Living Well

T H O M A S M. W A R D

Mar 24
9 min

Fortifying the Intellectual Life

I recently read Zena Hitz's book, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life (Princeton, 2020). I highly recommend it....

Aug 26, 2020
2 min

How Much Can I Love My Hat?

Sometimes I think that a saint is someone who is capable of loving a hat more than I currently love anything. You get to a strange...

Aug 17, 2020
2 min

Divine Ideas

When I hear the words "creation" and even "creationism," I don't usually think of the old debates about "creation vs evolution." Instead...

Jun 10, 2020
5 min

Joy, Discipline, and Sacrifice

Sometimes the good life demands sacrifice. It is written, Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends....

Jun 1, 2020
4 min

Rightly Ordered Loves and Intensity of Feeling

What it means for a virtue to regulate an appetite has nothing to do with diminishing appetite as such. It has to do with ordering an...

May 25, 2020
4 min

Disability and Medieval Philosophy?

Yes. My friend, Scott Williams, has put together an excellent book bringing the academic field of disability studies into dialogue with...

May 20, 2020
1 min

One Wine is Left in the Broken Bowl

What is left for the cold grey soul That moans like a wounded dove? One wine is left in the broken bowl 'Tis, to love, and love, and...

May 20, 2020
1 min

What Forms Will Your Loves Call Forth?

Here is an audio file of some commentary I gave on Charles Williams' novel, The Place of the Lion. I originally recorded this for my...

May 11, 2020
3 min

Conformity to the Real

Philosophy is an activity and all activities aim at the good. What good does Philosophy aim at? Knowledge, Wisdom, Understanding. These...

Apr 16, 2020
1 min

What it is Like to do Philosophy

What is it like to do philosophy? Here is an image. Imagine a rock on a calm sandy beach. The waves slowly wash up, caressing the rock,...

Apr 9, 2020
3 min

Practicing Gratitude

By the practice of gratitude I mean a lot more than observing all rules of etiquette about when and how to express gratitude to another...

Apr 7, 2020
4 min

Sheltering Courageously

The Scythians fight by flying. This is what Socrates tells us, anyway, in Plato’s Laches. He asks Laches himself what courage is, and...

May 15, 2019
1 min

Duns Scotus on Natural Law and Divine Freedom

I have a new paper out today, "A Most Mitigated Friar: Scotus on Natural Law and Divine Freedom." It shows how Scotus reconciles the...

Feb 25, 2019
2 min

(I'm) Down with Immortality

Bernard Williams has a famous paper, "The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality." I've been studying the paper and...

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