Post-Liberalism and Contemporary Catholic Political Philosophy | Prof. Robert Koons

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 29 September 2022

⏱️ 75 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given on April 27, 2022 at the University of Texas at Austin. For information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Robert C. (“Rob”) Koons is a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, where he has taught for 33 years. M. A. Oxford, Ph.D. UCLA. He is the author or co-author of four books, including: Realism Regained (Oxford University Press, 2000), and The Atlas of Reality: A Comprehensive Guide to Metaphysics, with Timothy H. Pickavance (Wiley-Blackwell, 2017). He is the co-editor (with George Bealer) of The Waning of Materialism (Oxford University Press, 2010), and co-editor (with Nicholas Teh and William Simpson) of Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science (Routledge, 2018). He has been working recently on an Aristotelian interpretation of quantum theory, on defending and articulating Thomism in contemporary terms, and on arguments for classical theism.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Thomistic Institute.
0:03.3	For more talks like this, visit us at tamisticinstitute.org.
0:10.6	So I'm going to talk tonight about post-liberalism and some contemporary,
0:17.0	Catholic political thinkers.
0:19.0	So I'm going to spend most of my time actually talking about
0:21.4	liberalism because I'm not going to explain what liberalism is, I first explain what liberalism is.
0:26.6	So I'll spend a lot of time trying to define that, distinguish it from all the things, in particular from what I'm going to call a classical tradition.
0:35.6	You die in this tradition, which I'll explain a bit.
0:38.8	Then talk a bit about why many of us are dissatisfied with liberalism, disconsensive liberalism,
0:45.4	and then finally what are some of the alternatives that present themselves.
0:49.9	So in order to find realism, a philosopher, I'm going to go way back to the ancient Greeks and the ancient Greeks in Romans
0:58.0	and talk about what I would call the classical eudaimus tradition.
1:02.0	So eudaimonia is Aristotle's word for happiness.
1:05.0	It's something that's objective,
1:07.0	the activity that human beings are naturally ordered to participate in.
1:13.1	And so this tradition actually starts in a way with Plato, through Aristotle, Cicero,
1:19.4	Roman philosopher and statesman Augustine, Oetheus, Thomas Aquinas.
1:25.0	So those are the sort of main figures in this tradition. In this tradition, there's a good, which is something that exists, is grounded in our human
1:35.3	nature.
1:36.3	The contrasting position is going to be the liberal tradition, or you might be called just the
1:39.3	modern position in which the good is just whatever we desire.
1:43.3	So whatever we happen to desire or
	...

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