In September 1947, Grisez began undergraduate studies at John Carroll University in University Heights, Ohio. One year later, he started taking philosophy and soon decided to major in it. In this, he was mainly influenced by his first and best philosophy professor, Marshall Boarman, a young and enthusiastic layman who had just received a Master of Arts degree from the University of Toronto, where he had studied the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. By taking a heavier than normal course load, Grisez completed the requirements for the Bachelor of Arts with the second summer session of 1950.
Completing a major then included writing a thesis on a topic chosen by the student. Grisez was interested in fine arts and poetry, and had read Jacques Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism and found it too ethereal to help appreciate and evaluate particular works. So, he chose to try to sketch out a more authetically Thomistic esthetics, mistakenly assuming that he would locate relevant texts by using available indices. At that time, however, there was no adequate index of Thomas’s works. So, Grisez skimmed the twenty-five volumes of the nineteenth-century Parma edition to find the texts—Thomistic research that provided a basis for his work on his graduate degrees.
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By late fall of 1949, Grisez had participated in meetings of philosophy professors and students from various universities in the vicinity of Cleveland, Ohio. After midnight Mass of Christmas 1949, while skimming Thomas’s treatment of heaven toward the end of the his commentary on the Sententiae of Peter Lombard, Grisez discerned that it would be good to become a professional philosopher and teach in a non-Catholic college, so as to make the thought of Thomas available to Christian students and challenge non-believers. To do that, he would need a doctorate from a leading secular university, but he realized he would first need a stronger foundation in Thomas than he was getting as an undergraduate. He therefore applied to the Dominican College of St. Thomas Aquinas in River Forest, Illinois, for a year of concentrated training during 1950–51. While that school was a seminary and had never had a lay student, it welcomed him and arranged a special program, which led simultaneously to a civil master’s degree and a pontifical licentiate in philosophy.
Besides coursework, the main requirement for the pontifical degree was a series of examinations; for the civil degree, a thesis was also required. Grisez chose to limit his ongoing investigation of esthetics to the definition of beauty and to offer a more profound treatment of that limited topic. He proposed to show that Maritain’s account of beauty is unsound, not least in regarding it as a transcendental along with truth and goodness. However, the Dean of Studies, the Rev. Dr. Gerard Joubert, O.P., regarded Maritain as authoritative and forbade dissent from his allegedly Thomistic view, with the result that Grisez could deal only with “physical” beauty—that is, the beauty of various specific sorts of entities—while prescinding entirely from metaphysics.
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In June 1951, Grisez began work at the University of Chicago on his doctorate in philosophy, a degree he received more than eight years later, in August 1959. During all but about twenty-four months of that stretch, he was also working full time, from 1951–56 at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and during 1957–59 at Georgetown University. Philosophy at Chicago was rigorous; more than three-fourths of those who entered seeking a doctorate eventually left without it. Having completed his course work and passed preliminary and comprephensive examinations by mid-1956, Grisez enlisted Prof. Richard P. McKeon to mentor his dissertation. McKeon was a brilliant scholar and an attentive mentor, but he provided almost no positive help; instead, he pointed out inadequacies and mistakes, and repeatedly demanded better work.
McKeon was particularly interested in philosophical methods, and Grisez was looking for a method by which, without prior assumptions or appeals to earlier thought, conclusions in metaphysics could be established. That quest, unfortunately, was too difficult to constitute a good dissertation topic. But Grisez noticed that a little treatise, the Summa totius logicae Aristotelis, which many followers of Thomas had attributed to him but was now universally recognized as spurious, diverged greatly from Thomas’s authentic views. Grisez proposed to compare positions taken by the author of the inauthentic work with those taken by Thomas in the many works in which he deals incidentally with the same matters, clarify the differences, and draw out the implications for metaphysical method.
As the project developed, William of Ockham was introduced as a third party for comparison, and the implications of all the texts for metaphysics were soft-pedaled. Still, in carrying out the project, Grisez came to understand analogous predication and to appreciate the function of reasoning in coming to know order of every sort. What he learned in doing the dissertation about the irreducibility of the intentions with which logic is concerned to natural realities and the products of human creativity also provided a precedent for his eventual insight into the irreducibility of ethics to anthropology and technology—the insight without which there can be no sound ethical theory.
Grisez publishes the dissertation here, copyright © 2012, and reserves the right to make and distribute copies for sale. However, he hereby grants everyone the right to print out and distribute without charge copies all or any part of the work provided the source is identified and this copyright information included. The five units below constitute the entire dissertation; it is divided only to speed up access.
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