Distinctively human action—that is, the kind of action which belongs to human beings and no other animals—receives its specifically-human character from the use of reason; and reason is developed through learning.
The Liberal Arts
[2020 Summer] Aquinas’ Cosmological Vision
Seminar: Minds today are given over to a background cosmological nihilism: a nihilism denying the belief that there is purpose independent of our own volitional determination; a nihilism become the unquestioned rule of the day. In contrast is the cosmological vision of Thomas Aquinas: a vision which sees in the fundamental principles of the universe an ordered whole, giving governance to all its parts, and perfect in itself.
[2020 Summer] Ethics: Sex
Seminar: In the word “sex” there is contained a twofold signification: the bifurcated biological nature of the individual and the complementary action toward which that birfucated nature is ordered. This seminar will study both significations, as two parts of a continuous whole, within the existence of the human person. This examination of sex in the light of personhood will be guided by a reading of Saint John Paul II’s Love & Responsibility, written while he was serving as Auxiliary Bishop of Kraków in 1960.
[2020 Summer] Heidegger: Phenomenological Method II
Seminar: Martin Heidegger’s phenomenological method, unlike Husserl’s, does not rely upon a scientific precision. Nor, like Max Scheler’s, is it merely an attitude of considering the relational value of “the things themselves”. Rather, it is a persistent, recursive, reflective investigation that seeks to disclose the reality of what is in all its cognoscible dimensions.
Continuum Philosophical Insight 