George Mason University

6:00 PM in the Hub Ballroom

A lecture by Fr. James Brent, O.P. (Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception)

This lecture is free and open to the public.

This lecture is sponsored by the Thomistic Institute and by Mason Catholic Patriots.

Lecture Description:

Thomas Aquinas is well known for presenting arguments for the existence of God based on facts about the cosmos, i.e. cosmological arguments. This lecture offers a detailed study of one of Aquinas's arguments—the argument from contingent being—and differentiates it from other cosmological arguments in light of his understanding of various metaphysical issues such as the eternity of the world and the nature of causality.

Speaker Bio:

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 an article forthcoming on “Thomas Aquinas” in the Oxford Handbook of the Epistemology of Theology. He earned his STB from the Dominican House of Studies in 2010, and was ordained a priest in the same year. 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. He is currently on the faculty at the Dominican House of Studies, where he teaches philosophy.