Common Places

A lecture with Q&A by Davenant Institute Vice-President, Colin Redemer, entitled "Old Aristotle, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Aquinas." Everyone knows that Aristotle left us a completed ethical system. What this lecture presupposes is, maybe he didn't? A close reading of Aristotle shows that his theory is constantly friscalating near the edge of completion, but that the author is self-aware of his system as flawed. In this lecture, Colin Redemer demonstrates Aristotle's self-aware shortcomings, before pivoting to see how Thomas Aquinas, in the first part of the second part, question 4, of the Summa Theologiae, responds to Aristotle's system of thought. The ways in which Aquinas' theory fulfills the dream of eudaimonia from Aristotle's ethical system will be revealed by shining the light of divine revelation upon it.