James Daniel Collins - The Lure of Wisdom (Aquinas Lecture 27)
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Under the Auspices of Wisconsin-Alpha Chapter of the Phi Sigma Tau
by James D. Collins, Ph.D.
MARQUETTE UNIVERSITY PRESS MILWAUKEE 1962
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Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 62-13514
Copyright 1962 By the Wisconsin-Alpha Chapter of the Phi Sigma Tau Marquette University
PRINTED IN U.S.A.
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To Violet Stafford and to the Memory of Dr. Leo J. Stafford
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Prefatory
The Wisconsin-Alpha Chapter of the Phi Sigma Tau, National Honor Society for Philosophy at Marquette University, each year invites a scholar to deliver a lecture in honor of St. Thomas Aquinas. Customarily delivered on a Sunday close to March 7, the feast day of the Society's patron saint, the lectures are called the Aquinas Lectures.
In 1962 the Aquinas Lecture "The Lure of Wisdom" was delivered on March 11 in the Peter A. Brooks Memorial Union of Marquette University by Dr. James D. Collins, professor of philosophy, St. Louis University.
Dr. Collins was born in Holyoke, Massachusetts on July 12, 1917. He received his A.B. degree from Catholic University of America in 1941. In 1942 he received his A.M. degree and in 1944 his Ph.D. degree also from Catholic University of America. After a year as research fellow in philosophy at Harvard University he came to St. Louis University in 1945.
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He is a former president of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, a member of the American Philosophical Association, and Phi Beta Kappa. He is currently president of the Metaphysical Society of America.
His published books include The Thomistic Philosophy of the Angels (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1947); The Existentialists: A Critical Study (Chicago: Regnery, 1952); The Mind of Kierkegaard (Chicago: Regnery, 1953); A History of Modern European Philosophy (Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing Co., 1954); God in Modern Philosophy (Chicago: Regnery, 1959).
In addition, he served as editor of Philosophical Readings in Cardinal Newman (Chicago: Regnery, 1961) and is a contributor to The Modern Schoolman, The New Scholasticism, The Thomist, International Philosophical Quarterly, Journal of Philosophy, Review of Metaphysics, Philosophical Review, Giornale di Metafisica, Thought and Cross Currents.
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To these books and many articles in learned journals, Phi Sigma Tau has the pleasure of adding The Lure of Wisdom.
Page 1
The Lure of Wisdom
It is sometimes assumed that philosophical concern about attaining to wisdom was confined to the ancient and medieval worlds, and that this aim withered away as one of the chief casualties of the waning Middle Ages. On this view, the modern philosophers do no more than make a customary etymological bow in the direction of the love and pursuit of wisdom, while actually organizing their thought around methods and themes which cannot yield, and are not intended to yield, wisdom as their proper fruit. The practical consequence of reading history in this way is to conclude that contemporary minds have no business in bothering about wisdom. If men persist in searching after it with philosophical instruments, then they must pay the price either of attempting an impossible throwback to a past civilization or else of breaking so completely with the whole
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trend of modern speculation that their views are freakish and unattractive to the contemporary mind.
I do not think that the present-day prospects for wisdom are quite so desperate or that the history of modern positions on wisdom has been properly investigated. The more we probe comparatively into modern philosophy, the more striking is seen to be the persistence of the basic themes from one age to another. Wisdom being one of these basic topics in philosophy, it seems antecedently unlikely that it should be an extraordinary exception to this historical continuity, unless one were to define it so narrowly as to bind it down to just one philosophical theory about wisdom or one cultural situation for its appearance. And when we turn to the actual texts of the modern philosophers, we find that this antecedent unlikelihood of its disappearance is borne out by the actual discussions of wisdom undertaken by these thinkers. Their writings show that wisdom is not shunted aside as lacking in interest or as impossible of attainment. Rather, it
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is treated in new ways and integrated with new conceptions concerning the human mind and the goals of human life. The historical record shows that it does continue to engage modern philosophers as providing one of their proper topics and aims of philosophizing. Unless we attend to what they say about the meaning and accessibility of wisdom, we will be overlooking an important strain in modern philosophy and thus depriving ourselves of some relevant guidance on the ways to approach wisdom in our own age.
Our net cannot reach out far enough to snare all the aspects of this vast question of how wisdom has fared at the hands of the modern philosophers. But at least a start can be made by investigating three relevant points. Our first task will be to notice how the problem of wisdom came to a head with the Skeptics and Stoics of the later Renaissance, thus forming a major part of the heritage of problems accepted in modern philosophy. The next step will be to study in some detail the conception of wisdom proposed by Descartes, since
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