The Moral Truth We All Know - Do Good and Avoid Evil | Prof. Jennifer Frey

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 27 March 2019

⏱️ 83 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This talk was offered at Brown University on March 13th, 2019

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Speaker Bio

Jennifer A. Frey (University of South Carolina) received her BA from Indiana University in Bloomington Indiana in 2000, and her PhD at the University of Pittsburgh in 2012. In 2013 she was Collegiate Assistant Professor and Harper Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago prior to taking up her current appointment as Assistant Professor in the Philosophy department at the University of South Carolina. Jennifer's research interests lie at the intersection of virtue ethics and action theory. She has publications in The Journal of the History of Philosophy, The Journal of Analytic Philosophy, and in several edited volumes. She is the recipient of several grants, including a 2.1 million dollar project awarded by the John Templeton Foundation, titled "Virtue, Happiness, and Meaning in Life." She is currently at work on three separate book projects.

Transcript

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0:00.0	What I want to do is kind of sketch how I think about moral truth, which is pretty close,
0:10.7	I think, to how St. Thomas thinks about moral truth.
0:14.3	So I do contemporary philosophy.
0:17.1	So the people that I engage with in my writing are other contemporary philosophers by
0:22.2	in large.
0:25.2	But I tend to have a constant dialogue with Thomas Aquinas.
0:30.7	He's one of the main people that I draw upon in large part because I think a lot of what Thomas says makes a lot of sense.
0:40.9	So when I read him, I was an atheist and I was like 18 years old.
0:46.5	And I was just totally struck by how much sense it made.
0:51.6	Really amazing.
0:52.8	Did not expect that.
0:54.8	So what I'm going to do is talk a little bit about what Aquinas thinks truth is, like how
1:02.5	he thinks about truth generally, and then move into thinking about moral truth and
1:09.9	moral knowledge.
1:11.4	And so I'll say some things to try to distinguish it from other kinds of knowledge
1:16.5	that we might acquire in life.
1:20.1	And then I'm going to talk about practical reasoning and the virtues.
1:26.2	And then at the end, I'm going to come back and talk a little bit about this concept,
1:30.3	practical truth.
1:32.3	I think that moral truth is a kind of practical truth, but what does that really mean?
1:38.3	So, quidest veritas, right?
1:41.3	That's the question that Pontius Pilate asks Christ right before he's condemned to death.
	...

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