de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 0:00 This is Episode 42 of Ethics and Culture Cast from the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture. Welcome to Episode 42 of Ethics and Culture Cast from Notre Dame's de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture. I'm Ken Hallenius, the communications specialist at the Center. In this episode, we chat with Therese Cory, an associate professor of philosophy and the newest member of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas. We talk about reading Aquinas with undergraduates, the cross-cultural conversation around Aristotle's writings, and how the thought of St. Thomas is relevant to modern day AI researchers. Let's sit down for this delightful conversation. Well, Therese, thank you so much for coming to be with us today. Therese Cory 1:10 Thank you for having me, Ken. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 1:11 Absolutely. So tell us a little bit about yourself. Where are you from? Where did you do your studies, those those sorts of things? Therese Cory 1:18 Well, I was born in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, across from Detroit. I was homeschooled through my, through high school, and just got this tremendous interest in philosophy and theology through all the reading that I was doing through high school. I went to Ave Maria College in Ypsilanti, Michigan for a degree in theology and classics. Did graduate studies at Catholic U, Catholic University of America in D.C. From there, I had my first job at Seattle University, lived for a couple of years in Germany and now here I am at Notre Dame. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 1:54 Wow, how and when did you come here to Notre Dame? Therese Cory 1:58 So I started in 2015. I actually was hired in 2014, but I was, I deferred for a year to take a fellowship at, in Germany. And I was really excited to be able to come to Notre Dame because Notre Dame is, you know, one of the best places to do medieval philosophy in the country. And I have so many great colleagues here working in medieval philosophy and in the history of philosophy broadly, so I have a lot of wonderful people to talk to. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 2:24 So tell us a bit about what you teach and who are your students and what are they like? Therese Cory 2:30 Right, so, I teach a lot of Intro to Philosophy. I love teaching our first year philosophy requirement to first year students. One of the most exciting things for me is to be able to introduce students to the possibility of thinking through things that they just take for granted. So concepts like what is a cause? What does it mean for something to cause something else? Why is there something rather than nothing? If we argue about whether some behavior is just or unjust, well, okay, well, what is justice? And I really love having these discussions with them. I love Notre Dame students, they're really bright and engaged and intellectually curious. So I teach a lot of those classes. I also teach ancient and medieval philosophy for our majors. And I teach courses for the graduate program. So my specialization is in medieval philosophy, Thomas Aquinas, the history of theories of mind and that sort of thing. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 3:29 Where did you first meet Thomas? And what drew you in to actually become like, you know, this is your area? Therese Cory 3:36 Yeah. So I think I probably read Aquinas for the first time when I was in college. So as a theology major, we read a lot of Thomas Aquinas in the courses that I was taking. And what attracted me to his writings particularly was just this sense of being a kind of systematic whole. So Aquinas doesn't just focus on a couple little topics, he's really interested in putting together an entire picture of all of the different aspects of reality. And really interweaving not only, you know, science and philosophy, metaphysics, ethics, but also theology. So he's really got this, this big picture in which you can integrate the life of faith, and also our knowledge of the natural world. And I found that incredibly attractive. And from, you know, the, the first few pages I was reading, I was completely hooked. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 4:32 Now, it's kind of hard, but, I mean, the construction is so different than what we do, right? You read the "Summa" and if it's your first time reading it and you don't have a guide, it seems everything backwards and unconnected. Therese Cory 4:45 Yes, I think Aquinas is one of those thinkers that because he's got a reputation for extreme clarity and precision people sometimes think, okay, I'll just go online and I'll read the "Summa Theologiae." It's all on there on the, Dominicans have made it available in English online. And then it's, then there's often a kind of sense of discouragement. You start reading the articles and you realize, okay, he's presupposing everything else in his system in order to be able to understand this one problem. And so I think it's good, just diving into Aquinas, maybe not to start immediately with the text, but to but to look at a good introduction and get your feet wet and a sense of the whole and then you can start to be able to parse what's happening in the text a little more easily. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 5:28 Yeah. What is a good book for a beginner to read? Therese Cory 5:32 So Father Stephen Brock has a great book that he recently published. I think it's called "An Introduction to the Thought of Thomas Aquinas" [ed. Note: the title is "The Philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas: A Sketch"]. He has a chapter on all of the major themes and it's, it's really well done. So I recommend that to my students a lot. