Freedom is, without a doubt, an important component of Aquinas’s worldview. The drama of salvation, in which humans respond to God’s offer to redeem them from sin and give them everlasting happiness, would make no sense if humans were not free.1 But commentators have found it difficult to agree on the details of Aquinas’s views.

Following Aristotle, Aquinas posited three virtues of the speculative intellect: science, wisdom, and understanding. Aquinas’s accounts of the virtues of science and wisdom have received a great deal of attention, as has his notion of intellectual virtue in general. But understanding as an intellectual virtue has received almost no attention at all. Part of the difficulty stems from Aquinas himself: Aquinas uses intellectus broadly, and typically without specifying whether he means to refer to our natural habitual knowledge of first principles, the act of understanding, or a developed virtue. At the same time, however, Aquinas clearly considers the virtue of understanding to be both important in its own right and fundamental to the virtues of science and wisdom. This chapter seeks to examine understanding as an intellectual virtue in Aquinas and to propose a hypothesis about what, given Aquinas’s account, it would mean to develop the intellectual virtue of understanding. I will argue that Aquinas’s account implies that we can develop the virtue of understanding only insofar as we can come to increase what we habitually know and thereby pave the way for our understanding to operate more readily and more effectively. In this way, the virtue of understanding is importantly different from the other intellectual virtues.

The doctrine of the transcendentals is a truly medieval doctrine. Up until the thirteenth century, philosophers and theologians were familiar with the study of being through the ancient philosophers and their schools, particularly Plato and Aristotle. What was important for Plato, Aristotle et al. was to offer an account of being in terms of those constitutive principles without which nothing would be. So, for example, being was taken to be accounted for in terms of participation in the forms (Plato), or through the dichotomies of substance and accident, matter and form, act and potency (Aristotle). What such projects seemed to exclude, or at least did not address explicitly, was the character of being itself. The question of the character of being itself was not explicitly elaborated until the thirteenth century, when the chancellor of the University of Paris, Philip, produced his Summa de bono (1225–8), the first eleven questions of which elaborate the doctrine of the transcendentals or what he called the communissima. Philip was quickly followed in this project by the Franciscans at the University of Paris, notably Alexander of Hales, whose Summa theologica or Summa fratris Alexandri (1245) contained a treatise on the transcendentals in Book 1.

World-systems analyses emerged in the 1970s as attempts to fuse a Marxist-informed critique of developmental economics with historical sociology. They are best known through the writings of Immanuel Wallerstein (1930-2019), but benefit from multiple others who have contributed to and expanded the topics of interest for the world-systems knowledge movement. This chapter highlights some of the main concerns of world-systems and illustrates their relevance for literary and cultural studies of economics, society, the State, and cultural production. World-systems analyses began as alternatives to forms of developmental and stage theories, both Keynesian-oriented economics in the post-war period, and within post-Russian Revolution Marxism. As a moral protest against the capitalist world-system, world-systems analyses also question the theoretical and epistemological frameworks developed within the modern research university.

This chapter examines how aspects of post-capitalism have been imagined by speculative fiction, with some emphasis on utopian and dystopian fiction. There are some methodological issues around the best way to read speculative fiction in relation to post-capitalism. One influential distinction is between “blueprint” utopias and “critical” utopias. Blueprint utopias, such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), are held to offer rigidly instrumental plans for reorganizing society. Critical utopias, such as Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), supposedly destabilize deeply-rooted assumptions, freeing readers to explore possible economic forms that appear neither in reality nor fiction. However, this chapter emphasises that the distinction between blueprint and critical utopias is a blurred one. It further suggests that instrumentalizing interpretations of speculative fiction are part of its status as culture, rather than a mere misuse of speculative fiction. Reading speculative fiction critically and creatively, including attention to its instrumentalities, may help to transform what constitutes the field of “the economic” in the first place, and enrich our understanding both of capitalism and its alternatives. However, already existing practices of the more-than-capitalist world often far exceed what speculative fiction has been capable of imagining.

Toward the end of his life, Aquinas delivered a series of catechetical talks in the vernacular on the Apostles’ Creed to an Italian audience, which were preserved in Latin by his secretary, Reginald of Piperno. Its eschatological themes, including the resurrection, would have been of huge importance to Aquinas’s audience.1 His exposition shows his commitment in faith to the future resurrection of all the dead for judgment, and to an eternal reward bestowed on those who die in a state of grace and an eternal punishment for those who die in sin. In our own times there has been widespread theological debate over whether an eternal hell will ever be populated, especially in view of those passages in Scripture that suggest a renewal of creation. In Aquinas’s time and place there was no such controversy about hell. But while the beatitude of heaven enjoyed priority over hell in his theological thinking, with infernal punishment understood to consist primarily in the eternal loss of the beatific vision, fundamental to each was the bodily resurrection common to both the blessed and the wretched.

