The Thomistic Institute

This walk was given on September 21, 2021 at Yale University. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: R. J. Snell is Director of Academic Programs at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, NJ. Prior to his appointment at the Witherspoon Institute, he was Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Philosophy Program at Eastern University and the Templeton Honors College, where he founded and directed the Agora Institute for Civic Virtue and the Common Good. He has been visiting instructor at Princeton University, where he is also executive director of the Aquinas Institute for Catholic Life. He's written books and articles on natural law, education, Bernard Lonergan, boredom, subjectivity, and sexual ethics for a variety of publications. 892718

This lecture was delivered on October 28, 2021 at the University of South Carolina. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Christopher Frey is currently an associate professor in the department of philosophy at the University of South Carolina. Prof. Frey works primarily in Ancient Greek philosophy, especially Aristotle’s natural philosophy and metaphysics. He is writing a book entitled The Principle of Life: Aristotelian Souls in an Inanimate World. It concerns the distinction between the animate and the inanimate, the unity of living organisms, nutrition, birth, death, and, more generally, what one’s metaphysical worldview looks like if one takes life to be central. He also works in contemporary philosophy of perception and mind and has written extensively on the relationship between the intentionality and phenomenality of perceptual experience. In addition to these two main areas of research, he has secondary projects in metaphysics, the philosophy of action, Medieval philosophy, Early Modern philosophy, and the history of analytic philosophy.

Prof. Bogardus' slides can be viewed here: https://tinyurl.com/dc329b72 This lecture was given on November 30, 2021 at the University of Texas at Austin. For more 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 November 19, 2021 at the University of South Carolina. View Prof. Keown's slides here: https://tinyurl.com/yck2hbwu For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Dr. John Keown is the Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Christian Ethics in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics.He graduated in law from Cambridge and took a doctorate in law at Oxford, after which he was called to the Bar of England and Wales (Middle Temple). After a spell teaching medical and criminal law at the University of Leicester, he became the first holder of a lectureship in the law and ethics of medicine at Cambridge, where he was elected to a Fellowship at Queens' College and, later, a Senior Research Fellowship at Churchill College. In 2015 he was made a Doctor of Civil Law by the University of Oxford in recognition of his contribution to law and bioethics.He has published widely in the law and ethics of medicine, specializing in issues at the beginning and end of life. The second and heavily revised edition of his widely acclaimed book Euthanasia, Ethics and Public Policy: An Argument Against Legalisation was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018.His research has been cited by distinguished bodies worldwide, including the United States Supreme Court; the Law Lords; the House of Commons; the House of Lords Select Committee on Medical Ethics, and the Australian Senate. In 2011 he testified as an expert witness for Canada in a leading case concerning the country’s laws against euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. He has served as a member of the Ethics Committee of the British Medical Association and has been regularly consulted, not least by legislators and the media, on legal and ethical aspects of medicine. Author of the first paper to demonstrate comprehensively that the American War for Independence failed to satisfy all (if any) of the criteria for a ‘just war’ (and was, therefore, an unjust revolution), he has also written a play based on one of the classic cases in law and bioethics: the trial of Dr. Leonard Arthur for the attempted murder of a newborn baby with Down's syndrome.

This lecture was given on November 5, 2021 at Auburn University. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Sr. Jane Dominic Laurel is a member of the St. Cecilia Congregation of Dominican Sisters of Nashville, Tennessee. She received her Doctorate in Sacred Theology from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome, Italy. She has been active in her religious community's teaching apostolate for over fifteen years and has assisted with the theological formation of the newest members of her religious congregation. In addition to contributing articles to a number of journals and magazines, including the Vatican newspaper (L'Osservatore Romano), The National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly, The Linacre Quarterly, and the Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings, Sister has served as editor-in-chief of her Congregation's book, Praying as a Family (also available in Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic versions). With EWTN, she directed a television series of the same title. She has also served as the creator and founding Director of the University of Dallas Studies in Catholic Faith & Culture Program.

Fr. Guilbeau's handout can be found here: https://tinyurl.com/3vw4dp4e This lecture was delivered on December 6, 2021 at St. Mary Mother of God Catholic Church for the DC Young Professionals Chapter of the Thomistic Institute. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: A native of Louisiana, Fr. Aquinas Guilbeau, O.P. entered the Province of St. Joseph in 2005. After several years of pastoral work in New York City, Fr. Guilbeau began doctoral studies in moral theology at the University of Fribourg, where he completed a dissertation in moral theology. His topic was Charles De Koninck’s doctrine of the common good. In addition to his teaching, Fr. Guilbeau is prior of the Dominican House of Studies.

This homily by Fr. Dominic Legge, O.P. was given on Thursday, Jan. 27 in the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception for the Catholic University of America's annual University Mass in honor of the school's patron, St. Thomas Aquinas. For more 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 an Assistant Professor in systematic 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. He entered the Order of Preachers in 2001 and was ordained a priest in 2007. He practiced law for several years as a trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice before becoming a Dominican.

This lecture was given on November 2, 2021 at Yale University. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Farr Curlin is the Josiah C. Trent Professor of Medical Humanities and Co-Director of the Theology, Medicine, and Culture Initiative (TMC) at Duke University. Dr. Curlin’s ethics scholarship takes up moral questions that are raised by religion-associated differences in physicians’ practices. He is an active palliative medicine physician and holds appointments in both the School of Medicine and the Divinity School, where he is working with colleagues to develop a new interdisciplinary community of scholarship and training focused on the intersection of theology, medicine, and culture.

This lecture was given at University of Alabama, Birmingham on November 1, 2021. For more events and info visit thomisticinstitute.org/events-1. Marie George has been a member of the Philosophy Department since 1988. Professor George is an Aristotelian-Thomist whose interests lie primarily in the areas of philosophy of nature and philosophy of science. She has received several awards from the John Templeton foundation for her work in science and religion, and in 2007 she received a grant from the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences (CTNS) for an interdisciplinary project entitled: “The Evolution of Sympathy and Morality.” Professor George has authored over 50 peer-reviewed articles and two books: Christianity and Extraterrestrials? A Catholic Perspective (2005) and Stewardship of Creation (2009). She is currently working on Aquinas’s “Fifth Way,” and also on a variety of questions concerning living things (self-motion, consciousness, evolution, etc.). Professor George is a member of ten philosophical societies, including the American Catholic Philosophical Association, the Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy, and more.

This lecture was given at University of California, Berkeley on November 16, 2021. For more events and info visit thomisticinstitute.org/events-1. Zena Hitz is a Tutor at St. John's College where she teaches across the liberal arts. She is interested in defending intellectual activity for its own sake, as against its use for economic or political goals. Her forthcoming book, Intellectual Life, is rooted in essays that have appeared in First Things, Modern Age, and The Washington Post. Her scholarly work has focused on the political thought of Plato and Aristotle, especially the question of how law cultivates or fails to cultivate human excellence. She received an MPhil in Classics from Cambridge and studied Social Thought and Philosophy at the University of Chicago before finishing her PhD in Philosophy at Princeton.