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 5:44 Wonderful. Well, you were recently appointed to the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas. So tell us a bit about what the academy does. Therese Cory 5:54 Yeah. So the Pontifical Academies are sort of like think tanks of various sorts for the Vatican. There's ten Pontifical Academies. The most recent one was founded, I think in the 90's, or no, in the early 2000s, a Pontifical Academy for Latin; and one of the oldest ones is the Pontifical Academy of the Sciences, which was founded in the 1600s. So the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas was founded in 1897 by Pope Leo XIII. So one of the big accomplishments of Pope Leo XIII was to elevate the study of Thomas Aquinas as a figure of particular importance for the Catholic intellectual tradition. And so one of the things he wanted to do was bring together in a kind of honorary society scholars working in Aquinas's philosophy and theology. So, there, there's 50 of us. These are lifetime appointments. And what we do is get together once a year and talk about our research, talk about themes that are of particular importance to the life of the church today. Those conference results are gathered together in a volume every year. So we try to focus on issues and questions where the thought of Thomas Aquinas can have a special relevance to contemporary life. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 7:20 I happen to know that next year there's a conference that the Pontifical Academy is hosting, right? Therese Cory 7:25 Yes, we're very excited about that. So the, that's the International Thomistic Congress. This will be the 11th one, the first one took place in 1925. And it's been a long time since we've had one. And so that's one of the things that the Academy is trying to do is to revive this practice as a way of bringing Thomists from around the world together. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 7:43 Sure. There haven't been a lot of appointments of late, right? When's the last time somebody has been appointed to the to the academy prior to now? Therese Cory 7:52 Um, that's a good question. So I'm not sure who the most recent appointee is. Given that it's relatively small and usually people, you know, they, the term ends either because they retire or because they pass away. So it doesn't happen that often. But so there's one other woman on the academy right now from Argentina. And then the the first woman I believe was a nun who is earlier in the in the 20th century. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 8:22 Okay, it's kind of interesting that it took until 18, the late 19th century for there to be an academy given, you know, the story is that the, the Summa was part of the texts that were honored at the Council of Trent. Therese Cory 8:38 Right. Yeah. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 8:39 Right. The story is told that it was the Gospels and the Summa. Therese Cory 8:43 Yeah. And they and they've been the Summa has been a big part of Jesuit education for a long time as well. So it's, it's had this, and then the Dominican education, of course. So it's had this important place in the training of priests and religious for a long time, certainly, and then also in Catholic schools generally. But I think for Leo XIII it was a way of looking at trying to find a figure from the history of Catholic thought who's who's thought really distinctively represents some of the key concerns that face Catholics and he really wanted I think Aquinas to be elevated or his thought to receive extra prominence because of the issues that Aquinas is concerned with are the issues that many questions that Catholics, Catholics raise about faith and, and the nature of the human being and our final destiny. And so there's a lot of really interesting existential questions there. And it's interesting to see, so Pope John Paul II reformed the Academy in, I believe it was, was 1999 after writing the letter "Fides et Ratio." So he wrote this apostolic letter called "Inter Munera Academiarum" in which he described why he thought that the academy had a special place for the thought of the modern world. And I actually brought the text, I thought I would read the the formulation that he uses because it's particularly beautiful, he says, "In the cultural conditions of our time, it seems truly appropriate to develop further this part of Thomistic doctrine which deals with humanity, given that his assertions on the dignity of the human person and the use of his reason, in perfect harmony with faith, make St. Thomas a teacher for our time." And he really sees the thought of Thomas Aquinas as being something in which the human person, the embodiment of the person, the orientation of the person toward transcendence and toward a loving relationship with God. That there's something there that can be of particular service to contemporary Catholics struggling to find themselves in the modern world. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 10:57 Very much a focus on his kind of anthropology. Therese Cory 10:59 Yes, yeah. