“Man, Natural End of”

While doing his graduate work, Grisez focused on metaphysics and was not interested in ethics. However, to fill a gap in the philosophy department at Georgetown, he began working on ethics in 1959. The first major work he studied was the part of St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae that is concerned with the foundations of ethics. By 1963–64, when he had a Lilly Fellowship and a sabbatical from Georgetown, Grisez had begun to develop a theory of ethics, derived from Thomas but capable of standing on its own. He therefore spent September–December 1963 researching and writing this brief article on the natural, ultimate end for the New Catholic Encyclopedia.. The article is copyright © The Catholic University of America 1967, all rights reserved.

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“The First Principle of Practical Reason:
A Commentary on the Summa Theologiae, 1–2, Question 94, Article 2”

Grisez had studied carefully and researched secondary sources on a brief text of St. Thomas concerning the primary principle of practical reasoning. Convinced that Thomas’s account of that principle was sound and important but badly misunderstood, Grisez spent January–March 1964 drafting a detailed commentary on that text. It became the foundation of his and his colleagues’ work on the ethical theory that they have developed together. In 2010, Grisez still regards the article as sound, except for some of his statements in part V regarding matters on which he has become convinced that Thomas was mistaken. The article is copyright © University of Notre Dame 1965, all rights reserved.

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The article was translated into Spanish by Diego Poole, and is copyright © Universidad de Navarra 2005, todos los derechos reservados.

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The article was translated into Portuguese by José Reinaldo de Lima Lopes, and is copyright © Da Fundaçäo Getùlio Vargas 2007, todos direitos desta ediçäo säo reservados.

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