With the heaviest of hearts, Elaine Weismann reports that our beloved friend, Great Books Academy Chairman, and Adler-Aquinas Fellow, Max Weismann, passed away on February 22, 2017 from kidney cancer. A Memorial Service is being planned at St. Chysostom’s Church, where the service of his good friend, Mortimer Adler, was held 16 years ago: 1424 Dearborn St., Chicago, May 6 at 3PM, reception to follow. May he rest in peace.
Robert C. Trundle, Adler-Aquinas Institute
Integrated Truth and Existential Phenomenology: A Thomistic Response to Iconic Anti-Realists in Science relates an existential phenomenology to modal reasoning. By this reasoning, rooted in a consciousness of phenomena in themselves, a Thomistic realism is advanced wherein scientific inquiry yields objective truth and presupposes a causal principle. This principle, as an inferably true modality, strictly implies a first cause. And this cause as a supreme norm, causally created human nature as it ought to be. So with no naturalistic fallacy, a naturalistic ethics is inferred from our psycho-biological nature that also informs art and politics. Politics, as the institutionalization of ethics, is inferable from ethical prescriptions that are as certifiably true as the descriptions of science that inform it.