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 11:01 Wow. That's, that's inspiring. Well, what are the other kinds of things that you are interested in, kind of, professionally? So, Thomas and then...? Therese Cory 11:14 Right. So I'm really interested in the history of philosophy of mind. So one of the things that I work on in the 13th century in Aquinas and Aquinas's predecessors, is the nature of the human mind. How does he think it works? Is it material or immaterial? These questions, I think, are really interesting. And these these questions, I think, when we look at how they were answered in time periods, very distant from our own, we get new perspectives and new ways of thinking about the mind and what it might mean to have a mind and what the difference is between human minds and animal minds. So I, I think of myself in some respects as an archaeologist who goes back and recovers theories that have just gotten buried over under layers of sediment. One of one of the really interesting historical trends that I track in some of my work is the reception of thought from the Islamic world in, in Aquinas's lifetime. So Aquinas is occupying this incredibly important point in the history of Western thought, when there's this whole new stream of ideas coming in, philosophical ideas, from the Arabic speaking world, and they're being translated into Latin, and they're being read at the University of Paris, where Aquinas is a student, and so, thinkers at the time are trying to figure out how do we integrate these ideas with the ones that were already familiar with, from, say, Augustine and the Church fathers? And Aquinas is embarking on this incredibly creative process, which is already really something he's taking over from his teacher, Albert the Great, of trying to bring these traditions together into a coherent whole. And so part of what I do is track how that got done. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 13:01 Yeah, that's particularly interesting and couldn't be any more relevant to even, you know, our current conversation, right, the idea of the interplay of civilizations and cultures. Therese Cory 13:10 Exactly, exactly. Yeah. And I think we have this notion now. That's, that's very current that we see in a lot of popular media and online. That, you know, Islam and Christianity have just been in this civilizational battle since the dawn of time, you know. And I think what we see when we look at the intellectual interaction here that's happening in the Middle Ages, we see a really different side of that relationship and story that's not told as much where there's really a kind of shared philosophical project that's being carried on by these two, these two religious groups that share a commitment to monotheism. And so they share a lot of philosophical commitments. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 13:53 Especially because the Islamic thinkers were themselves dealing with Aristotle and kind of preserving those writings and responding to them and trying to figure out how they related to their monotheism as well. Therese Cory 14:07 Yes. And I think we tend to forget, when we think about Aristotle in the Middle Ages, you know, how did Aristotle get into circulation at the University of Paris in the 13th century and the tradition of reading Aristotle, the commentary, traditions, these, this is all coming through the Arabic philosophical community, who, for centuries had been writing commentaries and developing the Aristotelian tradition coming out of the Greek background in Northern Africa and in the Middle East. And that whole tradition is just getting picked up then, in the Latin tradition. So you really see a kind of continuity from Greece, to Baghdad, to Toledo. And then again to Paris. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 14:55 Yeah. Wow. Well, now you are also a member of the de Nicola Center's Faculty Advisory Committee. So how did you first get involved with the DCEC? Therese Cory 15:07 Well, you know, as you know, Carter is very good at connecting with faculty and reaching out and I think I had been on campus maybe two weeks when, when he came to talk to me. So it was, it's been great to work with the de Nicola Center since then. And a lot of the student fellows end up in my classes and they've been a real treat to teach because they have this huge enthusiasm for medieval thought and ancient thought. I have some of them are in my class right now. And and then also, I've been involved with the some of the pro life work that some of these students do. So most recently, the pro life apologetics group asked me to come and talk to them about some famous arguments in that that are sort of up for debate in the pro life, pro choice kind of debates. So we had a wonderful conversation about that. I am so impressed with the students and the incredible work that they're doing and the commitment that they show and, and really the training and support that they received through the de Nicola Center. It's really impressive. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 16:10 Wonderful. So what are you working on now? What is next to come from your desk? Therese Cory 16:15 Right now I'm finishing up a book on Aquinas's theory of knowing as being. And so the idea of this book is to look at what kind of being is the mind? And, and how can we think about knowing – less in terms of developing a connection with the extra mental world, and more in terms of a kind of transformation of the person. And so the way I like to think about it is that for Aquinas, knowing is like growing, when you're when you're learning something, if you're a college student at Notre Dame, and you're going through your classes and you're learning all these new ideas, your mind as a part of you is growing and developing just in exactly the same way that a sapling is growing into a tree. And you're putting forth new branches and new leaves, and just like a tree is able to do things that a sapling can't do as it's reaching maturity, the ways in which you you grow through knowledge are enabling you to do new things. So I'm really interested in this metaphysical way of thinking about knowing in terms of a development of the human person, which I think gets obscured sometimes when we focus so much on a kind of way of thinking about knowing is just making connections with an outside world. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 17:30 Yeah. That has also of course, ramifications for AI as well, right? Because computers as they begin to make not just the connections, but they increase their own ability and that just snowballs. Therese Cory 17:44 Yes. And as you can see, this is mimicking something that the human mind does as a kind of open ended self development, right. And it raises all sorts of interesting questions about whether, you know whether the ability to do that is something that indicates that something has a mind. Right? Should we say that that an AI has a mind? This is, of course, a topic of great interest for philosophy classrooms. