How Do We Know Essences? Sense Knowledge and Abstraction | Fr. James Brent, O.P.

The Thomistic Institute

This talk was given on June 26th, 2021 at the 10th Annual Aquinas Philosophy Workshop: Knowledge, Truth, and Wisdom in Aquinas. For information on upcoming Thomistic Institute events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Fr. James Dominic Brent, O.P. was born and raised in Michigan. He pursued his undergraduate and graduate studies in Philosophy, and completed his doctorate in Philosophy at Saint Louis University on the epistemic status of Christian beliefs according to Saint Thomas Aquinas. He has articles in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Natural Theology, in the Oxford Handbook of Thomas Aquinas on “God’s Knowledge and Will”, and on “Thomas Aquinas” in the Oxford Handbook of the Epistemology of Theology. He earned his STL from the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception. He taught in the School of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America from 2010-2014, and spent the year of 2014-2015 doing full-time itinerant preaching on college campuses across the United States. Since then, he has been an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Dominican House of Studies.