Philosophy Department Alumni Newsletter Page 2

Philosophy Department University of Dallas Alumni Newsletter Issue 6 Spring, 2014 Dear Alumnae and Alumni, Inside this issue: Some of you—those of you who graduated after 1997—may know that I am German. I arrived in this Jude Galbraith ’14 receives 2 country, and at UD, in 1997, at first in the expectation to stay but for a little while … well, here we are, seventeen years later. Fr. Cain Aquinas Medal I became a citizen of the United States in 2011. Since then, I have experienced both some of the privi- 2014 seniors focus on 3 leges of citizenship, such as the right to vote, and some of the responsibilities, like performing jury duty. philosophy of architecture I was called up for jury duty for the second time just after the end of the spring semester. The first time was in February, 2012, shortly after I had been naturalized. That first time, what struck The 2014 Aquinas Lecture: 4 me particularly about jury duty was the way in which it reflects the American understanding of democ- Fr. Robert Spitzer racy: every citizen is entitled to be tried by a jury of his or her peers. Although experts are present at the trial—above all, the judge—the fate of the individual being tried does not ultimately lie in the hands of legal experts but of fellow citizens (who in many cases even elect the members of the judiciary). In Phi Sigma Tau: 5 Germany, jury trials generally do not exist, nor does the election of judges. Even judges serving in the Philosophy Honor Society lowest courts are government-appointed lawyers. Think about it! No wonder Germans have a different understanding of the role of government in their lives. American conservative scholars sometimes argue Philosophy, Art, & War 6 that this is all Hegel’s fault, with his emphasis on the state as the vehicle that the Weltgeist employs as it by Don R. Schol ’63 unfolds in history. The second time around, I noticed the closeness of some legal discussions to philosophical problems. As Dr. Simmons recommends... 8 philosophy alumni, you surely remember Aristotle’s term, category? Aristotle has ten categories which, he implies, represent an exhaustive classification of the different ways in which something can exist: as Michael Hayes ’12 8 substance, quality, quantity, time, place, and so forth. Now category is a term originating in Greek legal practice, where katēgoreisthai meant “to accuse” or “to charge.” But what is the relationship between Aquinas Lecture Published 9 legal practice and philosophy? That connection became extremely clear to me in the trial in which I participated. One of first issues that the prosecutor raised in his presentation of the law applicable to the case being tried concerned the meaning of a conviction “beyond reasonable doubt.” For a jury to New Concentration: 10 reach a decision “beyond reasonable doubt” does not require that it be 100% certain of the guilt of the History and Philosophy accused. Where exactly, however, does the threshold of reasonable doubt lie? How many small incon- of Science sistencies in the accounts offered by witnesses, for example, constitute sufficient grounds for reasonable doubt? It is up to the jury to figure this out in each particular case—through rational deliberation. The classical scholar Jean-Pierre Vernant has argued that philosophy arose in ancient Greece when spaces for such rational deliberation opened up in the polis. The poor fellow being tried was accused of assault with a deadly weapon. To our surprise, we potential jurors learned from the prosecutor that a “deadly weapon” can be anything that has the potential to cause death—not just a gun or a knife but even, say, a tree branch wielded against another person. The prosecutor showed us the writing board to which he had clipped some notes as an example of a poten- Upcoming Events: tial “deadly weapon.” Sure enough, if a writing board is banged often and hard enough on someone’s head, death could ensue. But does that make a writing board a “deadly weapon”? It seemed to me that this was stretching language too far—and missing some important distinctions, such as the distinction January 28, 2015 between the essential purpose for which a thing was designed, and an accidental (ab)use of the same 2014 Aquinas Lecture thing. A gun is a deadly weapon because it was made to kill; one could hardly say the same thing of a Dr. Wayne J. Hankey writing board. Open to the Public In the end, I didn’t make the jury. This had nothing to do with my disagreement over the meaning of “deadly weapon,” I think, but more likely with the fact that I corrected the prosecutor’s English. He asked us, at some point, if we thought some baseball player would be “doing good” next weekend. “What kind of good?” I interjected. “Do you mean work for the Salvation Army, the Red Cross, the Society of St. Vincent de Paul …?” Not a good idea to say such things, perhaps, for the guy in row one with the German accent. Have a wonderful summer! Philipp W. Rosemann Chair Philosophy Department Alumni Newsletter Page 2 All the World’s a Stage … Jude Galbraith, Recipient of the 2014 Fr. Thomas Cain