What Is Truth? Why Does It Matter? | Prof. Jennifer Frey

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 15 April 2022

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This lecture was given on February 28, 2022 at Indiana University. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Jennifer Frey is an associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and fellow of the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America. Prior to joining the philosophy faculty at USC, she was a Collegiate Assistant Professor of Humanities at the University of Chicago, where she was a member of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts. She has published widely on virtue and moral psychology and she has co-edited three volumes on Self-Transcendence and Virtue, Practical Wisdom, and Practical Truth. Her writing has been featured in Breaking Ground, Evangelization and Culture, First Things, Fare Forward, Image, Law and Liberty, The Point, and USA Today.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Thomistic Institute.
0:04.2	For more talks like this, visit us at tamistic institute.org.
0:12.0	I am obviously not a cradle Catholic.
0:14.8	I was not even raised Christian or really any kind of religious believer.
0:19.7	If anything, I was probably raised to be a religious relativist.
0:25.0	And it was actually studying philosophy here at Indiana University
0:29.7	that convinced me that this religious relativism was basically an untenable life posture.
0:38.3	So when I first set foot on IU's campus in the fall of 1996, which is a while ago now,
0:46.3	I was an avowed atheist and I was also an aspiring writer.
0:52.3	But I was also enrolled in a philosophy class my first semester and that proved,
0:57.0	although I didn't know it at the time, but that proved to set the course for the rest of my life.
1:03.0	It was really my discovery of philosophy that first made me realize that I had a kind of restless heart for the truth,
1:12.6	this kind of unchecked desire to want to understand the world and to want to understand myself,
1:18.6	and not in a kind of piecemeal, haphazard sort of way, but in a holistic and well-orded sort of way,
1:26.6	in which all the pieces of the puzzle would
1:28.4	actually fit into a coherent whole. I basically wanted to know whether the stories that I had
1:35.3	been told about myself, about my country, about the human person were true, right? And after about
1:44.1	a full year and a half of studying, I basically lived
1:47.7	on the library, I finally approached a priest here at St. Paul's. I'd been doing a lot of reading
1:54.8	in philosophy and theology. In particular, I had been reading Augustine and Aquinas fairly heavily, pretty much on my own,
2:03.6	alongside with many fathers of the early church.
2:07.6	So all of this, in addition, of course, to the canonical figures in the philosophical tradition in the West,
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Thomistic Institute, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The Thomistic Institute and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.