

The Thomistic Institute
The Thomistic Institute
The Thomistic Institute exists to promote Catholic truth in our contemporary world by strengthening the intellectual formation of Christians at universities, in the Church, and in the wider public square. The thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Universal Doctor of the Church, is our touchstone.
The Thomistic Institute Podcast features the lectures and talks from our conferences, campus chapters events, intellectual retreats, livestream events, and much more.
Founded in 2009, the Thomistic Institute is part of the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, DC.
The Thomistic Institute Podcast features the lectures and talks from our conferences, campus chapters events, intellectual retreats, livestream events, and much more.
Founded in 2009, the Thomistic Institute is part of the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, DC.
Episodes
Mentioned books

Jul 27, 2022 • 1h 17min
What Makes a Person Good? Aquinas and the Cardinal Virtues | Prof. Jennifer Frey
This lecture was given on April 28, 2022 at the College of William and Mary.
For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org.
About the speaker:
Jennifer Frey is an associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and fellow of the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America. Prior to joining the philosophy faculty at USC, she was a Collegiate Assistant Professor of Humanities at the University of Chicago, where she was a member of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts. She has published widely on virtue and moral psychology and she has co-edited three volumes on Self-Transcendence and Virtue, Practical Wisdom, and Practical Truth. Her writing has been featured in Breaking Ground, Evangelization and Culture, First Things, Fare Forward, Image, Law and Liberty, The Point, and USA Today.

Jul 26, 2022 • 1h 12min
Faith And Asceticism | Fr. John Corbett, O.P.
This lecture was given on July 7, 2022 at the 4th Annual Student Leadership Conference on Faith, Reason, and the Mind’s Ascent to God.
For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org.
About the speaker:
Fr. Corbett grew up in Columbus, Ohio, and came to know the Dominicans through family members in the Order, through St. Patrick’s Parish, and through attending Providence College, from which he graduated in 1973 with a B.A. in Political Science. Fr. Corbett joined the Dominicans in the summer of 1974 and was ordained a priest on May 12th, 1980. He completed his Licentiate in Sacred Theology in 1981 and began to teach moral theology as well as the Development of Western Civilization at Providence College. Three years later he began his doctoral studies under Servais Pinckaers, O.P., at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland and was awarded his Ph.D. after completing his dissertation on the theology of virtue in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Fr. Corbett was appointed to the Faculty of the Pontifical College Josephinum in Columbus, Ohio, in 1991, and spent the next seven years teaching various courses in moral theology, as well as offering retreats, spiritual direction, and personal formation for seminarians. Joining the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception in the Fall of 1998, Fr. Corbett teaches in the area of fundamental moral theology and the theology of the virtues, covering material from the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae in four sequential courses. He also offers seminars in Thomistic Action Theory, Contemporary Interpretations of Natural Law, as well as a seminar in the thought of Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre. He is interested in developing courses on the Ethics of Homicide, as well as on the Development of Casuistry in the Catholic Church.

Jul 25, 2022 • 44min
Does Nature Make Laws? An Introduction to the Natural Law Tradition | Prof. Joshua Hochschild
This lecture was given on December 1, 2021 at Georgetown University.
For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org.
About the speaker:
Joshua Hochschild is Professor of Philosophy and Director of Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Mount St. Mary’s University, where he also served six years as the inaugural Dean of the College of Liberal Arts. His primary research is in medieval logic, metaphysics, and ethics, with broad interest in liberal education and the continuing relevance of the Catholic intellectual tradition. He is the author of The Semantics of Analogy: Rereading Cajetan’s De Nominum Analogia (2010), translator of Claude Panaccio’s Mental Language: From Plato to William of Ockham (2017), and co-author of A Mind at Peace: Reclaiming an Ordered Soul in the Age of Distraction (2017). His writing has appeared in First Things, Commonweal, Modern Age and the Wall Street Journal. For 2020-21 he served as President of the American Catholic Philosophical Association.

Jul 22, 2022 • 1h 22min
Neuroscience and the Soul | Dr. Daniel De Haan
This lecture was given on May 29, 2022 at the 11th Annual Aquinas Philosophy Workshop on Aquinas on the Soul.
The handout for this lecture can be found here: https://tinyurl.com/yckbsbs3.
For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org.
About the speaker:
Daniel De Haan is a Research Fellow in Natural Theology at the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion and the Faculty of Theology and Religion at the University of Oxford. Before coming to Oxford he was a postdoctoral fellow working on the neuroscience strand of the Templeton World Charity Foundation’s Theology, Philosophy of Religion, and the Sciences project at the University of Cambridge. He has a doctorate in philosophy from the Catholic University of Leuven and University of St. Thomas in Texas. His research focuses on philosophical anthropology and the sciences, natural theology, and the thought of Thomas Aquinas.

7 snips
Jul 21, 2022 • 54min
Free Will and the Soul | Prof. Thomas Osborne
This lecture was given on May 28, 2022 at the 11th Annual Aquinas Philosophy Workshop on Aquinas on the Soul.
The handouts for the lecture can be found here: https://tinyurl.com/42jmxp7u.
For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org.
About the speaker:
Thomas M. Osborne, Jr. (Ph.D., Duke 2001), is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy, and a member of the Center for Thomistic Studies, University of St. Thomas (Houston). He has written many articles on medieval and late-scholastic philosophy and other topics, and is the author of Love of Self and Love of God in Thirteenth-Century Ethics (2005), Human Action in Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham (2014), and Aquinas's Ethics (2020).

