Five Videos on Thomas Aquinas on Happiness

I created another set of short lecture videos for my students, enrolled in my Introduction to Philosophy and my Foundations in Philosophy classes, focused on a key discussion by Thomas Aquinas in question 2 of the First Part of the Second Part of his Summa Theologiae.  It is often called the "treatise on happiness", and that is the focus of those discussions.  What is the nature of human happiness?  What - among the things that people think will make them happy - really does make human beings happy? 

Here are those five videos, which I released early to my Patreon supporters last month:

• Wealth and Human Happiness
• Honor, Fame. and Power and Happiness
• Pleasure and Human Happiness
• Goods of Body or Soul and Happiness
• Can Any Created Good Be Happiness?

One Sentence Summary on Aristotle and Anger

As the current editor of Stoicism Today, and a frequenter of various social media Stoicism-focused groups, I wind up wading into quite a few discussions bearing not only on Stoic philosophy, but on practical philosophy more generally, particularly when the conversation turns to two other matters that I do quite a bit of work on - Aristotelian philosophy, and the emotion of anger.

In the course of one of those discussions in the Facebook Stoicism Group, an interlocutor asked me if I could provide a one-sentence summary of Aristotle's position on anger.  If that was something easy to do, I would have done so right then and there.  But since it isn't I decided I'd put some thought into it and then provide an answer later.  And that's exactly what I'm doing now.

Aristotle's position on anger is that it is one of the most complex and distinctive of the human emotions, that it involves bodily, psychological, social, and moral dimensions, and that anger can and ought to be felt and acted upon in a number of right ways.

Understanding Anger - Lecture 9: Thomas Aquinas On Anger

Our series of monthly lectures for this year -- hosted by the historic Kingston Library -- has come to a close, with a well-attended and very enjoyable last session.  The topic for this talk, Thomas Aquinas' perspective upon anger, tied together thematic threads from many of the previous sessions, particularly because Thomas himself was a great systematizer and synthesizer of previous points of view.

In the previous session, we examined several early Christian thinkers who discussed anger (you can watch the video of that earlier session here), taking us up to the 5th century AD, the cusp between antiquity and the middle ages.  In this final session, we focused on a thinker solidly in the midst of the medieval period, the 13th century, often called the "high middle ages."  You can watch the video of that very lively discussion here.

10 Philosophical Texts I'd Bring to a Desert Island

A bit over a year ago, a longstanding friend and colleague -- someone I actually went to college with -- asked me a question so intriguing that I ended up sitting down and recording a 20-minute YouTube video answering it in detail.

He wrote me:  If you could bring ten philosophical works to be stranded with on the proverbial desert island, which ten would they be, and why? 

Second Radio Interview: Thomas Aquinas and Natural Law

Invited back to Theology Matters with the Pellews -- the idea being that I might start doing more or less regular guest spots focused on key Christian (and also atheist) thinkers of the past -- I proposed that my discussion this time focus on Thomas Aquinas and his conception of Natural Law.  Not just Natural Law by itself, in isolation, though, but understood in conjunction with several other key conceptions of laws in Thomas' thought, namely, Eternal Law, Divine Law, and Human Law.

The original date had to be shifted from early August to later on in the month, due to some computer issues on the end of the show, which prefigured a few technical difficulties that occurred during the second portion of the actual show.  Overall though, it seems -- going by listener responses -- to have been a good show.  Given my somewhat perfectionist tendencies, the fact that I was one of the speakers, and the sort of "professional blinders" that being an expert in the field inevitably brings, I'm not a good judge of these sorts of matters -- how well the presentation, the dialogue, the interaction actually illuminated Thomas thought for the non-philosopher listening in.

If you'd like to listen to -- or download -- the full podcast of the show, you can do so by clicking here.

Twitter and Facebook Addictive? New Boundaries for Temperance

Those who have come across posts from my Facebook author page, my Twitter feed, or my other blog Virtue Ethics Digest, know that I have a penchant for pointing out instances where results of research publicized by putatively cutting-edge brain scientists, psychologists, or other cognitive and social scientists do little more than reintroduce -- often without adequate reference or reflection -- topics and truths developed long ago within traditions of moral philosophy, particularly those traditions we term "Virtue Ethics."

Perhaps I seem overly gleeful at the prospect of showing -  or rather showing up -the supposedly more scientific approaches to the complex phenomena of moral life that their objects of research possess a history antedating their perennial efforts to yet once again pronounce the definitive word on the matters. It's hard not to when researchers routinely say things straightfacedly like "Little is known about how people experience and regulate desires in daily life"  -- as if human beings haven't been experiencing, reflecting upon, discussing, proposing and testing models, and occasionally even experiencing some success with these matters for millennia -- and in some cases even writing some things down about them, a few ideas considered useful, insightful, or at least entertaining enough that we read them still today under the rubric of "classic literature," even moral philosophy.

New Year, Old Blog, New Name?

Over roughly the last month, my blog has laid fallow.  The end of last semester piled on not only the typical final exam/project preparation, grading, answering student complaints about grades, but also much basically administrative and governance work for my university.

As the person at FSU arguably with the most experience in the many possible permutations and features of the CLA, I was drawn into the still rather murky and messy process of writing our university's Quality Enhancement Plan.  The funding for the Writing Across the Curriculum pilot program on Close Readings I'm coordinating finally trickled down to my level, two months later than expected.  The last three weeks of the term also saw Faculty Senate, Academic Affairs, and COACHE report meetings.  I've also been preparing for teaching my typical load of four Critical Thinking classes, with two of these incorporating service learning and focusing on food awareness.  Final presentations and reports for my Chesnutt Library Fellowship (in Information Literacy) -- reporting a very mixed success (about which I'll blog in a later post) brought my on-campus obligations to a close.

