Showcasing Contemporary Catholic Thought

Decosimo turns to Aquinas for aid with the intellectual and moral challenges in the phenomenon of “pagan virtue” or “outsider virtue”: how should the adherents of a particular religion, worldview, or form of life respond to the apparent virtues and excellences exhibited by those living outside that form of life? Decosimo’s response delivers an account of Aquinas in which his Augustinian and Aristotelian tendencies mutually support one another, together with a pattern for doing justice to outsider expressions of human good on the basis of one’s own fundamental convictions.

Feser provides a careful, analytic elaboration of proofs for the existence of God drawn from the history of classical theistic reflection from Aristotle to Leibniz.

Griffiths exemplifies the virtues of an analytic, speculative approach to questions in Catholic eschatology, above all: which of God’s creatures, if any, can be brought (or bring themselves) to nothing?

This volume gathers together a wide and representative range of Haldane’s contributions to philosophical reflection on ethics, politics, education, art, society, and Catholic faith.

Kerr gives us here the first monograph treatment of the argument for God’s existence in Aquinas’s early work of metaphysics, the De Ente et Essentia.

Murphy’s book takes up the work of retrieving our conception of God’s goodness from idolatrous assimilation to forms of human moral goodness. Divine goodness, Murphy argues, does not entail that God is morally required to promote the well-being of God’s creatures. The result is an account of divine perfection better able to meet the challenges of the argument from evil.

Pawl’s monograph provides an extended philosophical defense, not for the truth, but for the coherence, of Conciliar Christology: the collection of doctrinal statements on the identity of Christ made over the course of the first seven ecumenical councils of the Christian Church. The book adds to these statements a further five claims to the collection whose coherence Pawl defends: first, that multiple incarnations are possible; second, that Christ descended into Hell during his death; third, that Christ’s human will is free; fourth, that Christ is impeccable; fifth, that Christ, via his human intellect, knows all things past, present, and future. The result is a model of analytic clarity in Christian philosophical theology.

Stump draws on Thomistic moral psychology and value theory, neurobiology, developmental psychology, and biblical narrative to provide an innovative and formidable defense of Aquinas’s theodicy.

Turner’s study revisits Aquinas’s theology to argue that there are reasons of faith in favor of the view that God’s existence can be rationally demonstrated. The result is a serious contribution to our understanding of natural and negative theology and of analogical speech about the divine.