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 18:09 Right. Right. Therese Cory 18:10 Um, yeah. But but there's a there's a lot of important implications, I think even in the work of Aquinas for thinking about AI intelligence, because he really wants to say that there's an essential feature of cognitive activity or mental activity is consciousness. And he thinks that consciousness requires a kind of feel, a kind of, you know, a what it is like. Of it, there's a there's a feel to having a sensation or having a thought. And he thinks that that's not possible, except for something that's immaterial, to some degree. So, I think from a Thomistic perspective, if we look at AI, then we would want to say, well, AI can't, given the material structures that it has, it can't be something that has consciousness, but you know, the the field is still open on that one. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 19:02 Sure, yeah. To what extent, the fact that Thomas Aquinas was a priest. This of course, as you say, you know, he was not only in philosophy, but also theology. How about the reader of Thomas? Can you approach Thomas as it as a total unbeliever? And obviously, there's value there. But what does having approaching Thomas as a person of faith, right? What effect does that have? Therese Cory 19:31 Right? So this is a question that comes up sometimes in my ancient and medieval class, you know, students want to know if we're reading this material from authors who are theologians and philosophers, and then the views are so systematic. Can we really extract Aquinas's philosophy for someone who is a non believer. And I think there's sort of, there's a, the answer is sort of on the one hand and on the other hand, so de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 19:56 Drawing a distinction. A fine Dominican tradition. Therese Cory 19:59 Exactly, as Aquinas might do himself. So just on the one hand, just as reading any text, it's very important to be aware of the context and of the background of the author and of the various things that the author prioritizes. So too with Aquinas, I think we can't fully come to grips with the views, if we're not really willing to take at all seriously the text where he talks about concepts that are traditionally associated as religious concepts. So an example of this is, you know, his theory on human, the human mind and human knowing. It's really hard to get the complete picture of what he thinks about human knowing, unless we pay some attention to the text where he's talking about angelic knowledge. And so, I think it's not really possible to read Aquinas's philosophy if what in abstraction from his theology, if what that means is we just don't read any of the texts where he talks about the theological stuff. Because sometimes that's what the test cases are happening, we actually get a better picture of what's going on philosophically. But on the other hand, Aquinas is a thinker who's very committed to the possibility that human reason, has a kind of domain. And there are things that can be known by human reason. And then there are that are in a sort of unaided quest for truth going through the natural world observing, reflecting on experience drawing conclusions from principles, and that when the human beings doing theology, what we're doing is we're adding new data to the database. And so the datum of revelation, that God is a trinity, that Jesus is God incarnate. So these are basically new, new bits of data that we can then continue with human reason to reflect on. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 21:56 What we cannot achieve by human reason, on our own. Therese Cory 21:59 Exactly. So they're things that are taken on testimony, and then we know them through faith. And so as a result, it's possible then to make a principal distinction when you're reading Aquinas, is the conclusion that he's drawing right here: is that something that I need that datum of revelation in order to reach that conclusion? Or is that a conclusion that I can reach just using the datum that's possible through sense experience and through philosophical reasoning? And so there's a ton of Aquinas's philosophy, where I think, you know, a person who doesn't have commitment to the Catholic faith can still get a lot out of his philosophical thought just as a kind of system in its own right. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 22:42 Wow. Well, Therese, thank you so much for opening our eyes to that much at least. Therese Cory 22:49 Yeah, thanks so much, Ken. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 22:50 And congratulations to your appointment. Therese Cory 22:52 Thank you. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 22:52 And all the work that comes with that. Therese Cory 22:54 Thank you very much. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 23:01 Thank you to Professor Cory. You will find links to her book and to a talk about Muslim philosophers and Aquinas that she delivered for the Thomistic Institute in the show notes. Subscribe to Ethics and Culture Cast so that you can always get the latest episodes by visiting ethicscenter.nd.edu/podcast. We would love your feedback. Please review the show on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you get your podcasts, and email your suggestions to cecpodcast@nd.edu. Our theme music is "I Dunno" by grapes licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution license. We'll see you next time on Ethics and Culture Cast. Until then, make good decisions. Transcribed by https://otter.ai