McInerny, R. (1997) Ethica Thomistica: The Moral Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. Revised edition. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press. Chapter 1: Morality and Human Life 1. Human Action and Moral Appraisal Human actions are moral actions. A human act is one that is conscious, deliberate, and free, and therefore something for which the …
Today there is almost constant talk in universities of excellence: excellence of institutions, of staff, and even of students. A quick search of the University of Edinburgh website yields teaching and research excellence (including the Research Excellence Framework), academic excellence, Exemplars of Excellence in Student Education, VLE Excellence, Tercentenary Awards for Excellence, the Centre for …
Few concepts are invoked more confidently in contemporary universities than the student voice. Yet the way the term is framed – and especially the language of championing it – obscures the limits of student judgement while betraying a deeper unease with educational authority. In higher education, what is needed is not greater responsiveness, but the …
One of my favourite poems by Seamus Heaney is this one from his 1991 collection Seeing Things. This poem is the eighth in the first section (Lightenings) of Part 2 (Squarings). viii The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise Were all at prayers inside the oratory A ship appeared above them in the …
Patient: Do you think I have low self-esteem? Therapist: No, it’s about right. How do we know whether our own evaluation of ourselves, and of our lives as a whole, is accurate or justified? How can we tell if we’re genuinely living a good life? MacIntyre (2016, p. 222) makes the bold claim that at …
A day after submitting my blog post (The Good Life of the University) to the Teaching Matters blog team, I happened on an interview (2012) with MacIntyre in which reference is made to an essay of his (Catholic Universities: Dangers, Hopes, Choices) which appeared in an edited book called Higher Learning and Catholic Traditions (2001). …
Link to post on Teaching Matters blog: https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/teaching-matters/the-good-life-of-the-university/ Introduction Study with us for an extraordinary future, says the University of Edinburgh’s webpage. But what kind of future does a university education promise – one of personal growth, or merely a means to an end? Universities themselves rarely address this question. When they do, their response …
Alasdair MacIntyre (2001) ‘Catholic Universities: Dangers, Hopes, Choices’, in Robert E. Sullivan (ed.) Higher Learning and Catholic Traditions. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, pp. 1–21. While the essay is most obviously about Catholic universities, MacIntyre makes clear that all universities can learn from some of the Catholic writers who have written about …
I spent an hour or so with a student from Vietnam this week. I could tell from her accented English she was likely to be Vietnamese, but she was quick – keen even – to let me know. In fact, she began our tutorial by explaining that she was attending this writing tutorial because English …
It has become commonplace to describe all sorts of phenomena in positive terms. Take the word community. It is often applied to any group of people with something vaguely in common, however thin or ill-defined that thing might be. To call such a group a community immediately suggests coherence, shared recognition, and solidarity. Curiously, the …
