Capital Punishment Capital punishment, or “the death penalty,” is an institutionalized practice designed to result in deliberately executing persons in response to actual or supposed misconduct and following an authorized, rule-governed process to conclude that the person is responsible for violating norms that warrant execution. Punitive executions have historically been imposed by diverse kinds of authorities, for an expansive range of conduct, for political or

Karl Rahner (1904-1984) Karl Rahner was one of the most influential Catholic philosophers of the mid to late twentieth century. A member of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) and a Roman Catholic priest, Rahner, as was the custom of the time, studied scholastic philosophy, through which he discovered Thomas Aquinas. From Aquinas’ epistemology and philosophical psychology Rahner was introduced to the Aristotelian-Thomistic notion of abstraction.

Aristotle: Biology Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.) may be said to be the first biologist in the Western tradition. Though there are physicians and other natural philosophers who remark on various flora and fauna before Aristotle, none of them brings to his study a systematic critical empiricism. Aristotle’s biological science is important to understand, not only because it gives us a view into the history and philosophy of

Moral Character At the heart of one major approach to ethics—an approach counting among its proponents Plato, Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas—is the conviction that ethics is fundamentally related to what kind of persons we are. Many of Plato’s dialogues, for example, focus on what kind of persons we ought to be and begin with examinations of particular virtues: What is the nature of justice? (Republic)

Mental Causation The term “mental causation” applies to causal transactions involving mental events or states, such as beliefs, desires, feelings, and perceptions. Typically, the term is used to refer to cases where a mental state causes a physical reaction: for instance, the mental state of perceiving a Frisbee flying your way can cause the physical event of your springing up to catch it. It should