Prof. Thomas Ward explores C. S. Lewis’s "The Abolition of Man", analyzing how technology’s conquest of nature risks diminishing humanity unless anchored by objective moral values.

This lecture was given on April 8th, 2025, at Indiana University.

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About the Speaker:

Thomas M. Ward is Associate Professor of Philosophy at The University of Texas at Austin, in the School of Civic Leadership. He specializes in the history of philosophy and theology of the Middle Ages. Ward is the author of After Stoicism: Last Words of the Last Roman Philosopher (Word on Fire, 2024), Ordered by Love: An Introduction to John Duns Scotus (Angelico, 2022), Divine Ideas (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and has translated, with commentary, John Duns Scotus’s Treatise on the First Principle (Hackett, 2024). He has been a NEH Fellow (2022) and Harvey Fellow (2009-2011), and is a past winner of the Society for Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy Founder's Award (2013) and the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly Rising Scholar Essay Contest (2018). He studied philosophy at Biola University (BA 2004) and theology at Oxford University (M.Phil 2006), where he was Head Resident at the Kilns, the former residence of C.S. Lewis. His PhD in philosophy is from UCLA (2011). Ward is married with six children and is a member of St. Peter Catholic Student Center in Waco.

Keywords: Abolition of Man, Artificial Contraception, Catholicism, C. S. Lewis, Eugenics, Ethics of Technology, Incarnation, Posthumanism, Practical Reasoning, Virtue Ethics