Matter and form are two notions lying at the very heart of Aquinas’s broadly Aristotelian conception of reality. Aquinas inherits these notions from Aristotle (hyle and morphe in Greek), and his understanding of each is shaped to a large extent by the various uses to which Aristotle himself puts them. Even so, the precise nature of Aquinas’s hylomorphism, as well as its centrality in his thought, are of independent significance. Indeed, it would be impossible to understand Aquinas’s fundamental divisions of reality – including the division of God and creature, substance and accident, body and spirit – apart from his own particular conception of matter and form. It would also be impossible, apart from this same conception, to appreciate the elements of an explanatory framework that Aquinas deploys in almost all his writings – including potentiality and actuality, principles and causes, and the fourfold division of causes into material, formal, efficient, and final. In short, to acquire a familiarity with the details of Aquinas’s understanding of matter and form is almost to become accustomed to his distinctive vision of reality.

Origin stories of the economics discipline give considerable credit not only to philosophy, but also to poetry. And many canonical economists have reputations for polymathy. But interdisciplinary economic inquiry, like that which has become increasingly common since 2008, is often treated as both novel and ill-fated, in part because contemporary orthodox economists lack the commitment to pluralism necessary for fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration. This chapter looks to a 2020 Climate Fiction (“CliFi”) novel, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry For The Future, for models of interdisciplinary collaboration between economists, critical theorists, and climate scientists. In particular, Robinson centers an unlikely pair of Utopian thinkers – British economist John Maynard Keynes and American theorist Fredric Jameson – who at crucial junctures in their careers took seriously what is also the project of Robinson’s titular Ministry: treating future generations as a political constituency deserving of political representation in the present.

This chapter outlines the relationship between finance and postmodernism in the post-1970s United States. After laying out this shared narrative of finance and postmodernism, particularly in regard to the work of Fredric Jameson and in a reading of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991), the chapter then argues that the presumed whiteness of both finance capital and postmodern aesthetics in Jameson and Ellis is decentered by Toni Cade Bambara’s Those Bones Are Not My Child (1999). Bambara’s novel is set in Atlanta in 1979-1981, years during which the city was at once rapidly becoming a global financial capital and was simultaneously also the site of the abduction and murder of anywhere between thirty to one hundred Black children and youths. Bambara’s novel demands that this racialized violence be read as a part of any analysis of Atlanta as a financialized city, and shows us that there is no way of understanding finance and postmodernism without reckoning with the constitutive anti-Blackness of the US economy.

Thomas Aquinas was born to an aristocratic family in Roccasecca, near Naples, probably in 1226.1 At an early age, he was sent to be schooled by the Benedictine monks at the famous abbey of Monte Cassino.2 It seems that his family planned that he would one day become its abbot – a fitting position of honor and prestige for the youngest son of Italian nobility.3

The hubris of economists is astonishing. While they regularly look to other disciplines for topics of study, they all too rarely engage seriously with those fields. Building on the arguments in our book Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn from the Humanities (2017), we contend that while economics is more important than ever, its glaring deficiencies are unnecessary. Most strikingly, even behavioral economists usually neglect culture, have a simplistic and unrealistic depiction of human behavior, and assume away genuine irrationalities. We offer an alternative: an economics that not only learns from literature, philosophy, and the other humanities, but also from history, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and political science. Embracing those fields could lead economists to develop more realistic models of human behavior, recognize that they should not be so confident about their predictions, and produce more effective and just policies.

This chapter examines how American literature has engaged with business corporations in general, and the legal fiction of corporate personhood in particular. There are few major novels about business corporations, because literary fiction has tended to concentrate on the moral dilemmas and social entanglements of individuals, rather than the more impersonal realm of economic activity. Yet the changing legal nature and increasing importance of corporations has forced some writers to rethink what it means to be human, creatively rethinking the relationship between individual and collective agency. The chapter considers three phases in the literary representation of corporations: as monster, as system, and as story. It uses as examples James Fenimore Cooper’s The Bravo (1831), Frank Norris’s The Octopus (1901), Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Richard Powers’s Gain (1998), and Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End (2007).