Jul 20, 2022 • 1h 8min
The Passions Of The Soul | Prof. Michael Gorman
This lecture was given on May 28, 2022 at the 11th Annual Aquinas Philosophy Workshop on Aquinas on the Soul.
The handout for the talk can be found here: https://tinyurl.com/4bmexjhm
For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org.
About the speaker:
Michael Gorman is a graduate of St. Michael's College in the University of Toronto (B.A., Christianity and Culture, 1987), The Catholic University of America (Ph.L., Philosophy, 1989), the State University of New York at Buffalo (Ph.D., Philosophy, 1993), and Boston College (Ph.D., Theology, 1997). After serving as assistant professor of Catholic Studies at Saint Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia from 1997 to 1999, he joined the faculty of the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America, where he has taught ever since.
A fellow of The Catholic University's Institute for Human Ecology, he has also been an Alexander von Humboldt fellow (Leipzig 2004), a Fulbright fellow (Cologne 2008), and a scholar in the Templeton Foundation's Working Group "Virtue, Happiness, and the Meaning of Life" (2015-2017).
He works primarily on metaphysics, especially the metaphysics of essence, substance, and normativity, and on applications of metaphysics in areas such as theory of mind, Christology, action theory, and ethics. He is the author of Aquinas on the Metaphysics of the Hypostatic Union (Cambridge, 2017) and over thirty scholarly articles. He is particularly interested in how analytic philosophy and medieval philosophy can be brought together in a way that is historically accurate and philosophically fruitful.

Jul 19, 2022 • 1h 9min
Does The Person Survive After Death? | Prof. John O'Callaghan
This lecture was given on May 28, 2022 at the 11th Annual Aquinas Philosophy Workshop on Aquinas on the Soul.
For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org.
About the speaker:
Prof. John O'Callaghan is the Director of the Jacques Maritain Center at the University of Notre Dame as well as a permanent member of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas, appointed by Pope Benedict XVI in 2010. He served as the past President of the American Catholic Philosophical Association. His areas of scholarly interest include Medieval Philosophy, the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, and Thomistic Metaphysics and Ethics. Prof. O'Callaghan earned his BS in Physics from St. Norbert College in 1984, an MS in Mathematics from the University of Notre Dame in 1986, and his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Notre Dame in 1996.

Jul 18, 2022 • 58min
The Individuation Of The Soul After Death | Fr. Dominic Legge, O.P.
This talk was given on May 27th, 2022 at the 11th Annual Aquinas Philosophy Workshop on Aquinas on the Soul.
The handout for the talk can be found here: https://tinyurl.com/4nfcx8vp
For information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org.
About the speaker:
Fr. Dominic Legge, O.P., is the Director of the Thomistic Institute and Assistant Professor in Dogmatic Theology at the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C. He holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, a Ph.L. from the School of Philosophy of the Catholic University of America, and a doctorate in Sacred Theology from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. He entered the Order of Preachers in 2001, after having practiced constitutional law for several years as a trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice. He has also taught at The Catholic University of America Law School and at Providence College. He is the author of The Trinitarian Christology of St. Thomas Aquinas (Oxford University Press, 2016).

42 snips
Jul 15, 2022 • 1h 5min
The Powers Of The Soul | Fr. James Brent, O.P.
This talk was given on May 27th, 2022 at the 11th Annual Aquinas Philosophy Workshop on Aquinas on the Soul.
The handout for the talk can be found here: https://tinyurl.com/mr224yuv
For information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org.
About the speaker:
Fr. James Dominic Brent, O.P. was born and raised in Michigan. He pursued his undergraduate and graduate studies in Philosophy, and completed his doctorate in Philosophy at Saint Louis University on the epistemic status of Christian beliefs according to Saint Thomas Aquinas. He has articles in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Natural Theology, in the Oxford Handbook of Thomas Aquinas on “God’s Knowledge and Will”, and an article forthcoming on “Thomas Aquinas” in the Oxford Handbook of the Epistemology of Theology. He earned his STL from the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception, and was ordained a priest in the same year. He taught in the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America from 2010- 2014, and spent the year of 2014-2015 doing full time itinerant preaching on college campuses across the United States.

Jul 14, 2022 • 1h 6min
Do You Believe in Miracles? (And Can Such Belief Be Reasonable?) | Prof. W. Matthews Grant
This lecture was given on April 13, 2022 at Mississippi State University.
For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org.
About the speaker:
W. Matthews Grant is Professor and Chair in the Department of Philosophy at University of St. Thomas (MN), and Associate Editor of the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly. His articles have focused on Aquinas and the Philosophy of God, particularly issues having to do with the divine nature and God’s relationship to human freedom. His new book Free Will and God’s Universal Causality: The Dual Sources Account, draws resources from Aquinas and the scholastic tradition to explain how libertarian creaturely freedom can be reconciled with robust accounts of God’s providence, grace, and predestination.


