Representation vs. Direct Realism in Modern Philosophy
University of Chicago 5801 S Ellis Ave Chicago, IL 60637, Hyde Park, ILGyula Klima (Fordham University)
Gyula Klima (Fordham University)
Published in 1949, Paul Blanshard’s American Freedom and Catholic Power captured the attention of American intelligentsia with its claim that American Catholic citizens had to choose “between a church hostile to fundamentals of democracy and a state where contrary views are implicit under our Constitution.” John F. Kennedy’s famous speech to Protestant ministers in Houston on Sept. 12, 1960 was in many respects a response to Blanshard’s thesis. Today Blanshard’s bigotry may not be explicitly defended in educated circles, but questions remain about what made his book so compelling. Patrick Brennan considers whether Blanshard was onto something about the incompatibility of Catholic...
American Catholic women rarely surface as protagonists in histories of the United States. Offering a new perspective, Kathleen Sprows Cummings places Catholic women at the forefront of two defining developments of the Progressive Era: the emergence of the “New Woman” and Catholics’ struggle to define their place in American culture. Cummings highlights four women: Chicago-based journalist Margaret Buchanan Sullivan; Sister Julia McGroarty, SND, founder of Trinity College in Washington, D.C., one of the first Catholic women’s colleges; Philadelphia educator Sister Assisium McEvoy, SSJ; and Katherine Eleanor Conway, a Boston editor, public figure, and antisuffragist. Cummings uses each woman’s story to...
This conference addresses the following questions: What constitutes the image of God? How are we to understand Augustine’s claim that human beings come to understand both who they are and who they have been only through relationship with God? How do St. Thomas Aquinas and Blaise Pascal remain within or depart from the Augustinian tradition? What role do Aristotelian and Platonic (or neo-Platonic) conceptions of human identity and the soul play? Lastly, as Genesis offers an essentially relational account of “Imago Dei,” in what way can we discover or participate in such relationship with God through social relationships?
Thomas Aquinas’s doctrine of the Trinity is crucial to James Joyce’s presentation of the artist in both Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses. Now, Joyce’s deployment of Trinitarian themes is not strictly orthodox of course. But the Trinity does provide a model, an exemplar, for a proper understanding of artistic fecundity and a subtle critique of popular romantic conceptions of artistic self-expression. Whatever his intentions, Joyce’s treatment suggest ways in which the Thomistic doctrine of the Trinity and the Imago Dei can contribute to a fresh understanding of artistic activity.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn left a vast body of work, an inestimable influence on Russian culture, and a deeply divided public opinion. He documented the Soviet prison system, developed forms of literary representation for describing the experiences of prisoners, and was courageous in the face of repression. But doubts linger about him as artist, thinker and person, and thus prompt us to raise the Solzhenitsyn question.
Despite flaws in his biology, Aquinas' writings offer us guidance in our approach to 21st century biotechnology. Aquinas' notion of a Just War provides us with a way for thinking about biotechnology, since both use morally ambiguous means to address evils in an imperfect world. A comparison of these two disparate issues can yield criteria for an ethics of biotechnology.
In this lecture, Jean-Luc Marion advances a phenomenological notion of sacrifice that is distinct from the notion of sacrifice typically discussed in Sociology or even Religious Studies. He argues that sacrifice restores the gift from the side of the givee, much as he has argued previously that forgiveness restores the gift from the side of the giver. He develops both notions within the framework of a phenomenology of givenness, advancing the thesis that sacrifice requires neither destruction, nor restitution, nor even exchange, and still less contract. Sacrifice surpasses all this because sacrifice does not arise as an economic notion (one...
To bridge the cultural rift between Islam and the West, there is an urgent need to reestablish the mutually reinforcing dialogue between faith and reason in the West, and to support moderate Muslim scholars attempting to retrieve a non-voluntarist interpretation of Islam, often at risk to their own lives.