Prudence in St. Thomas Aquinas.

Abstract

In the present thesis, we attempt to explicate St. Thomas's understanding of prudence an all-important virtue. In the introduction, we demonstrate how prudence is an exigency of man's rational nature, showing that without it man is incapable of acting according to reason and attaining his end. Within our analysis, we identify the major influences on St. Thomas's conception of prudence, in descending order of importance, as: Aristotle, St. Albert the Great, Philip the Chancellor, and William of Auxerre and provide a commentary on the specific contribution of each of these authors. In the second section, we attempt to summarize the contemporary context of the debate on prudence. We look briefly at the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, Josef Pieper, and Gilbert Meilaender. As well, we point out that with the recent publication of Daniel Nelson's book, The Priority of Prudence, new life has been injected into the present debate on St. Thomas's understanding of the relation between prudence and the natural law. In the third and final section, we outline in detail St. Thomas's actual conception of the nature and exercise of the virtue of prudence. In this regard, we show that St. Thomas considers prudence a good operative habit of the practical intellect. We remark how St. Thomas views the three principal acts of prudence as: deliberation, practical judgment, and command, with this last being the proper act of the virtue. Finally, in our concluding paragraphs, we return to the issues raised by the Nelson book mentioned above and propose our thesis in this regard. This is, simply, that although Nelson is perhaps wrong to portray the 'natural law tradition' surrounding Aquinas as so rigidly deductivist, he is right to emphasize that St. Thomas's ethical theory is fundamentally virtue and prudence-based and not natural law-based. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)