The Teleological Grammar of the Moral Act

Introduction to Catholic Doctrine Series

Cutting through contemporary confusions with his characteristic rigor and aplomb, Steven A. Long offers the most penetrating study available of St. Thomas Aquinas's doctrine of the intention, choice, object, end, and species of the moral act. Many studies of human action and morality after Descartes and Kant have suffered from a tendency to split body and soul, so that the intention of the human spirit comes to justify whatever the body is made to do. The portrait of human action and morality that arises from such accounts is one of the soul as the pilot and the body as raw material in need of humanization. In this masterful study, Steven Long reconnects the teleology of the soul with the teleology of the body, so that human goal-oriented action rediscovers its lost moral unity, given it by the Creator who has created the human person as a body-soul unity.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steven Long teaches metaphysics and natural law in the school of graduate theology at Ave Maria University, where he is an associate professor. He received his PhD in philosophy from the Catholic University of America, after studying overseas at Leuven, Belgium. He has published numerous articles in peer review journals of philosophy and theology, lectures widely in the United States and Europe, and awaits the imminent publication of two other forthcoming books. He now resides in tropical paradise with his wife Anna Maria and their five children in Naples, Florida.