Carnegie Mellon/University of Pittsburgh
The Thomistic Institute at Carnegie Mellon/University of Pittsburgh presents a lecture by Prof. Christopher Frey from the University of South Carolina titled “On Being Incomplete: The Metaphysics of our Spiritual Pilgrimage”
This lecture will be delivered over Zoom. Registration below to receive Zoom credentials in your email inbox.
Monday, March 29
7:00 pm EST
About the Lecture:
According to Aquinas, human beings are viators. A viator is a pilgrim or wayfarer; to be in statu viatoris is to be in a condition of “being on the way.” There is, therefore, an important sense in which each of us is incomplete. Most discussions of our incompleteness focus on its psychological and spiritual dimensions. That we are lacking and out of place is first-personally manifest. The conscious appreciation of our deficiency is an ineliminable and central aspect of the human condition and our desire to overcome our imperfection drives us to direct our lives upon its divine remedy, the possession of beatitude. But it has a broader significance. Within the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition, the explanations of natural movement and of this movement’s relation to the divine involve a variety of incompleteness that parallels, in most important respects, our status viatoris. I will elucidate the metaphysics of incompleteness as it occurs in the natural order and explain its concordance with our own. In doing so, I hope to provide a more comprehensive understanding of what it is to be a pilgrim. On the way, we will discuss passages from Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, and Dante among others.
About the Speaker:
Christopher Frey is currently an associate professor in the department of philosophy at the University of South Carolina. Prof. Frey works primarily in Ancient Greek philosophy, especially Aristotle’s natural philosophy and metaphysics. He is writing a book entitled The Principle of Life: Aristotelian Souls in an Inanimate World. It concerns the distinction between the animate and the inanimate, the unity of living organisms, nutrition, birth, death, and, more generally, what one’s metaphysical worldview looks like if one takes life to be central. He also works in contemporary philosophy of perception and mind and has written extensively on the relationship between the intentionality and phenomenality of perceptual experience. In addition to these two main areas of research, he has secondary projects in metaphysics, the philosophy of action, Medieval philosophy, Early Modern philosophy, and the history of analytic philosophy.
