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177 notes 1. Ethics as a Guide into Metaphysics 1. Related in Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), a revision of the original 1959 edition, on p. 63. 2. William T. Noon, Joyce and Aquinas (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957). The book is still regularly cited in studies of Joyce, even if its suggestions of Joyce’s affinities with premodern philosophy have been less well received in the trendy attempts to deploy Joyce as an authority for a host of postmodern ‘‘isms.’’ 3. Weldon Thornton’s The Antimodernism of Joyce’s Portrait (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1994) is a case in point. Thornton makes a convincing case for the presence of Aristotelian notions of human agency and narrative rationality in Joyce, especially in Portrait of the Artist. He does not, however, investigate the interplay of elements from Thomistic metaphysics, theology, and aesthetics in Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses. 4. The most important link to Aquinas can be found in Stephen Dedalus’s lecture in the National Library of Dublin in Ulysses, whose theoretical content has been too often dismissed by commentators. A notable exception can be found in Rene Girard’s discussion of Joyce in A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991; reprint South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine’s Press, 2004), 256–70. Preoccupied with Joyce’s relation to Shakespeare, Girard does not comment on the way Aquinas figures in the conversation. By contrast, Noon’s book regularly recurs to this chapter as a basis for examining Joyce’s relationship to Aquinas. 5. Eric Voegelin, Anamnesis: On the Theory of History and Politics, in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, trans. M. L. Hanak, ed. David Walsh (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 392. 6. A similar sort of selectivity afflicts many contemporary interpretations of Aquinas ’s account of human knowledge. We shall address these problems in later chapters. 7. Ellmann, James Joyce, 5. 8. Stanley Cavell, Cities of Words (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 4. 9. Ibid., 4. 10. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge , Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 63–73, 100–106. 11. In his recent book, Faith, Reason and the Existence of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) Denys Turner brings Aquinas into conversation with the post-Nietzschean critique of metaphysics. Aquinas concurs with one of the assumptions of the critique, namely, that reason points to an otherness that it cannot Notes to pages 3–6 178 know. Turner, who wants to defend the theological significance of Aquinas’s arguments for the natural knowability of God, observes that in the contemporary context, there is nothing to guarantee that ‘‘beyond reason there is anything but a vacuous, empty nothingness, an endless prolongation of postponements.’’ The only way out of this nihilism is for reason to be able to name the otherness, to justify the existence of God as that to which it points. Interestingly, Turner turns to music as marking the limits of reason, a point made extensively in Joyce’s writings, especially in Portrait of the Artist, where Nietzschean and Thomist interpretations of the limits of reason and the significance of music are in contention with one another. See Turner, Faith, Reason and the Existence of God, 118 and 108–16. 12. Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature , ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), 287-89. 13. Ibid., 77. 14. Ibid., 290. 15. Joel Kupperman, Character (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 16. Murdoch advanced this argument in a number of places, most notably in her Gifford Lectures, published as Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (New York: Penguin, 1992). In this she was not entirely alone, since Elizabeth Anscombe contended that ethics was in dire need of a ‘‘philosophical psychology.’’ See her influential, ‘‘Modern Moral Philosophy,’’ which first appeared in Ethics 33 (1958); its most recent reprint is in Virtue Ethics, ed. Crisp and Slote (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 26–44. In current philosophy, Charles Taylor, who makes the case that reflection on the inescapable moral horizons of ordinary human agents provides access to moral ontology, continues the project of Murdoch. See Taylor, Sources of the Self. In Dependent Rational Animals (Chicago: Open Court, 2001), Alasdair MacIntyre defends a conception of human animality and dependency that echoes certain features of Murdoch’s thought; while Stanley Rosen advances a version, which shares much...

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