Abstract

This dissertation is a dialogue between feminists, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas. The dialogue concludes that the Thomistic natural law tradition provides an adequate method of justifying ethical precepts when coupled with methodological correctives from liberationists' insights about oppression and its internalization. ;Major concerns of the liberationists--oppression and its internalization--are absent in the Aristotelian/Thomistic tradition. Feminists have avoided this tradition partly because feminism emerged in the Enlightenment, a period in which philosophers actively rejected Aristotelian metaphysics and Thomistic natural law. Aristotle's and Aquinas' understanding of reason, nature, emotion, and the virtues differ substantively from the Enlightenment tradition's formulation of these concepts. Some of these pre-Enlightenment formulations are helpful to liberationists, if in turn, the liberationists correct certain aspects of Aristotelian/Thomistic thought. ;The sharp disjunction between reason and emotion evident in many Enlightenment philosophers is absent in Aristotle and Aquinas. The Aristotelians distinguished emotion from reason but held that emotions can participate in reason. Aristotle's cognitivist account of emotions and Aquinas' concept of right reason can help liberationists form an ethical theory and practical strategies to deal with the effects of internalized oppression. Feminists in turn counter the Aristotelian assumption that some people are more rational than others. ;A natural law distinction between reality and appearances offers significant insights about the relation of consciousness to social existence, which are not found in liberal, Marxist, or social self feminists. The Aristotelian/Thomistic tradition permits substantive claims about human nature, allows for the differentiation between the person and the parasite of internalized conditioning, posits that humans are ontologically good, and maintains that practical reason can ascertain the goods appropriate to human well-being. ;As a method of justifying ethical precepts, natural law does not impermissibly derive "ought" from "is." Natural law is best understood as a method of meta-ethics that specifies goods fundamental to well-being and ethical action, rather than as a system of normative prescriptions. Liberation theory and practice offer three important methodological correctives to Aquinas' method