This paper has two aims. First, I explore the scope and limitations of the doctrine of double effect (DOE) by focusing specifically on the notion of "effect classification." Turning my attention to some hard cases, I argue that the DOE has to be supplemented by additional principles that specify how effects are to be discriminated from one another and how the various aspects of the relevant actions are to be classified as intended or simply foreseen. Secondly, I draw some general lessons from this specific investigation of the ODE bearing on the way in which moral principles of this sort can be seen to function helpfully in moral reflection.

This paper presents an immanent critique of Heidegger's consignment of existentia to the "metaphysical" category of Vorhandenheit. Past scholarship has been by and large uncritical of this tenet of Heidegger, thereby thwarting a potentially fruitful dialogue between continental thinkers and those sympathetic to medieval ontology. The paper (1) argues that the account in Basic Problems of Phenomenology is marred by essentialism and thus overlooks a depth-dimension in existentia; (2) examines key passages in the 1941 Nietzsche lectures where Heidegger appears to flirt with the possibility of a more primordial sense of existentia; and (3) reads the 1936 text "The Origin of the Work of Art" as providing further evidence for reading Heidegger's ontology as a phenomenological recovery of the existential contingency of beings.

This essay is a defense of rationally normative ethics and individualism. Communitarians remedy the shortcomings of deontology's conception of the self as disembodied, asocial, and willful by reuniting reason and desire and by regarding reason as a principle of coordination within a social or communal context. While this renders reason more efficacious than it can be on the deontological view, it still falls short of the aspiration of Western ethics for rational control over theformation of moral judgments; reason and the individual in whom it resides are subordinated to the social. In order for there to be a truly rational norm of moral decision-making, reason must have a constitutive function. That is, reason must not only seek coordination or harmony among elements other than and beneath itself, but it must also be capable of realizing and perpetuating itself in that harmony. A certain kind of harmony is thus sought, one in which reason (self-aware, self-possessed, and self-determined agency) rules the soul. This ethical position is frankly realistic from a metaphysical point of view and is opposed to nominalistic theories of personhood. It is argued that nominalistic accounts of personhood which would exclude the unborn and others from the class of persons or rational agents are logically inconsistent.

Despite the recent claims of some prominent Catholic philosophers, I argue that Cardinal Newman's writings are in fact largely compatible with the contemporary movement in the philosophy of religion known as Reformed Epistemology, and in particular with the work of Alvin Plantinga. I first show how the thought of both Newman and Plantinga was molded in response to the "evidentialist" claims of John Locke. I then examine the details of Newman's response, especially as seen in his Essay in Aid of A Grammar of Assent, suggesting that many of Newman's central ideas closely mirror Plantinga's. Finally, I argue that ifNewman and Plantinga part ways at any point, it is with respect to the basicality of specifically Christian (as opposed to theistic) belief.

It is commonly agreed that Augustine's discussion of divine foreknowledge in DcD 5.9 is distinguished by its anti-Ciceronian polemic, but no one has analyzed the philosophical structure of this polemic to determine if it is compelling. I argue that Augustine's presentation has significant philosophical merit for two reasons. First, Augustine's rigorous application of the principle, shared with Cicero, that "nothing occurs unless it is preceded by an efficient cause" is capable of answeringforcefully one of the chief difficulties that Cicero poses against the possibility of divine omniscience of human choice-making. Second, Augustine's presentation contains the potential to answer persuasively the epistemological problem that Cicero states against divine foreknowledge in his De Jato and De divinatione but which Augustine ignores in DcD 5.9.

My assessment of Jean Porter's Natural and Divine Law is mixed. She provides a generally accurate account of the scholastic theory of natural law, since she steers clear of the erroneous notion that its understanding of "nature" was confined to the physical or biological and rightly notes that "nature" refers to the fullness of human nature. Her account of modern natural law theory is less reliable; for she ignores the work of several prominent contemporary natural law theorists and regrettably caricatures the natural law theory employed in Church documents. I found most illuminating her claims that biblical themes influenced which issues became the focus of scholastic natural law. Her entire project, however, is flawed in serious ways: 1) surprisingly, in light of her previous work, she neglects nearly entirely the role of virtue in natural law theory; and 2) the trajectory of her work is designed to lead the Church to change its teaching on sexuality, even to the point of claiming that scholastic natural law theory has principles that justify homosexual celebrating of the erotic in the gay lifestyle.