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The Thomistic Institute

Aquinas on Virtue and the Path to Happiness | Prof. Josh Hochschild & Prof. Jane Sloan Peters

The Thomistic Institute

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8729 Ratings

🗓️ 30 September 2024

⏱️ 40 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Professors Josh Hochschild and Jane Sloan Peters participate in a two-person panel. First Professor Hochschild examines Aristotle’s concept of piety and its apparent absence in his writing, suggesting that Aristotle may talk about piety indirectly and in a more embodied way through discussion of contemplation of God. Then Professor Peters moves the discussion from the philosophical to the theological, specifically Aquinas’ moral theology. She discusses the often-overlooked importance of the gifts of the Holy Spirit along with the cardinal and theological virtues. Finally, the discussion explains how the gifts of the Holy Spirit complement the virtues and are necessary for salvation.


This lecture was given on June 29th, 2024, at The Dominican House of Studies.


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


About the Speakers:


Joshua Hochschild is Professor of Philosophy at Mount St. Mary’s University, where he also served six years as the inaugural Dean of the College of Liberal Arts. His primary research is in medieval logic, metaphysics, and ethics, with broad interest in liberal education and the continuing relevance of the Catholic intellectual tradition. He is the author of The Semantics of Analogy: Rereading Cajetan’s De Nominum Analogia (2010), translator of Claude Panaccio’s Mental Language: From Plato to William of Ockham (2017), and co-author of A Mind at Peace: Reclaiming an Ordered Soul in the Age of Distraction (2017). His writing has appeared in First Things, Commonweal, Modern Age and the Wall Street Journal. For 2020-21 he served as President of the American Catholic Philosophical Association.


Jane Sloan Peters is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the College of Mount Saint Vincent in Riverdale, NY. Her dissertation explored Thomas Aquinas's reception of Greek patristic and Byzantine biblical interpretation for his four-volume commentary on the Gospels, the Catena Aurea. She lives in Connecticut with her husband and two sons.


Transcript

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0:00.0

Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.

0:06.8

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.

0:19.1

To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at to mystic institute.org.

0:25.3

Thank you all for being here.

0:26.3

This is a really grand room, isn't it?

0:29.4

The topic for this panel is Aquinas on virtue and the path to happiness.

0:35.2

I think I got that right.

0:36.1

It's close to that.

0:37.4

I'm not going to talk as

0:38.3

much explicitly about Aquinas, but I'm going to talk about one of his most important sources

0:42.7

in sort of conceptualizing the ideas of living a good life, including virtue and happiness, namely

0:49.4

Aristotle. And I'm sort of curious to start out, you know, how many people feel like they're kind of basically familiar with.

0:56.6

They're not surprised to hear that Aristotle talks about virtue.

0:59.7

You've heard that, right?

1:01.0

You're not surprised to hear that Aristotle talks about happiness.

1:04.3

You've heard something like that.

1:05.3

Maybe you could even say something about how those two concepts are related.

1:09.0

Now, how many of you have heard about Aristotle

1:12.9

on the virtue of piety?

1:17.8

Very few hands.

1:19.8

So there's a reason for that.

...

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