James C. Doig (1929-1917)

James Doig died earlier this month.  He was a prolific scholar of Thomas Aquinas, including a translation of the Treatise on Law and book-length studies on Aquinas’s commentaries on the Metaphysics and the Nicomachean Ethics. He taught for 25 years at Clayton State University in Georgia.

Daniel Westberg dies at 68

Reverend Daniel Westberg, the author of influential work on moral theology and the ethics of Thomas Aquinas, died earlier this month in a sailing accident.

He taught at the University of Virginia from 1990 to 1998, and since 2000 has been a professor of ethics and moral theology at Nashotah House seminary in Wisconsin.

 

Conferences, Fellowships, CfPs, etc.

Here’s a fairly random collection of information I’ve collected over recent weeks:

• The Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin – Madison is advertising fellowships for 2018-19. Particularly notable are the Solmsen Fellowships on pre-1700 Europe and the Kingdon Fellowship on Judeo-Christian religious traditions. Applications are due Nov. 2, 2017. Details here.
• The a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities Cologne is advertising a large number of doctoral fellowships. The deadline is November 3, 2017. Details here.
• The Journée thomiste 2017 is scheduled for November 25 (Paris).
• The annual Charles Schmitt Prize is on again, in any area of intellectual history after 1500. Deadline is December 31.
• Martin Klein, Naomi Osorio-Kupferblum, and Oliver Istvan Toth have put out a call for papers on consciousness in medieval and early modern philosophy of mind, to be published in a special issue of the Romanian journal Society and Politics. The deadline is March 31, 2018. Details here.
• There’s a conference on the Calculatores tradition in Munich next spring (May 23-25, 2018). Details here.
• Leuven is hosting a conference on Theories of Causal Powers in the Thirteenth and the Fourteenth Century (June 1-2, 2018). CfP deadline February 15, 2018.
• Leuven is also hosting a conference next summer on Marsilius of Padua (July 6-7, 2018). Details here. CfP deadline December 31, 2017.
• Groningen is hosting a conference on Substance in Early Modern Scholasticism (June 4-5, 2018).
• The third Symposium Thomisticum will be held in Athens next summer on the theme Aquinas and the Greeks (June 7-9, 2018). CfP deadline December 1, 2017.
• The Thomas Institute in Utrecht has announced a conference on Initiation and Mystagogy in Thomas Aquinas: Theological, Philosophical, Liturgical, and Pedagogical Perspectives (December 13-15, 2018). CfP deadline March 1, 2018.
• The Society for Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy has a handsome new web page with much information about the Society.
• There’s a wonderful interview with James South (Marquette) at the APA blog.

Various Resources (Fall 2017)

Whenever I find something useful on the web, I tend to suppose that I’m the last person in the world (that is, our little world) to know about it. So apologies in advance if you’ve heard about these before.

• If you’re reading this, then you’re most likely a regular user of the online Corpus Thomisticum. But did you know that if you’re using the full-text feature of the site (e.g., here), you can double-click on any word and it will take you to the Perseus entry for that word, giving you not just a dictionary definition but an exact account of the part of speech etc. of that particular inflection of the word? This makes reading Aquinas in this format a great resource for anyone working to improve their Latin.
• Playing around with this feature led me to discover a great new(er) resource from the Perseus people: an online Latin/Greek search tool that ranges over various dictionaries. It’s called Logeion. This has a notably elegant and powerful user interface, and is a particularly useful tool for medievalists, because in addition to indexing Lewis and Short, it gives you Du Cange and also the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources. It’s worth taking a minute to read the About page, which explains some functionality that you would not discover on your own from the austere Start page.
• There is also – of course! – a corresponding Logeion app for your phone. My quick impression is that it does not do everything the web-based version does, but it’s still pretty cool.
• And speaking of apps, the Corpus Thomisticum itself now has an app, currently for Android only, that has the functions of the Index Thomisticus. (I have to report, though, that I couldn’t get it to work on my Android tablet.)
• Finally, the Aquinas Institute continues to release bilingual volumes of Aquinas’s works, and they are starting to enter into territory that goes beyond looking nice on a shelf — they are producing new translations. Here is the announcement of the first volume of their translation of the Sentences commentary (Bk. IV dd. 1-13). Notice that they’ve kindly made it available for free on the web.