Review
Bradley's contribution to the study of A quinas is important. From the standpoint of a historian, his main achievement is to clarify the 'dialogue' between Aquinas and Aristotle. This fulfills a long-time desideratum: the subject has been treated by many scholars . . . but Bradley is the first who has studied virtually all relevant texts in detail, with convincing results. He establishes a new status quaestionis from which all further research must start. -- Prof. Wolfgang Kluxen, University of Bonn
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From the Publisher
For many years, philosophers have read Aquinas's ethical writings as if his moral doctrine ought to make sense completely apart from the commitments of Christian faith. Because Aquinas relied heavily upon rational arguments, and upon Aristotle in particular, scholars frequently attempt to read his texts in a strictly philosophical context. According to Denis J. M. Bradley, this approach is misguided and it can lead to a radical misinterpretation of Aquinas's moral science. Here, Bradley sets out to prove that Aquinas was a theologian before all else and that any systematic Thomistic ethics must remain theological--not philosophical. Against the background of Aristotle's Nicomacheon Ethics, the author provides a detailed differentiation between Aristotle's and Aquinas's views in regard to the ground of the moral virtues and the end of man. Carefully scrutinizing the content of Aquinas's writings, Bradley argues that one cannot extract and recombine the rational elements of Aquinas's moral science and label them a "Thomistic philosophical ethics." Bradley contends that human nature's openness to its de facto supernatural end, which is the focal point of Aquinas's moral science, obviates any attempt to do this. Aquinas's critique of Aristotle, which was neglected by Aquinas's Thomist disciples, leads to a paradoxical philosophical conception of human nature: short of attaining its ultimate supernatural end, the gratuitous vision of the divine essence, human nature is in history and even in eternity naturally endless. Bradley illustrates that, in their proper context, Aquinas's many references to the "twofold human good for man," natural and supernatural, sustain--unlike the systematic philosophical ethics of traditional Thomism--this paradoxical conclusion about human nature's endlessness. Finally, Bradley suggests that it is the Christian philosopher who, by explicitly embracing the theological meaning of man's paradoxical natural endlessness, can best engage a postmodernism that repudiates any ultimate rational grounds for human thought and morality. Denis J. M. Bradley is a member of the department of philosophy at Georgetown University and a former fellow of the American Academy in Rome. He is the author of articles on the history of the faith-reason problematic in the middle ages, on Aquinas's metaphysics and its relationship to post-Kantian transcendental philosophy, and on the Thomistic implications of philosophical pluralism.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
