Aquinas's Reception of Aristotle | Reinhard Hütter

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4.8 • 873 Ratings

🗓️ 13 December 2018

⏱️ 42 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given to a small student seminar at Duke University on October 5th, 2018. For more information about upcoming TI events, visit: thomisticinstitute.org/events-1/

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Reinhard Huetter is Ordinary Professor of Fundamental Theology at the School of Theology and Religious Studies of The Catholic University.

Professor Huetter is a native of Lichtenfels, Germany. He received his Dr. theol. (summa cum laude) in 1990, and his Habilitation in 1995, both from the University of Erlangen. He taught for nine years theological ethics and systematic theology at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago and for seventeen years systematic theology at Duke University Divinity School. In 2004, he and his wife entered into the full communion of the Catholic Church.

His teaching and research focuses on fundamental theological questions of the relationship between faith and reason, nature and grace, revelation and faith, theology and philosophy, dogma and history, on questions of theological anthropology (grace and freedom), and the theology and epistemology of faith. He has an abiding interest in the thought of Thomas Aquinas and has, in more recent years, developed also an intense interest in the thought of John Henry Newman.

Huetter is the author of numerous books, most recently Dust Bound for Heaven: Explorations in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas (2012) and Divine Happiness: Aquinas on the Journey to Beatitude, the Ultimate Human End (forthcoming 2018) and has contributed numerous chapters to handbooks and edited collections. He is presently working on a theological commentary on Psalm 119, a small book on John Henry Newman, and a theological treatise on Doctrine: Its Nature and Development.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Topic of today's seminar is Aquinas the Aristotelian.
0:05.0	Instead of studying Aquinas' reception of Aristotle across the sprawling
0:11.0	earth ray of the angelic doctor, which would take us numerous semesters to do,
0:16.0	I have chosen a more manageable project for our seminar.
0:20.0	We will focus on one of Aquinas' relatively rare, polemical writings,
0:25.9	a work in which, on strictly philosophical grounds,
0:30.5	he reads, defense, and develops Aristotle's philosophy
0:34.3	over against some contemporary opponents, the Latin Averroists.
0:42.8	Thomas rode on the unicity of the intellect against the Averroists during his second regency,
0:49.6	his second stay tenure, on the Dominican chair in theology at the University of Paris
0:59.5	in the year 1,270, four years before his death.
1:07.7	Aquinas' deepest convictions about the value of Aristotle for understanding human nature and destiny come into play in this polemical opusculum.
1:17.6	In it, he takes issue with the teaching on the soul, advanced in the Latin translation, of the Andalusian philosopher Ibn Rusht, in his great commentary on Aristotle's
1:32.8	treatise on the soul.
1:35.9	Ibn Rusch Latinized Averroes was born in 1126 in Cordova, in the then Al-Moravid caliphate and died in 1198 in Marrakesh in the then Almohad Caliphate.
1:52.8	He came from a prominent family of judges and he himself served as judge and also as court physician.
2:03.2	Averroes wrote works on philosophy, theology, medicine, astronomy, physics,
2:08.3	and Islamic jurisprudence and law.
2:12.4	He was a strong proponent of what he took to be an authentic Aristotelianism.
2:18.0	He attempted to restore what he considered the original teachings of Aristotle
2:22.0	and opposed the Neoplatonist tendencies of earlier Muslim thinkers, such as Al-Farabi and Avicenna.
2:30.1	He also defended the pursuit of philosophy against criticism by theologians, such as Al-Ghazali.
	...

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