The Unexamined Life Is Not Worth Living.
Socrates exhorts us in the Apology to spend our days striving to make sense of our lives, to live a life of self-examination.
What might that mean for us today within the context of the Catholic philosophical
tradition?
"Such an account [of what it is to be a human being] will have to integrate what we
can learn about the nature and constitution of human beings from physicists, chemists,
and biologists, historians, economists, and sociologists, with the kind of understanding
of human beings that only theology can afford. What form would such an account take?
It would present human beings–and not just philosophers–as themselves engaged in trying
to give just such an account of themselves, as trying to understand what it is that
they are doing in trying to achieve understanding, a kind of understanding that will
enable us to distinguish what it is worth caring about a very great deal from what
it is worth caring about a good deal less, and both from what it is not worth caring
about at all. So there is a crucial relationship between metaphysics and ethics. For
it is only insofar as we understand the universe, including ourselves, as dependent
on God for our existence that we are also able to understand ourselves as directed
toward God and what our directedness toward God requires of us by way of caring. The
philosophical resources we have for constructing such an account are the resources
provided by the history of the Catholic philosophical tradition, which is to say that
such an account would have to emerge from the dialogues internal to that tradition,
from those debates and disagreements within that tradition that, as we have learned
from Fides et Ratio, are constitutive of it."(Alasdair MacIntyre, God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition, Rowman & Littlefield, 2009, pp. 177-78)
In Pursuit of Wisdom, Truth and Virtue
The University of Dallas is dedicated to the pursuit of wisdom, of truth, and of virtue
as the proper and primary ends of education. The university as a whole is shaped by
the long tradition of Catholic learning and acknowledges its commitment to the Catholic
Church and its teaching. The university is dedicated to the recovery of the Christian
intellectual tradition, and to the renewal of Catholic theology in fidelity to the
Church and in constructive dialogue with the modern world.
Veritatem, Justitiam, Diligite: Love Ye Truth and Justice.
This motto surrounds the university seal, emblematic of the ideals to which the university
is dedicated.
"Love Ye Truth and Justice" (Veritatem, Justitiam Diligite) is a conflation of Zachariah
8.8 and 8.19, and expresses the biblical message that truth and justice are the necessary
conditions for peace, prosperity, and happiness. This wise instruction has also been
discovered by reason and confirmed by history. It was the founding conviction of the
University of Dallas and it continues to inform all that the university aspires to
do.