The Thomistic Institute

This lecture was given on May 28, 2022 at the 11th Annual Aquinas Philosophy Workshop on Aquinas on the Soul. The handout for the talk can be found here: https://tinyurl.com/4bmexjhm For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Michael Gorman is a graduate of St. Michael's College in the University of Toronto (B.A., Christianity and Culture, 1987), The Catholic University of America (Ph.L., Philosophy, 1989), the State University of New York at Buffalo (Ph.D., Philosophy, 1993), and Boston College (Ph.D., Theology, 1997). After serving as assistant professor of Catholic Studies at Saint Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia from 1997 to 1999, he joined the faculty of the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America, where he has taught ever since. A fellow of The Catholic University's Institute for Human Ecology, he has also been an Alexander von Humboldt fellow (Leipzig 2004), a Fulbright fellow (Cologne 2008), and a scholar in the Templeton Foundation's Working Group "Virtue, Happiness, and the Meaning of Life" (2015-2017). He works primarily on metaphysics, especially the metaphysics of essence, substance, and normativity, and on applications of metaphysics in areas such as theory of mind, Christology, action theory, and ethics. He is the author of Aquinas on the Metaphysics of the Hypostatic Union (Cambridge, 2017) and over thirty scholarly articles. He is particularly interested in how analytic philosophy and medieval philosophy can be brought together in a way that is historically accurate and philosophically fruitful.

This lecture was given on May 28, 2022 at the 11th Annual Aquinas Philosophy Workshop on Aquinas on the Soul. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Prof. John O'Callaghan is the Director of the Jacques Maritain Center at the University of Notre Dame as well as a permanent member of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas, appointed by Pope Benedict XVI in 2010. He served as the past President of the American Catholic Philosophical Association. His areas of scholarly interest include Medieval Philosophy, the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, and Thomistic Metaphysics and Ethics. Prof. O'Callaghan earned his BS in Physics from St. Norbert College in 1984, an MS in Mathematics from the University of Notre Dame in 1986, and his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Notre Dame in 1996.

This talk was given on May 27th, 2022 at the 11th Annual Aquinas Philosophy Workshop on Aquinas on the Soul. The handout for the talk can be found here: https://tinyurl.com/4nfcx8vp For information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Fr. Dominic Legge, O.P., is the Director of the Thomistic Institute and Assistant Professor in Dogmatic Theology at the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C. He holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, a Ph.L. from the School of Philosophy of the Catholic University of America, and a doctorate in Sacred Theology from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. He entered the Order of Preachers in 2001, after having practiced constitutional law for several years as a trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice. He has also taught at The Catholic University of America Law School and at Providence College. He is the author of The Trinitarian Christology of St. Thomas Aquinas (Oxford University Press, 2016).

This talk was given on May 27th, 2022 at the 11th Annual Aquinas Philosophy Workshop on Aquinas on the Soul. The handout for the talk can be found here: https://tinyurl.com/mr224yuv For information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Fr. James Dominic Brent, O.P. was born and raised in Michigan. He pursued his undergraduate and graduate studies in Philosophy, and completed his doctorate in Philosophy at Saint Louis University on the epistemic status of Christian beliefs according to Saint Thomas Aquinas. He has articles in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Natural Theology, in the Oxford Handbook of Thomas Aquinas on “God’s Knowledge and Will”, and an article forthcoming on “Thomas Aquinas” in the Oxford Handbook of the Epistemology of Theology. He earned his STL from the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception, and was ordained a priest in the same year. He taught in the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America from 2010- 2014, and spent the year of 2014-2015 doing full time itinerant preaching on college campuses across the United States.

This lecture was given on April 13, 2022 at Mississippi State University. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: W. Matthews Grant is Professor and Chair in the Department of Philosophy at University of St. Thomas (MN), and Associate Editor of the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly. His articles have focused on Aquinas and the Philosophy of God, particularly issues having to do with the divine nature and God’s relationship to human freedom. His new book Free Will and God’s Universal Causality: The Dual Sources Account, draws resources from Aquinas and the scholastic tradition to explain how libertarian creaturely freedom can be reconciled with robust accounts of God’s providence, grace, and predestination.

