By way of Adriano Oliva, OP, an announcement of a volume of studies honoring Alain de Libera, and an opportunity to subscribe to the book's publication:

À l'occasion du soixantième anniversaire d'Alain de Libera, une trentaine de collègues de France et de l'étranger ont souhaité, par une série d'études d'histoire de la philosophie et de métaphysique, saluer son œuvre scientifique et lui offrir un témoignage d'amitié. L'histoire de la métaphysique étant l'un des points cardinaux du travail philosophique d'Alain de Libera, à qui l'on doit notamment de magistraux ouvrages sur les universaux, il a semblé judicieux d'étudier ces entités mineures mais néanmoins indispensables qui viennent compléter la substance pour constituer l'individu : les propriétés accidentelles.

La question des accidents est ici étudiée sur la longue durée – d'Aristote à la métaphysique analytique contemporaine, avec une attention particulière portée aux discussions médiévales – et sous ses différents aspects : ontologique, sémantique, épistémologique et psychologique. Sont ainsi abordés des problèmes philosophiques aussi fondamentaux que ceux induits par les catégories aristotéliciennes de qualité et de relation, les tropes, la causalité, l'individuation.

See this PDF file for details, which also contains a list of the volume's contributors. By subscribing to the book's publication before September 1, 2008, your name will appear in the volume, along with other subscribers. The volume is scheduled to appear on October 3, 2008.

Peter Weigel, of the Department of Philosophy at Washington College, has authored a book on Aquinas’s doctrine of the divine simplicity, due to appear this year. Here’s some of the blurb:

Aquinas’s teaching that God is entirely simple is central to his philosophy of God. Much of his thought cannot be properly understood without an adequate grasp of what simplicity involves and why he argues for it. The depth and rigor of Aquinas’s account of divine simplicity mark a significant contribution to the development of this crucial position in traditional philosophical theology. Commentators usually focus on limited aspects of Aquinas’s position, and contemporary philosophical assessments often reflect an incomplete understanding of the distinctive ontology supporting his theological conclusions.

This book offers an in-depth examination of what divine simplicity means for Aquinas and how he argues for its claims. Simplicity and other divine predicates are analyzed within the larger metaphysical and semantic framework surrounding Aquinas’s philosophy of God. The work thus goes beyond the issue of simplicity to some of the fundamental tenets of Aquinas’s philosophical theology and his views on divine predication. The author also engages with a variety of Aquinas’s recent commentators, bringing the insights of this great figure to bear on contemporary discussions.

A team consisting of Peter Kwasniewski and others has produced a translation of texts from Thomas’s Scriptum super sententiis that deal with charity. Published by Catholic University of America Press, the volume will appear shortly (see this PDF file). Here’s a snippet from the blurb:

Among the great works of Thomas Aquinas, the Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard has suffered almost total neglect among translators. Such neglect is surprising, considering that the massive Commentary—more than 4,000 pages in the last printed edition—is not only Aquinas’s first systematic engagement with all the philosophical and theological topics on which he expended his energy over the span of a short career but is also characterized by an exuberance and elaborateness seldom found in his subsequent writings. Although Chenu had already drawn attention decades ago to the importance of studying this youthful tour de force for a fuller understanding of Thomas’s more mature work, the Commentary on the Sentences has remained a closed book for many modern students of Thomistic and medieval thought because of its relative inaccessibility in English or in Latin.

The present volume, containing all the major texts on love and charity, makes available what is by far the most extensive translation ever to be made from the Commentary with the added benefit that the better part of the translation is based on the (as yet unpublished) critical edition of the Leonine Commission. The collection of texts from all four books has a tight thematic coherence that makes it invaluable to students of Thomas’s moral philosophy, moral theology, and philosophical theology. In addition, the inclusion of parallel texts from Aquinas’s first (Parisian) Commentary as well as from his second (Roman) attempt at a commentary, the recently rediscovered Lectura Romana, makes this edition all the more valuable for those who wish to track the internal development of Thomas’s thinking on these matters.

This volume is part of the Thomas Aquinas in Translation Series from CUA, which also has three other texts.

