Can I Actually Be Fulfilled? Ancient Insights Into Human Good | Prof. Candace Vogler

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 30 August 2024

⏱️ 40 minutes

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Summary

Professor Candace Vogler explores the concept of the highest good in philosophy, comparing views from John Stuart Mill, Immanuel Kant, and Thomas Aquinas, and examining how humans can orient themselves towards this ultimate goal.

This lecture was given on April 8th, 2024, at University of Rochester.

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About the Speaker:

Candace Vogler is the David B. and Clare E. Stern Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. Her primary area of research is moral philosophy, with special emphasis on virtue and practical reason. She draws extensively from work by G. E. M. ('Elizabeth') Anscombe, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Immanuel Kant, and sometimes she teaches work by John Stuart Mill. She also works on psychoanalysis (primarily Freudian work and the work of Jacques Lacan), and at the intersections of philosophy and literature and philosophy and film. Vogler is interested in questions about the highest good, about sin, and about moral self-improvement.

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
0:22.3	at to mystic institute.org. I'm actually going to give the talk about the highest good, which is a way
0:29.5	of getting at how much we can hope for, basically, this time around or in another life.
0:48.3	Very few contemporary philosophers are especially concerned with whether or not there is or could be a sumum bonum. Of course, philosophers used to take it that developing an account of the highest good was crucial to work in ethics
0:56.5	and political philosophy, and on some views, even to work in speculative or theoretical philosophy,
1:03.9	that we need to understand the highest good was a commonplace in ancient Greek philosophy, for
1:09.5	example, and the interest in what might count as the highest good
1:13.5	survived in 18th and 19th century European philosophy.
1:18.3	In these more recent forays into thought about the highest good,
1:23.0	European philosophers often associated developing an account of the highest good with advancing our efforts
1:29.8	to understand the foundations of right action, sound practical thinking, and duty.
1:36.5	In contemporary Anglophone philosophy, these topics are generally treated as matters of morality. What such philosophers tend to frame as concern over
1:47.7	the right rather than the good. That way of carving territory makes no sense with respect to the people
1:55.0	I'm about to discuss. Now, it's not clear that this way of framing and directing concerns over the
2:00.7	highest good fits any older work.
2:03.0	It is perfectly clear that it does not fit the older work that will most concern me, work by St. Thomas Aquinas.
2:10.5	I will not investigate the ways in which Aquinas' work on the highest good intersects with his work on acting well, but the relationship
2:19.2	between these two strands of his thought cannot take the shape that it takes in modern thought.
2:26.4	In this talk, I'm going to move toward Aquinas on the highest good from the side, using a philosophical
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