Theology of Disclosure = Phenomenological Theology

"Phenomenology can help restore the understanding of being and mind that was accepted in classical Greek philosophy and medieval thought and can still take into account certain contributions of modernity, especially those of science. Phenomenology, in its classical form, understands the human mind as ordered towards truth, and this is the understanding of the mind that prevailed in classical thinking. Phenomenology develops this understanding through its doctrines of intentionality and evidence but with a consideration of modern problems.

"This revival of classical thinking is both desirable and important. In spite of the many advantages the modern age has brought us over the past 500 years, it has also contributed to a kind of undermining of our human self-understanding and a skepticism about our ability to know both ourselves and the world in which we live. I think phenomenology can provide an alternative to both the modern and the post-modern predicament because it provides a new understanding of mind as ordered towards truth." -- Robert Sokolowski (March 26, 1999)

Pictures, Quotations, and Distinctions.
Fourteen Essays in Phenomenology.
(Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992)

I.

1. Picturing
2. Quotation

II.

3. Making Distinctions
4. Explaining

III.

5. Timing
6. Measurement
7. Exact Science and The World in Which We Live

IV.

8. Exorcising Concepts
9. Referring

V.

10. Grammar and Thinking
11. Tarskian Harmonies in Words and Pictures

VI.

12. Moral Thinking
13. What is Moral Action?
14. Knowing Natural Law

Assigned reading for PHIL 305 from Sokolowski's articles:

Robert Sokolowski, "Discovery and Obligation in Natural Law" (forthcoming, CUA Press)

Robert Sokolowski, "What is Natural Law?", The Thomist 68 (2004): 507-29.

Robert Sokolowski, "The Human Person and Political Life", The Thomist 65 (2001): 505-27.

Robert Sokolowski, "Scientific and Hermeneutic Questions in Aristotle", Philosophy and Rhetoric 4 (1971): 242-61.

Book Reviews

Schall reviews The God of Faith and Reason

Koterski reviews Ethics and Theological Disclosures: The Thought of Robert Sokolowski

"Within biblical religion, a distinction must be made between the Old and the New Testament. Leo Strauss has frequently observed that revealed religion and philosophy, Jerusalem and Athens, cannot be reconciled and that the tension between the two makes up the motive force for European history ... Strauss's observation may hold for the Old Testament, but it need not hold for the New; the Incarnation shows that all human powers, including reason, can be reconciled with Christian belief. Scholasticism, the use of reason within revelation, is not an intellectual abnormality but a human and metaphysical possibility in the New Law." -- Robert Sokolowski, Eucharistic Presence, p.134 n.21