Aquinas and Newman on the Pursuit of Wisdom and Happiness – Prof. Jennifer Frey

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Religion &Amp; Spirituality, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 17 November 2025

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This lecture was given on September 18th, 2025, at University of Tulsa.

For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.

About the Speakers:

Jennifer A. Frey is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tulsa. She previously served as the inaugural Dean of the Honors College. Before coming to Oklahoma, she was an Associate Professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina, where she was also a Peter and Bonnie McCausland Faculty Fellow in the College of Arts and Sciences. Prior to her tenure at Carolina, she was a Collegiate Assistant Professor the Humanities at the University of Chicago, and a junior fellow of the Society for the Liberal Arts. She earned her Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh and her B.A. in philosophy and medieval studies (with a classics minor) at Indiana University-Bloomington. In 2015, she was awarded a multi-million dollar grant from the John Templeton Foundation, titled “Virtue, Happiness, and the Meaning of Life.” She has published widely on virtue and moral psychology, and she has edited three academic volumes on virtue and human action: Self Transcendence and Virtue: Perspectives from Philosophy, Psychology, and Theology; Practical Truth; and Practical Wisdom (OUP, forthcoming 2025). Her writing has been featured in Breaking Ground, First Things, Image, Law and Liberty, The NewYork Times, The Point, USA Today, and the Wall Street Journal. She lives with her husband and six children in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.
0:06.2	Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.
0:13.1	The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.
0:19.5	To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at to mystic institute.org.
0:25.2	Plato understood the philosopher famously as the lover of wisdom,
0:30.6	and he built his academy for students who wanted to pursue that.
0:34.9	My question tonight is about the object of the philosophers Eros and whether that
0:40.3	object is only for the philosopher. After all, philosophers are pretty weird people. I think we have to be upfront about that.
0:49.3	Or whether we should all strive to love wisdom, and if so, why we should do this.
0:57.0	And in particular, I am very interested in whether the university itself, like Plato's Academy,
1:04.0	ought to be dedicated to the pursuit of wisdom.
1:08.0	Isn't it enough that we are dedicated without fear or favor to truth, or so we like to say?
1:14.8	What is wisdom anyway? And why is it that in most universities today, you will never meet a faculty
1:23.7	member or student who thinks they ought to be pursuing it or has any idea what it is.
1:30.3	So I want to try to approach this question by way of contrasting two very different visions
1:39.3	of what sort of knowledge is essential to the university, right? The first is that promoted by someone named
1:48.5	Max Weber, maybe you've heard of him, and the other is promoted by Cardinal John Henry Newman,
1:54.2	who is now alongside Thomas Aquinas, a doctor of the church. Yay. I will then move on to discuss Aquinas and conclude with some thoughts
2:03.5	about what is at stake in the debate between these two men and how it affects our understanding
2:10.5	of a liberal education. So how does it help us answer the question, why are we here? What are we doing?
2:17.3	Okay, so Weber first. So in 1917,
2:20.7	the great sociologist Max Weber was invited by a group of university students in Munich to launch
	...

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