelation which orders the wisdom of the philosophers to Wisdom strictly considered. (shrink)

What would a theory of practical reason that defended positions taken to be definitive or consonant with the natural law tradition, and that also aimed to be a serious contender within contemporary analytic ethics, look like? The theory put forward in Mark Murphy’s compelling and ambitious book seeks to provide the answer. The character of the theory Murphy defends is summarized by him as naturalist, objectivist, welfarist, antiparticularist, and anticonsequentialist. How this summary cashes out in detail will be recognizable in (...) many ways by those familiar with the work of John Finnis, though Murphy does depart from Finnis in significant respects. (shrink)

Those who associate the name of Joseph Owens only with his magisterial work in Aristotelian and Thomistic metaphysics will, with this issue of his collected ethical writings, be forced to reassess their appreciation of his scholarly breadth. The twenty-seven chapters which make up this book, though humbly put forward by their author as side-paths along his main intellectual road, are no dilettante’s work: they constitute a significant and challenging contribution to many of the central debates in Aristotelian/thomistic ethics.

It may seem odd that our legal culture’s uneasiness with regard to the insanity defense has risen in direct proportion to advancements in the scientific understanding of insanity itself. Yet the most intriguing benefit of Daniel N. Robinson’s short history of the insanity defense is his explanation of why this is not an oddity at all. For as Robinson convincingly argues, Western legal systems at least since the seventeenth century have been influenced by theoretical accounts of insanity which have undermined (...) the very understanding of human agency according to which those legal systems were built. The result has been a mounting incoherency in what it means for a plea of insanity to come before a court of law. (shrink)