Our first speaker this morning is Father James Brent.

Father Brent is a priest of the order of preachers

and completed his doctoral studies in philosophy at St. Louis University

writing his dissertation under Professor Eleanor Stump.

His doctorate, the epistemic status of Christian beliefs in Thomas Aquinas, compares and contrasts St. Thomas

with the ideas of Richard Swinburne and Alvin Plantiga on questions of foundationalist forms of knowledge and evidences of religious belief.

Father Brent is Professor of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.,

and the author of a number of learned articles.

The title of his talk this morning, which I asked me to give a kind of introduction to realism in the Aristotelian Thomas tradition,

and the title of his talk this morning is the principle of non-contradiction yesterday,

today, and forever.

Please help me welcome, Father James Brent.

Thank you, Father Thomas Joseph.

And thank you all for coming here.

I think this is a great opportunity for us.

Father Thomas Joseph asked me to present something a little bit more basic for people who might not be a specialist in philosophy.

You may be studying theology or people who are not necessarily acquainted with the ways of, and there's technical

issues of professional sorts of philosophical discussions. And so I'm going to give a kind of

general talk and then at the end I'll start to get into more technical issues for those of you

here who are concerned and familiar with more technical sorts of questions.

So I begin by referring to the encyclical letter, Fides at Ratzio of Pope John Paul II.

He identified three tasks that he wishes contemporary philosophers would carry out

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