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Timothy B. Noone (Catholic University of America) REGISTER HERE Cosponsored by the Philosophy Department and the Medieval Studies Workshop This lecture will situate Bonaventure’s thought on education, philosophy, and the sciences into the context of the thirteenth century’s controversies regarding the place of philosophy in the universities and human life generally.  While Bonaventure accepts the essential and irreplaceable role of philosophy and science in the progress of human knowledge and endorses the claim that they both perfect the human intellect, he insists that science and philosophy are in a hierarchy of knowledge that transcends them, culminating in the study of...

Timothy B. Noone (Catholic University of America) REGISTER HERE This master class is open to graduate and undergraduate students, including non-University of Chicago students. Space is limited and offered on a first-come, first-served basis. Copies of the readings will be provided. This seminar will begin with crucial texts from the middle of the thirteenth century that set up the problem of the first known as that problem came to be discussed in the writings of Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, and Duns Scotus.  Thereafter, the seminar will examine the three authors mentioned on the issue of the first known and explore...

Randy Boyagoda (author of Richard John Neuhaus: A Life in the Public Square) Cosponsored by First Things, the Chicago Leadership Forum, and Relevant Radio For all the political controversies that Fr. Richard John Neuhaus was involved in over his four decades in American public life, and these were many, he really understood his work in vocational terms. In other words, he understood his work foremost as the work of a man of God. It’s too simple to dismiss him (or admire him!) as a Republican in a Roman collar, as many of his later critics and fans did. Learn the full...

Aryeh Kosman (Haverford College) Cosponsored by the Philosophy Department Aristotle’s remarks in the last book of the Nicomachean Ethics that the highest form of happiness consists in θεωρία is often translated as revealing happiness to consist in contemplation, without noting that both terms designate a kind of seeing, a mode of vision. This oversight if more remarkable when we recall that the vision in question is that of the divine. What does Aristotle mean by “seeing the divine?” This lecture will suggest that one way to understand Aristotle is to hear him as urging that happiness is associated with seeing the world as divine. Such seeing...

Aryeh Kosman (Haverford College) REGISTER HERE This master class is open to graduate and undergraduate students, including non-University of Chicago students. Space is limited and offered on a first-come, first-served basis. Copies of the readings will be provided. This seminar will discuss Aristotle’s account in Book 6 of the Nicomachean Ethics of what he there terms “virtues of thought” – ἀρετὰι τῆς διανοίας – distinguishing them from virtues τοῦ ἤθοuς – virtues of character.   Virtues of thought seem to be those cognitive states that enable us to think well – to reason correctly and to judge truly, sometimes about what is the...

A lecture with Ada Palmer (University of Chicago) Cosponsored by the Department of History It is difficult today to imagine a world in which religious communities were deeply intertwined with the civic order and when a third of a town’s population might be priests, monks, and nuns. In Renaissance Florence the Dominican Monastery of San Marco was intimately tied to every aspect of city life, from commerce and patronage, to civil broils and foreign invasions, to education and medicine, to the great artists, architects and radical thinkers who earned the Florentine Renaissance its eternal fame. This lecture will explore the...