This lecture was given on October 12, 2021 at Iowa State University. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Fr. Anselm Ramelow is a Catholic priest in the Order of Preachers. He is professor of philosophy at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley and currently the chair of the philosophy department. He obtained his doctorate under Robert Spaemann in Munich on Leibniz and the Spanish Jesuits (Gott, Freiheit, Weltenwahl, 1997) and did theological work on George Lindbeck and the question of a Thomist philosophy and theology of language (Beyond Modernism? - George Lindbeck and the Linguistic Turn in Theology, 2005). He contributed articles to the Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophy and essays on topics at the intersection of philosophy and theology, as well as a translation and commentary on part of Aquinas’ De veritate. He continues to work on questions of free will, philosophy of religion (miracles, existence and nature of God) and philosophical aesthetics.

This lecture was given on May 6, 2022 at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. Dr. LaPenna's PowerPoint may be found here: tinyurl.com/mr38h43y For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Dr. Paul LaPenna is a neurologist in Greenville, SC and Associate Professor of Neurology at the Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine, Carolinas Campus. Dr. LaPenna completed his neurology residency at Indiana University School of Medicine in 2018. As a neurohospitalist, Dr. LaPenna’s skill set is focused on treatment of neurological emergencies and performing and interpreting electrophysiological studies of the brain and peripheral nervous system. As an Associate Professor of Neurology, Dr. LaPenna has won numerous teaching awards, including Clinical Medicine Professor of the neuroscience curriculum in 2019, 2020, and 2021. For the 2020-2021 academic year, Dr. LaPenna was awarded the Preceptor of the Year. For his care towards patients, he was elected to the Arnold P. Gold Humanism Honor Society in 2016. Dr. LaPenna has an interest in the relationship between science and faith—in particular, the relationship between neuroscience and the soul, the overreaching claims of science, and the dignity of the human person, to name a few. Saint Thomas Aquinas has been a major influence in Dr. LaPenna’s intellectual and faith journey. Dr. LaPenna was previously a collegiate runner and now enjoys running recreationally, hiking, and spending time outdoors. Most of all, he loves his wife Nicole and their two daughters, Catherine and Susanna.

This lecture was given on May 1, 2022 at Brown University. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: William B. Hurlbut, MD, is Adjunct Professor and Senior Research Scholar in Neurobiology at the Stanford Medical School. After receiving his undergraduate and medical training at Stanford University, he completed postdoctoral studies in theology and medical ethics, studying with Robert Hamerton-Kelly, the Dean of the Chapel at Stanford, and subsequently with the Rev. Louis Bouyer of the Institut Catholique de Paris. His primary areas of interest involve the ethical issues associated with advancing biomedical technology, the biological basis of moral awareness, and studies in the integration of theology with the philosophy of biology. He is the author of numerous publications on science and ethics. He has worked with NASA on projects in astrobiology and was a member of the Chemical and Biological Warfare Working group at the Center for International Security and Cooperation. From 2002-2009 Dr. Hurlbut served on the President’s Council on Bioethics. He serves as a Steering Committee Member of the Templeton Religion Trust.

This talk was given on April 28, 2022 at Mississippi State University. The slides accompanying this lecture can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/bogardusmississippi For information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the Speaker: Tomás Bogardus is associate professor of philosophy at Pepperdine University. He was born in Long Beach, California, and earned his BS in biology at UC San Diego, his MA in philosophy at Biola University, and his PhD in philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. He works mainly in metaphysics and epistemology, and is most interested in the mind-body problem and the rationality of religious belief.

This lecture was given on February 22, 2022 at the US Military Academy at West Point. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Joshua Hochschild is Professor of Philosophy and Director of Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Mount St. Mary’s University, where he also served six years as the inaugural Dean of the College of Liberal Arts. His primary research is in medieval logic, metaphysics, and ethics, with broad interest in liberal education and the continuing relevance of the Catholic intellectual tradition. He is the author of The Semantics of Analogy: Rereading Cajetan’s De Nominum Analogia (2010), translator of Claude Panaccio’s Mental Language: From Plato to William of Ockham (2017), and co-author of A Mind at Peace: Reclaiming an Ordered Soul in the Age of Distraction (2017). His writing has appeared in First Things, Commonweal, Modern Age and the Wall Street Journal. For 2020-21 he served as President of the American Catholic Philosophical Association.