Aquinas on the Final Purpose of Human Existence and Human Prudence | Fr. Thomas Joseph White, O.P.

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 8 February 2021

⏱️ 47 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given to the University of Texas at Austin on November 19, 2020.

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About the speaker:

Fr. Thomas Joseph White, O.P. is the Director of the Thomistic Institute at the Angelicum. He did his doctoral studies at Oxford University and has research interests in metaphysics, Christology, Trinitarian theology, and the theology of grace. His books include The Incarnate Lord, A Thomistic Study in Christology (2015) and The Light of Christ: An Introduction to Catholicism (2017). He is co-editor of the academic journal Nova et Vetera and in 2011 was appointed an ordinary member of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas. In 2019 Fr. White was named a McDonald Agape Foundation Distinguished Scholar.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Tamistic Institute.
0:03.3	For more talks like this, visit us at tamistic institute.org.
0:10.9	What I'm going to talk about today is Aquinas on prudence,
0:14.2	the final end, and political wisdom.
0:18.3	And I'm going to offer a kind of paradoxical thesis.
0:20.9	This is a very simple introduction to Aquinas' moral thinking.
0:24.6	So I'm not going to cite him chapter and verse.
0:26.8	I'm going to give a kind of very general overview, which would be something you could follow
0:32.1	up with by studying his moral theory in greater detail.
0:34.6	And I'm going to argue something somewhat paradoxical, which is that Aquinas'
0:40.6	contemplative understanding of the final end of the human being is union with God
0:44.8	has profound political connotations that are in some ways very positive.
0:50.1	And I may, if I can make it to it, think a little bit about the pandemic as a test case for moral prudence or moral decision making, complex political moral decision making.
1:00.1	I want to start by talking about a distinction we could make when we look at Aquinas' theory of human action, his theory of moral agency, between truths about
1:16.9	moral behavior that are non-negotiable and truths about moral behavior that are negotiable
1:22.4	or debatable. So it's helpful whenever you're talking about an explanatory science or discipline intellectually to try to figure out what the required starting points are.
1:36.3	And also perhaps I think about the limitations, the negotiability of the discipline.
1:43.3	So you want to think about what are the things that you are committed to the negotiability of the discipline.
1:50.4	So you want to think about what are the things that you are committed to necessarily,
1:53.4	if you're just trying to locate the object of reflection,
1:58.2	that make it possible for you to do the science or undertake a study object.
2:02.5	So if we're doing biology, studying biology, we're going to need to look at living things.
	...

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