Aquinas 2023

Aquinas Lecture 2023

"Person Means Relation" by David Walsh, Ph.D.

Thursday, January 26
7:30 - 9:00 PM
Multipurpose Room, SB Hall
A reception will follow in O’Halloran Atrium, SB Hall.

"Person Means Relation"

The title comes from St. Thomas’s analysis of what it means to be a person, an analysis he hammered out within his reflection on the persons of the Trinity. Even though he did not apply it to persons more generally there is enough to suggest the path he might have taken. The paradox of a figure like Thomas is that his own intense interior life largely eludes the philosophical means at his disposal. To know a person, and to know what it means to be a person, is to know what is going on within them. The development of that understanding of persons from the inside is largely the fruit of a later philosophical revolution, toward which he may have pointed and might well have welcomed. As such it remains the task we have inherited and the one in which the modern world distills what is best within it.

Graduate Seminar: "Pope Benedict's Personalism"

Friday, January 27
10:00 - 11:30 AM
Serafy Room, SB Hall
Click here for text.

About David Walsh, Ph.D.

David Walsh, Ph.D., is the Chair Board Member of VoegelinView, President of the Eric Voegelin Society, and Professor of Political Science at Catholic University of America. His works include a three-volume study of modernity: After Ideology: Recovering the Spiritual Foundations of Freedom (Harper/Collins, 1990), The Growth of the Liberal Soul (Missouri, 1997), and The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence (Cambridge, 2008). He is also author of Politics of the Person and as the Politics of Being (Notre Dame, 2016), followed by a companion volume, The Priority of the Person (2020). His current book project is “The Invisible Source of Authority: God in a Secular Age.”