Fr. Robert Sokolowski, Ph.D.
Lecture
Fr. Robert Sokolowski, Ph.D., is Professor of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1962, he is internationally recognized and honored for his work in philosophy, particularly phenomenology. In 1994, Catholic University sponsored a conference on his work and published several papers and other essays under the title, The Truthful and the Good, Essays In Honor of Robert Sokolowski. Fr. Sokolowski came to the College as part of the E.L. Wiegand Distinguished Visiting Lecturers Program, which was established to bring distinguished educators to Thomas Aquinas College and St. John's College. Following is abridged from a lecture he gave at the College on March 26, 1999.
I'd like to begin with a rather confrontational claim: That phenomenology can help restore the understanding of being and mind that was accepted in classical Greek philosophy and medieval thought and can still take into account certain contributions of modernity, especially those of science. Phenomenology, in its classical form, understands the human mind as ordered towards truth, and this is the understanding of the mind that prevailed in classical thinking. Phenomenology develops this understanding through its doctrines of intentionality and evidence but with a consideration of modern problems.
