Aquinas on virtue
Subtitle: a causal reading
By: Nicholas Austin
Series: Moral traditions series; Moral traditions series
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
Published: 2017
Language: eng
Number of pages: 233
ISBN-13: 9781626164727; 9781626164734
Subjects: Virtue; Christian ethics
Description: Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), an Italian Dominican friar and Catholic priest, is one of the most influential theologians in the Christian tradition--and certainly the most influential theologian of the Roman Catholic Church. By synthesizing classical Christian theology with Aristotelian philosophy, Aquinas's thought continues to have an astonishing impact on an array of disciplines. Scholarship on Aquinas is flourishing, with studies of natural law theory, action theory, the morality of the passions, feminism, political theory, etc. Yet despite the contemporary renewal of virtue ethics--a movement in Catholic and Protestant and Orthodox traditions that attempts to answer the question, "How should I live?"--to date no full-length treatment of Aquinas's theory of virtue exists. Nicholas Austin aims to fill that gap. Aquinas on Virtue offers a new and comprehensive interpretation of how Aquinas uses the four causes--formal, material, final, and efficient--to understand virtue in general, and how these causes underlie his treatment of specific virtues that make up the bulk of his ethics. In the final part of the book Austin applies the causal approach to four contested issues in contemporary virtue theory: practical wisdom; virtue and the passions; the teleology (or ultimate end) of virtue; and infused moral virtues, exploring the relation between grace and virtue.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Part I. Defining virtue. Defining temperance causally; title: Virtue as a habit; title: Virtue as a good habit; title: Virtue's definition; title: Part II. Causal ethics. Exemplar and object; title: End and agent; title: Part III. The causal analysis of virtue. Rational virtue; title: Passionate virtue; title: Telic virtue; title: Graced virtue; title: Rethinking infusion; title: Appendix : Virtue defined.