Thursday, January 9, 2014

2014 Aquinas Workshop


Mount Saint Mary College in Newburgh, NY will be hosting the Fourth Annual Philosophy Workshop on the theme “Aquinas on God” from June 5-8, 2014.  The speakers will be James Brent, OP, William E. Carroll, Michael Dodds, OP, Edward Feser, Alfred Freddoso, Reinhard Huetter, Candace Vogler, and Thomas Joseph White, OP.  More information here and here.

As previously announced, on Friday, January 31, I’ll be giving the Aquinas Lecture at Ave Maria University in Florida.  More information here.

More speaking engagements to be announced.

9 comments:

  1. Hmm. By google's calculation, I could make the drive from my house to the campus in three hours. This could be fun!

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  2. Somebody had better record it!

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  3. Very interesting that Ralph McInerny's Praeambula Fidei. Thomism and the God of the Philosophers (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2006) is a required text for the event!

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  4. The level of discourse at these events is remarkable, as is the food and fellowship. My only quibble is that each year this conference is held the same weekend as the University Faculty for Life conference.

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  5. Out of curiosity, did Aquinas or any other scholar do any work on chance or probability and their relation to classical theism?

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  6. Dear Anonymous: Just from a vague memory, I think Aquinas argued that chance is compatible with classical theism. Events are not chance when considered from God's perspective, but we do not have God's perspective. From our perspective, events happen that are chance. But God could still be in control of events.
    For example, we could go through a novel and write down the tenth letter on each consecutive page. No matter how many times we do this, we would not be able to predict the next letter; it is chance. However, there is still an author of the work, and the letter is still actually there for a purpose, even if it looks random to us.

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  7. Aristotle and Aquinas following him, both understand chance as a cause, at least in a derivate sense. Chance can generally be understood as the intersection of two or more independent lines of causality. On that understanding, chance would seem quite compatible with God and His providence.

    Pax

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