What's Lost in Translation, and What's Not (part 2)

As if I were addressing a room, rather than casting my bread upon the waters of cyberspace, I'll start with an anecdote, one which I find funny.  Hopefully you will also see the somewhat dark humor in it.

Several years back, Alasdair MacIntyre was on some panel at the Modernity:  Yearing for the Infinite conference at Notre Dame.  I entirely forget what the discussion was about, but remember well a remark he interjected, or at least its essential content.  So, in Thucydidian reformulation (having the characters in one's narrative say not what they really said but what they ought to have said, given their ethos) :

When I was a boy, we were beaten if we did not learn Greek irregular verbs well.  I am not defending beating children.  In fact that is a very bad thing to do, both for the children and for those beating them.  It was painful, and produced anxiety.  But now . . . I can read Sophocles and you can't.

A fellow philosopher Dave O'Hara and I started a conversation on Twitter about languages and translations in philosophy, one which I am certain just as much on his side as on mine, reverberates with countless conversations he carried out with other people down the years. When students in class, other professors, parishioners in study groups, fellow travelers passing the time with talk, and the host of other seemingly chance interlocutors find out that you can read a text in its original language, a language they do not know, there are some standard lines in which the discussion typically develops.  Guiding, understandable, but mistaken assumptions come to light.  Sometimes I point them out.  nowadays, I usually just pass over them and allow the conversation to go as the other person seemingly needs it to proceed.

What's Lost in Translation, and What's Not (part 1)

A philosophical colleague of mine, Dave O'Hara, who I must admit not to knowing well, has been carrying on an interesting exchange with me about languages, translations, and philosophy.  So far, we've been conversing about it via the bite-size  passages the microblog Twitter permits (though Dave used the "part 1. . .  part 3" multiple post way around the length limit).  I found myself, as I often do with Twitter, somewhat frustrated at having to reduce complex thoughts on tricky matters to easily misinterpreted sound bites (though I must admit, I also do enjoy the challenge), and the issues raised are genuinely deep philosophical ones, so I decided those issues deserved a blog entry.

Here's how the exchange developed:

Davoh (Dave O'Hara)

Philo tweeps: how important do you consider learning languages for the study of philosophy? Which languages?

philosopher70 (me)

Langs? Absolutely important! For Western: Greek, Latin, French, German. Ex: Aristotle, key concepts across texts lost in translation

Anselm on Persons in God's Mind (part 1)

Saint Anselm makes a very interesting distinction at several points in his writings.  He contrasts how things are in our thought, language, or knowledge about them with how things actually are in themselves.

Such a contrast between reality and appearance, or reality and representations of reality, is a commonplace found in nearly all philosophical approaches, even in those which accord priority to perspectives rather than to realities.  Anselm goes further, however, introducing a higher, or better put deeper, level: there is how things are in our knowledge of them, how things are in themselves (in se), and how they exist, as he puts it, in the divine Word, i.e. how they exist in the mind of God.  Here is one of several key passages (in Hopkin's and Richardson's translation:

Now, it is evident that the more truly the Creating Being exists than does the created being, the more truly every created substance exists in the Word (i.e., in the Understanding) of the Creator than in itself. Therefore, how would the human mind comprehend what that kind of speaking and knowledge is which is so vastly superior to and truer than created substances, if our knowledge is as vastly surpassed by these [created] things as their likenesses are different from their being?

Ethics of Anger

About a week ago, one the local Cumberland County Library branches emailed me to ask whether I might be willing to give some sort of talk an evening in January, something dealing with Philosophy, perhaps, the librarian suggested, a talk about Ethics.  Always ready to squeeze another gig between already plotted engagements, even more to scribe in fresh ink on a virgin calendar (at least virtually), I immediately agreed.  Engaging a group of non-academics, people unaffiliated with the university, but intellectually active, curious, questioning, is both challenging and rewarding.  I have come to take a double view of philosophical topics.

On the one hand, there are matters of the mind which possess their own intrinsic worth and beauty, and this often renders them complex and not immediately accessible (often inexplicable, even unintelligible to my philosophical colleagues).  There is no popularizing these, no "bringing philosophy down from the heavens to earth" for such matters.  The mind and the heart must make the step by step difficult climb to reach them, must puzzle the concepts open, unfold the ideas portion by portion, before uncovering the prize.

On the other hand, there are many other matters philosophy and philosophers grapple with that ordinary plain people who have something on the ball ought to be able not only to understand without any disciplinary preparation or training, but also to enjoy, to delight in thinking about and understanding.  Aristotle begins one of his most difficult works, the Metaphysics, observing that "all human beings by nature desire knowing" (or "to know" or "knowledge", depending on how you want to translate it).  If to us academics, this seems a starting point rendered patently untrue by our experience, how much of that is due to that natural inborn human desire being stymied instead of encouraged in its development by those who are to introduce learners to a subject, to lead them deeper and deeper within, to bring them to vistas from which they can look out, their perspectives ever after altered?

I wrote back that I would mull over possible topics.  I always have four or five different irons in the fire at any given time.  Which of those would admit adaptation for a more popular lecture and discussion?  I started on the list.  Then my partner phoned and grabbing the opportunity to sound her about my proposed subjects, I started reading down the list. She stopped me after the second one.  The first one was all that was needed, it would easily draw and keep interest.  And I had not only been experiencing it, studying it, dialoguing with the great philosophers, theologians, saints and psychologists about it, I'd already written a few pieces and started on a book about it.  Just pitch the first one, she said.  It's all you need.  But it needs a sexier title.  I've got it: