Search results for ""Author Alice M. Ramos""
The Catholic University of America Press Dynamic Transcendentals: Truth, Goodness and Beauty from a Thomistic Perspective
Addressing contemporary interest in the relationship between metaphysics and ethics, as well as the significance of beauty for ethics, Alice Ramos presents an accessible study of the transcendentals and provides a dynamic rather than static view of truth, goodness, and beauty. She emphasises the role played by the human person in the perfection of the universe, in the return of all things to their source, and relies on the philosophical and theological wisdom of Thomas Aquinas as well as contemporary thinkers such as Jacques Maritain, John Paul II, and others. For Aquinas, the human being is the image of an exemplary cause, made in the image of God, who is also the final cause. We are made with a dynamic nature that pursues perfection and union with God. As we realise our end, we bring about the intensification of our participation in the transcendentals. Ramos explains that in pursuing truth, goodness, and beauty and in acting from love of the true good, we are actually pursuing God, the exemplar and end of the human person. This study of the transcendentals helps us to make the connection between the metaphysical order and the moral order, and also sheds light on contemporary culture and moral questions. The book is divided into three parts, the first of which is focused on the transcendental of truth. It presents themes in Aristotelian metaphysics as developed by Aquinas and shows the importance of an ethics of knowing. The second part focuses on beauty and teleology and discusses human and divine providence, evil and suffering, the experience of vulnerability and shame, and the relationship between the good and glory. The final section considers moral beauty, the ugliness of vice, and the role of art for human perfection.
£70.00
The Catholic University of America Press Beauty and the Good: Recovering the Classical Tradition from Plato to Duns Scotus
In the past twenty years or more, there has been a growing interest among philosophers and theologians alike in the transcendentals and especially in the beautiful. This seems fortuitous since so much of contemporary culture is fixated in many ways on beauty, on what might be called a superficial or man-made beauty, intent on outward appearance, with little or no concern for the human person’s interiority and distinctive nature. The Ancients and the Medievals, on the contrary, were sensitive not only to the beauty of nature and art but also to beauty as intelligible, that is, to the beauty of moral harmony and of metaphysical splendor. While the question of whether the beautiful is in fact a transcendental aspect of being continues to be a subject of dispute in contemporary scholarship, the relationship between the beautiful and the good has been accepted since ancient times and has been attended to in recent publications. None of these publications, however, offers a systematic treatment of this relationship by drawing from the wisdom of both ancient and medieval thought in such a way as to bring together the work of scholars in this tradition.Beauty and the Good intends therefore to make a singular contribution by presenting a richer alternative to the contemporary cult of beauty and appearance on the one hand, and to the concomitant decline of real beauty on the other hand. In addition to highlighting the centrality of beauty in the Aristotelian account of moral virtue, where virtue is kalon and virtuous actions are done for the sake of kalon (the word kalon designates that which is beautiful, noble, and good)—an account which is found echoed in the medieval notion of intrinsic goodness (bonum honestum), understood as intelligible or spiritual beauty—this volume will provide the metaphysical and theological grounding for beauty, as influenced in part by Plato and Neoplatonism, together with a much needed account of how we know and judge beauty, and how for the recognition of true good and real beauty we need to be properly disposed. The integration of philosophical and theological reflection on the nature and relationship of beauty and the good, on our perception and judgment of beauty and of the good as beautiful, and on the motivational role of beauty in human action has as its goal to produce a coherent volume of essays.
£75.00
