Aquinas's "Disputed Questions on Evil": A Critical Guide

✍ Scribed by Michael V. Dougherty (ed.)

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2016
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 268
• Series: Cambridge Critical Guides
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Thomas Aquinas's "Disputed Questions on Evil" is a careful and detailed analysis of the general topic of evil, including discussions on evil as privation, human free choice, the cause of moral evil, moral failure, and the so-called seven deadly sins. This collection of ten, specially commissioned new essays, the first book-length English-language study of "Disputed Questions on Evil", examines the most interesting and philosophically relevant aspects of Aquinas's work, highlighting what is distinctive about it and situating it in relation not only to Aquinas's other works but also to contemporary philosophical debates in metaphysics, ethics, and philosophy of action. The essays also explore the history of the work's interpretation. The volume will be of interest to researchers in a broad range of philosophical disciplines including medieval philosophy and history of philosophy, as well as to theologians.

✦ Table of Contents

List of contributors page vii
Acknowledgments x
List of abbreviations xi
Introduction / M. V. Dougherty 1
1. Metaphysical themes in "De malo", 1 / John F. Wippel 12
2. Weakness and willful wrongdoing in Aquinas’s "De malo" / Bonnie Kent and Ashley Dressel 34
3. Free choice / Tobias Hoff mann and Peter Furlong 56
4. Venial sin and the ultimate end / Steven J. Jensen 75
5. The promise and pitfalls of glory: Aquinas on the forgotten vice of vainglory / Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung 101
6. The goodness and evil of objects and ends / Thomas M. Osborne, Jr. 126
7. Evil and moral failure in "De malo" / Carl N. Still and Darren E. Dahl 146
8. Attention, intentionality, and mind-reading in Aquinas’s "De malo", q. 16, a. 8 / Therese Scarpelli Cory 164
9. Evil as privation: the Neoplatonic background to Aquinas’s "De malo", 1 / Fran O’Rourke 192
10 Moral luck and the capital vices in "De malo": gluttony and lust / M. V. Dougherty 222
Bibliography 235
Index 246