Dynamic Transcendentals: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty from a Thomistic Perspective

Acknowledgments

vii Acknowledgments During the first year of my graduate studies in philosophy at the University of Navarra in Spain, Alejandro Llano, who was to be my dissertation director, suggested that I read the first question of Aquinas’s De Veritate. That suggestion, for which I am so grateful, sparked my interest in the transcendentals and especially in the transcendentality of truth. I saw in Aquinas’s thought the resources I needed to develop what I then called a metaphysics of the sign, a dissertation project that enabled me to make sense of some of my previous studies in contemporary semiotics. Since my return from Spain I have been fortunate to receive encouragement for my work from a number of philosophers. Ralph McInerny, whose Thomistic Institutes at the University of Notre Dame were always a source of inspiration, was especially supportive when he learned of my intention to write a book dealing with a dynamic interpretation of the transcendentals. The way I initially conceived of the book is somewhat different from the form it has taken here; the interpretation, however, remains the same. In the past fifteen years my work on the transcendentals and on other themes in Aquinas and the Thomistic tradition has appeared in a number of publications. Some of the essays in this book are from previously published articles that have under- viii  Beauty, Order, and Teleology viii  acknowledgments gone either slight or significant revision. I am grateful for the permission to publish parts or the whole of the following articles : “A Metaphysics of the Truth of Creation: Foundation of the Desire for God,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 69 (1995): 237–48; “Beauty and the Perfection of Being ,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 71 (1997): 255–68; “Beauty, Mind, and the Universe,” in Beauty, Art, and the Polis, ed. Alice Ramos (American Maritain Association, 2000, distributed by The Catholic University of America Press), 70–84; “The Dignity of Man and Human Action,” Acta Philosophica 10, no. 2 (2001): 315–21; “Evil and Providence: Toward a New Moral Order,” in Faith, Scholarship, and Culture in the 21st Century, ed. Alice Ramos and Marie I. George (American Maritain Association, 2002, distributed by The Catholic University of America Press), 269–79; “Moral Beauty and Affective Knowledge in Aquinas,” Acta Philosophica 13, no. 2 (2004): 321–37; “The Human Person as Image and Sign,” Proceedings of the International Congress on Christian Humanism in the Third Millennium: The Perspective of St. Thomas Aquinas: September 21–25, 2003, vol. 2 (Vatican City: Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas, 2005): 101–10; “Art, Truth, and Morality: Aesthetic Self-forgetfulness versus Recognition,” in Mimesi, Verità, Fiction, ed. Rafael Jiménez Cataño and Ignacio Yarza (Rome: EDUSC, 2009), 89–106; “Transcending Bodily Existence and Vulnerability,” in Maritain and America, ed. Christopher M. Cullen, S.J., and Joseph Allan Clair (American Maritain Association, 2009, distributed by The Catholic University of America Press), 179–91; “Toward the Recovery of the Moral Sense,” in The Renewal of Civilization, ed. Gavin T. Colvert (American Maritain Association Publication, 2010, distributed by The Catholic University of America Press), 99–109; book review of Beauty by Roger Scruton, Quaestiones Disputatae 1 (Fall 2010): 261–63. In addition, I would like to acknowledge the use of previously published material in Spanish: “Mensura: Un Concepto neoplatónico en Tomás de Aquino,” in acknowledgments  ix Metafísica y Antropología en el Siglo XII, ed. María Jesús Soto (Pamplona , Spain: EUNSA, 2005), 349–64; and “La Confrontación entre el amor y la incapacidad de amar,” in Identidad cristiana, ed. Antonio Aranda (Pamplona, Spain: EUNSA, 2007), 117–28. I wish to note here that my collaboration in a research project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, under the direction of María Jesús Soto at the University of Navarra , was in part instrumental in my decision to seek the publication of this volume of essays. I am grateful to Dr. Soto for her interest in my work and for her friendship, which has remained firm throughout the years and despite the distance. There are many others both in the United States and abroad to whom I am indebted; some will find their work quoted in the pages that follow or duly acknowledged in a note; others whose names do not appear but with whom I have intellectual ties, or ties of friendship...