Wisdom, Law, and VirtueLawrence Dewan’s important collection of essays on Aquinas’s metaphysics is now matched by one on ethics. Fordham University Press has published Wisdom, Law and Virtue: Essays in Thomistic Ethics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), which contains an astounding number—twenty-seven!—of his writings on Thomas’s ethics.

The kind people at Fordham University Press have also made a discount available to you that defrays the cost of what is a big (600 pp.), and therefore costly, book. If you wish to buy it, go to the webpage for the book on Fordham’s site, place it in your shopping cart, and then, at check-out, enter the promo code DEW08, which will apply a 20% discount, taking it from its original $85.00 down to $68.00, plus shipping and handling. A nice gesture.

Here is the book’s table-of-contents:

Universal Considerations

Chapter 1. Wisdom and Human Life: The Natural and the Supernatural

Chapter 2. Wisdom as Foundational Ethical Theory in St. Thomas Aquinas

Chapter 3. St. Thomas, Metaphysics, and Human Dignity

Chapter 4. Truth and Happiness

Chapter 5. Antimodern, Ultramodern, Postmodern: A Plea for the Perennial

Chapter 6. Is Thomas Aquinas a Spiritual Hedonist?

Chapter 7. Is Liberty the Criterion in Morals?

The Will and Its Act

Chapter 8. The Real Distinction between Intellect and Will

Chapter 9. St. Thomas, James Keenan, and the Will

Chapter 10. St. Thomas and the Causes of Free Choice

Chapter 11. St. Thomas and the First Cause of Moral Evil

Natural Law

Chapter 12. St. Thomas, Our Natural Lights, and the Moral Order

Chapter 13. Jacques Maritain and the Philosophy of Cooperation

Chapter 14. Natural Law and the First Act of Freedom: Maritain Revisited

Chapter 15. Jean Porter on Natural Law: Thomistic Notes

Legal Justice

Chapter 16. St. Thomas, the Common Good, and the Love of Persons

Chapter 17. St. Thomas, John Finnis, and the Political Good

Chapter 18. Thomas Aquinas, Gerard Bradley, and the Death Penalty

Chapter 19. Death in the Setting of Divine Wisdom: The Doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas

Chapter 20. Suicide as a Belligerent Tactic: Thomistic Reflections

Various Virtues

Chapter 21. Jacques Maritain, St. Thomas, and the Philosophy of Religion

Chapter 22. Philosophy and Spirituality: Cultivating a Virtue

Chapter 23. St. Thomas and the Ontology of Prayer

Chapter 24. St. Thomas, Lying, and Venial Sin

Chapter 25. Communion with the Tradition: For the Believer Who Is a Philosopher

Methodological Postscript

Chapter 26. ”Obiectum”: Notes on the Invention of a Word

Chapter 27. St. Thomas and Moral Taxonomy

Heu! Oh, well. Better late than never.
Teleological Grammar

Last fall the kind people at Ave Maria University sent me a copy of Steven Long’s impressive book, The Teleological Grammar of the Moral Act, which seeks to explain and defend Aquinas’s complex yet crucial doctrine of the moral act (a doctrine at the heart of topics such as sexual morality, medical ethics, etc.). The doctrine of double-effect is unintelligible without it.

The book was immediately a topic of much conversation, with a session at this year’s Kalamazoo being devoted to it, and a recent issue of Ave Maria’s journal, Nova et vetera (English edition)—more on this up-and-coming (if not already-arrived) journal in a future post—being built around the topics found in the book. Here is its blurb, found on the web page where you can order it:

Cutting through contemporary confusions with his characteristic rigor and aplomb, Steven A. Long offers the most penetrating study available of St. Thomas Aquinas’s doctrine of the intention, choice, object, end, and species of the moral act. Many studies of human action and morality after Descartes and Kant have suffered from a tendency to split body and soul, so that the intention of the human spirit comes to justify whatever the body is made to do. The portrait of human action and morality that arises from such accounts is one of the soul as the pilot and the body as raw material in need of humanization. In this masterful study, Steven Long reconnects the teleology of the soul with the teleology of the body, so that human goal-oriented action rediscovers its lost moral unity, given it by the Creator who has created the human person as a body-soul unity.