Can a Catholic Be a Classical Liberal? | Prof. Erik Dempsey

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 20 March 2023

⏱️ 56 minutes

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Summary

The handout for this lecture may be found here: https://tinyurl.com/5f2ebxm5 This lecture was given on February 2, 2023, at the University of Kansas. For more information about upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Erik Dempsey (PhD, Boston College) is the Assistant Director of University of Texas at Austin's Thomas Jefferson for the Study of Core Texts and Ideas. He completed his doctorate at Boston College in June 2007. He is interested in understanding human virtue, and the proper place of politics in a well-lived human life, the different ways in which human virtue is understood in different political situations, and the ways in which human virtue may transcend any political situation. His dissertation looks at Aristotle's treatment of prudence in the Nicomachean Ethics, and Aristotle's suggestion that virtue should be understood as an end in itself. He is adding a discussion of Thomas's discussion on Aristotle in order to prepare the dissertation as a book. He teaches many classes for the Thomas Jefferson Center, including, Jerusalem and Athens (on the ethical and political teaching of the Bible and Aristotle); Theoretical Foundations of Modern Politics; The Bible and Its Interpreters; The Question of Relativism; Ancient Philosophy and Literature; and American Political Thought.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.
0:06.7	Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.
0:13.6	The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.
0:20.0	To learn more and to attend these events,
0:22.2	visit us at to mystic institute.org.
0:29.7	This is the first time I've set out to address this topic in some kind of public statement.
0:36.9	So I want to own to begin with that my own thinking on
0:40.5	this is something of a work in progress. With that said, let me just proceed to the substance of the
0:47.7	talk, put some things on the table for you all to chew on, and hopefully when I'm done, we can have a kind of discussion.
0:56.0	And as I said, I don't even mind if you guys interrupt me during the talk. But let me say at least a little
1:00.3	bit before we get to that. So the topic I'm addressing today is one that I take to be of great
1:07.5	importance for Catholics living in the contemporary world,
1:12.4	whether Catholics can be adherence of classical liberalism.
1:17.5	That is, Catholicism being the faith that the Thomistic Institute promotes,
1:24.0	and classical liberalism being the principles, both political and anthropological, and the
1:30.4	political forms, which were defended by and articulated by individuals like John Locke, Montesquieu,
1:38.7	Benedict Spinoza, and the American founders. The form of thought and the form of politics that shapes the
1:47.0	modern West and affects the whole world today. The status of liberalism is, as I'm going to
1:56.1	discuss, a somewhat fraught question in Catholic intellectual history.
2:02.0	But before I get into the meat of this, I wanted to say a little bit more about why exactly this topic seems to me so urgent and so urgent now.
2:15.4	So to begin with, in speaking on this issue, I'm responding to a trend that I've noticed
2:22.5	among serious-minded Catholics today, especially young serious-minded Catholics, which is a tendency
	...

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