Aquinas Medal Each year, the Philosophy Department awards the Fa- ther Thomas Cain Aquinas Medal to the major whom it judges to be the most accomplished senior. The award is named after both St. Thomas Aquinas and Father Thomas Cain, who was a humble and faithful follower of his great Dominican predecessor and confrère. Fa- ther Cain (1911–2000) taught philosophy at the Univer- sity of Dallas for twenty-one years. He came to Irving to cap off a career that took him to Switzerland and the Philippines, in addition to various Dominican provinces in the United States. Father Cain also served as the first prior of the Dominican Priory of St. Albert the Great on the UD campus. He was a figure much beloved by his students, who appreciated his good heart and sense of humor. Finally, Father Cain was connected with a sad and significant aspect of American history: in 1963, he anointed President John F. Kennedy after his tragic shooting. The recipient of the 2014 Father Thomas Cain Aquinas Medal is Jude Galbraith, who also served as the secre- tary of Phi Sigma Tau, the philosophy honor society. Jude’s outstanding work over his career as a philosophy major at UD culminated in a senior thesis that the De- partment hopes he will be able to publish in a revised form—that’s how good it is. Under the title, “This Wide and Universal Theater: Modernity and the Archi- tecture of the Playhouse,” the thesis investigates the question of the kind of architecture appropriate for the modern theater. The thesis contrasts the visions of the social function of the theater, and of the architecture in which that vision finds expression, in the Palais Garnier in Paris and the Festspielhaus at Bayreuth. Charles Gar- nier embraced the theater (and more particularly, the opera) as a playful place in which actors appear not only on the stage, but in the audience as well: the members of the audience enact their social roles, though with the awareness of a certain artificiality in the social order. Wagner, by contrast, focused his Festspielhaus completely on the stage, where a reality was put on display that he saw as more authentic than actual life. The audience was to be absorbed in this superior reality, rather than playfully enacting ephemeral social roles. The thesis ends with a section that is devoted to the problem of the contemporary theater and the kind of building appropriate to it. If Shakespeare was right in declaring, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players,” then theater architecture is sub- tly revealing of the anthropology and ethics that inform a particular society—that is perhaps the deepest insight of Jude’s fine senior thesis. Philosophy Department Faculty and Staff William A. Frank, Professor Dennis L. Sepper, Professor Fr. James Lehrberger, O. Cist., Assoc. Professor Lance Simmons, Assoc. Professor Christopher V. Mirus, Assoc. Professor William Tullius, Affiliate Asst. Professor Griffin T. Nelson, Affiliate Asst. Professor Matthew D. Walz, Assoc. Professor Joshua S. Parens, Professor Robert E. Wood, Professor Philipp W. Rosemann, Professor Mary Emily Chernoff, Admin. Asst. Frank Scalambrino, Affiliate Asst. Professor Philosophy Department Alumni Newsletter Page 3 Congratulations! The Class of 2014 Graduates with Senior Theses on the Philosophy of Architecture Regular readers of this newsletter already know that the Senior Seminar for the academic year 2013–2014 was devoted to the philosophy of architecture. After studying philosophies of architecture from Vitruvius to Heidegger, with an emphasis on the writings of contemporary architects like Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and Christian Norberg-Schulz, our twelve seniors set out to invent, research, and com- pose senior theses on aspects of the general topic that they found to be of particular relevance to their own interests. These theses were presented to the campus community in a day-long conference on Saturday, March 22: • James Bogdan, “Living in/with Ruins” • Michael Bowden, “Dwelling in Suburbia” • Joshua Elzner, “Portraying the Form of Christ: The Glory of the Lord and Sacred Architecture” • Jude Galbraith, “This Wide and Universal Theater: Modernity and the Architecture of the Playhouse” • Christina Gardner, “Synthesis and Transcendence in La Sagrada Familia: An Embodiment of Modern Ideals” • Olivia Gulino, “Make Yourself at Home: The Necessity of Ethics in Architecture for the Facilitation of Existential and Phenomenological Dwell- ing” • Patrick Malone, “A Heideggerian Understanding of How Man Dwells in the Liturgy of the Eucharist” • Daniel Matamoros, “On Profane Architecture: A Secular Response to Sacred Architecture” • Taran Schwartz, “Abstracting Meaning in Architecture: American Appropriation of Classical Form” • Harris Smith, “Friedrich Nietzsche and Günther Domenig: The Coming to Presence of Physis in the Steinhaus” • Mark Toffler, “The Architect as Social Engineer” • Sarah Vukalović, “Gathering the Divinities: Sym- bolism in Language and Archi- tecture” Written and oral comps followed in the first weeks of April.

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