What Makes a Person Good? The Cardinal Virtues and Living Life Well | Prof. Raymond Hain

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 10 June 2022

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This lecture was given on March 24, 2022 at Cornell University. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the Speaker: Professor Raymond Hain is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Providence College and Associate Director of the Providence College Humanities Program. He received his BA in Philosophy from Christendom College and his MA and PhD in Philosophy from the University of Notre Dame, where he studied under Ralph McInerny and David Solomon. He works primarily in moral philosophy in the Thomistic tradition, as well as topics in applied ethics (especially bioethics and the ethics of architecture) and connections between philosophy and literature. As part of the Humanities Program, he directs the Providence College Humanities Forum and the Providence College Humanities Reading Seminars.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Tamistic Institute.
0:03.3	For more talks like this, visit us at tamisticinstitute.org.
0:12.2	What makes a person good?
0:15.2	Such a question confronts us immediately with the beating heart of the moral life,
0:21.6	its dark mysteries and terrifying joys.
0:26.1	I suppose my title suggests already an answer,
0:29.8	an answer as ancient and venerable as my opening question.
0:34.3	The cardinal virtues make us live life well.
0:43.3	They aren't the only things we need to live life well, of course, for the three theological virtues. Faith, hope, and love must be added to the cardinal virtues if we're to become saints.
0:50.3	And not becoming a saint, of course, is the only real tragedy in life.
0:56.0	But I'm getting ahead of myself.
0:59.0	My treatment of these things this evening will be principally philosophical.
1:03.0	But since this is a Thomistic Institute lecture, and since philosophy is herself the handmaiden of theology,
1:10.0	just as the cardinal virtues are in the
1:12.3	service of the theological virtues. I think it fitting that I begin with some things drawn
1:17.6	from the Catholic Church's 1992 Catechism. There are four sections of the Catechism,
1:24.1	faith, liturgy, morality, and prayer. Each of these four sections is divided in half. First
1:31.6	half considers first principles, so the opening section on faith spends time on the existence
1:38.2	of God, the nature of revelation, the act of believing, and so on. And then a second half reflects on a paradigmatic instance in the case of faith the Apostles
1:49.1	Creed.
1:50.9	The cardinal virtues appear, naturally enough, in the section on morality.
1:56.4	The second half is devoted to the Ten Commandments, but the first half, the consideration of first principles,
	...

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.