Mark Hopwood
speaker
1,269 appearances
31 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2009
last heard Sep 2014
Mark Hopwood’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Elucidations · Episode 48: Jennifer Frey discusses the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas · 10 Jun 2013
podcast
Great.
Okay, so one aspect of Aquinas' work that you've particularly focused on in your writing is his work on well what we might refer to as ethics.
I mean you've already said you can't really separate these aspects of his thought, but to the extent that we can focus on one, you've been interested in what he's had to say about ethics.
Now, Aquinas is sometimes referred to as a teleological thinker.
And I guess teleology
has something to do with the idea of purpose, things having a purpose.
But maybe you could explain that a little bit more.
What what would it mean to say that Aquinas was a teleological thinker?
So this is not a way of thinking about things that is just obviously incompatible with modern science.
Like to talk about
natural teleology to talk about a sunflower having a way it ought to be isn't to deny all that modern science teaches us about sunflowers and other things.
It's just to say if you leave the sunflower in the right kind of soil and the right kind of environment and you don't interfere with it, there's gonna be a way it's gonna go.
It's gonna look like this every time.
Okay, great, that's really helpful.
So one question that it might be worth talking about before we close is
how this kind of general view that Aquinas has about human beings
might help us as philosophers.
What
What kind of problems are there that Aquinas could help us to see more clearly or perhaps provide us with a better kind of answer to?
So in a way, I mean this takes us back to a point we made earlier that for Aquinas it just doesn't make sense to separate out these different areas of study.
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