Anthony J. Celano

Thomas Aquinas on business and the fulfillment of human needs

In the history of Western thought, Thomas Aquinas is certainly the most influential medieval thinker. His stance on moral questions generally and his views on socio-economic justice in particular provided normative orientation to subsequent Christian thinkers, and they still influence Catholic social teaching, as exemplified in the social encyclicals of the Church. For instance, the latest papal letter, Caritas in Veritate, which addresses the moral challenges to business in the age of globalization, draws heavily upon the moral arguments of Thomas Aquinas. In this chapter, we wish to make Thomas’s stance on the ethics of business intelligible to a readership neither steeped in medieval studies, nor familiar with specifically Christian views on morality

Robert Kilwardby on the Relation of Virtue to Happiness

The growing sophistication of philosophical speculation together with the increasingly contentious claims of the thirteenth-century masters of Arts and Theology is reflected in the literary career of Robert Kilwardby. As a young Parisian Arts master, Kilwardby devoted much of his energy to explaining the works of Aristotle, recently introduced into the University’s curriculum. Although particularly interested in the logical treatises, Kilwardby most likely commented upon the so-called ‘Ethica vetus et nova’, which were part of the Arts curriculum in the first half of the thirteenth century. Kilwardby’s commentary, while quickly superseded by the more complicated questions on the entire Ethics, represents an extremely important transitional phase in the understanding of Aristotle’s moral philosophy. Kilwardby’s careful reading of Aristotle’s text allowed him to reject the usual religious interpretation of his contemporaries. His awareness of the limitations of moral science marks a decisive step away from the earlier reading of the Nicomachean Ethics ( EN ), which viewed Aristotle’s doctrine of the human good to be identical with the religious ideal of union with God. As a result, Kilwardby’s commentary on the EN demonstrated how Aristotle’s ethics could no longer be understood as a slight variant of Christian moral theology.