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Reviewed by:
  • Disputed Questions on Virtue
  • Bonnie Kent
Thomas Aquinas. Disputed Questions on Virtue. Translated by Jeffrey Hause and Claudia Eisen Murphy. Introduction and commentary by Jeffrey Hause. The Hackett Aquinas. Indianapolis-Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 2010. Pp. xxvii + 398. Paper, $18.95.

Aquinas’s Disputed Questions on Virtue, translated by Jeffrey Hause and Claudia Eisen Murphy, presents questions debated in formal “disputations” by the medieval equivalent of graduate students. The title covers five different disputations: on the virtues in general, on charity, on the cardinal virtues, on hope, and on fraternal correction. The first two have thirteen articles each; the other three are much shorter. All five are thought to date from the same period as the second part of Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae (1271–72). To some extent the text reflects arguments actually offered by the students; but only to some extent, because Aquinas edited their arguments in addition to composing his own replies and answering objections to his views.

How does the Hause/Murphy edition of these disputed questions compare with the 2005 translation by E. M. Atkins and Thomas Williams, published by Cambridge? Three [End Page 613] differences are worth considering. First, Hause and Murphy’s translation rests on the provisional Latin text established by the Leonine commission, the best version currently available. The Cambridge translation rests on an earlier edition of the Latin (Marietti 1953), though Atkins used the provisional Leonine text to correct particularly problematic passages. Second, Hause and Murphy take a conservative approach, keeping quite close to the Latin and adopting conventional translations of scholastic terms, such as ‘passion’ for ‘passio’ and ‘prudence’ for ‘prudentia.’ The Cambridge edition translates these words as ‘emotion’ and ‘practical wisdom’ and in other respects takes a freer approach to interpreting Aquinas’s Latin. That said, both are generally clear and readable. Third, the new volume includes an extensive commentary by Hause (258–389). Not only does Hause’s work serve as a user’s guide to specific passages, it helps to clarify the issues at stake, placing them in a wider historical and philosophical context. The Cambridge volume offers readers less in the way of guidance, although a twenty-two–page introduction by Williams and a five-page glossary of Latin terms certainly help.

The disputed questions “On the Cardinal Virtues” and “On the Virtues in General” are especially useful in explaining Aquinas’s controversial account of infused moral virtues. In his view, these virtues are received as free gifts of grace together with the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity. Commentators eager to cast Aquinas as an Aristotelian typically focus on naturally acquired moral virtues, treating infused moral virtues as a kind of afterthought. So when Aquinas refers to the cardinals, or to many other virtues with the same names as virtues discussed by ancient philosophers, people commonly assume that he means naturally acquired virtues. In fact, we must often judge from context whether Aquinas’s remarks apply to acquired moral virtues, infused moral virtues, or possibly to both.

On the whole, the Hause/Murphy edition represents a significant contribution to the study of Aquinas. It does, however, have a couple of drawbacks. One is small but annoying. For reasons unfathomable, the volume’s table of contents gives only the topics of the five disputations. Since it does not list the specific articles in each of them, readers must flip through the text to discover which specific questions are discussed on which pages. The second drawback is more significant. Hause and Murphy use the cognate ‘habit’ for the Latin ‘habitus,’ instead of opting for ‘disposition,’ as the Cambridge edition does. After reciting some reasons for this decision, they admit that the most important one is simply the pervasiveness of ‘habit’: “[W]e want to enable students who cannot read Latin but who want to consult other texts of Aquinas to be able to do so with a minimum of difficulty and confusion” (xxiv–xxv). While this is an admirable aim, ‘habit’ is nowhere near as pervasive a translation of habitus as it was twenty years ago. ‘Disposition’ has become increasingly entrenched. Even an earlier volume in Hackett’s Aquinas series—Robert Pasnau’s translation of the...

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