José M. Torralba
Visiting Researcher
Biography
Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Navarra (Spain)
José M. Torralba has mainly worked on German Philosophy (especially Kant), Elizabeth Anscombe, and the tradition of liberal education. He recently co-edited two volumes: Ways of Being Bound. Perspectives form post-Kantian Philosophy and Relational Sociology (Springer) and Literature and Character Education in Universities (Routledge). He is currently the director of the Civic Humanism Center for Character and Professional Ethics at the University of Navarra.
Research Interests
Project Title: "The configuration of the moral subject in Aquinas. Character, freedom and moral development"
Abstract: My research project aims to contribute to Thomistic studies on moral development. I argue that Aquinas offers original answers to critical questions about character education in the neo-Aristotelian tradition. I will focus on two issues. Firstly, on the relationship that a subject has to his (good or bad) habits, that is, on the extent to which one is free to follow them once they have been consolidated. On this issue depends the answer to the question of whether a person can change morally and under what conditions. I will offer an interpretation of Aquinas’s claim (in which he follows Averroes) that a habit is "what a person uses at will [habitus est quo quis agit cum voluerit]”. Secondly, Aquinas’s solution to the so-called “Aristotelian circle,” that is, to the problem of whether one’s moral configuration is determined by the character that a person has developed through the education he has received. Here, I will analyze Aquinas’s interpretation of Aristotle’s claim that “virtue makes the goal correct, and [prudence] makes what promotes the goal [correct]”. Both questions are connected since a way out of the Aristotelian circle would only be available if the subject is not determined by his habits.