Fr. Stephen Brock explains Aquinas's Fifth Way, focusing on the governance of things and how natural bodies without cognition display goal-oriented activity, ultimately placing the Fifth Way into dialogue with Darwinism.

This lecture was given on September 5th, 2024, at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

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About the Speaker:

Stephen L. Brock is a priest of the Prelature of Opus Dei (ordained 1992). He is Ordinary Professor of Medieval Philosophy at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome, where he began teaching in 1990. Since 2008 he has been an Ordinary Member of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas. Since 2017 he has been a visiting professor in the Department of Philosophy of the University of Chicago. He is the author of Action & Conduct: Thomas Aquinas and the Theory of Action (T&T Clark, 1998); The Philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas: A Sketch (Wipf & Stock, 2015); The Light that Binds: a Study in Thomas Aquinas's Metaphysics of Natural Law (Wipf & Stock, 2020); and numerous articles on various aspects of Aquinas’s thought.

Keywords: Aquinas' Fifth Way, Darwinism, Divine Governance, Natural Bodies, Natural Inclinations, Purposeful Activity, Regularity in Nature, St. Thomas Aquinas, Teleology