Michael Pakaluk
Michael Pakaluk since 2016 has been Professor of Ethics and Social Philosophy in the Busch School of Business at The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, where he teaches virtue ethics and professional ethics. He has been Acting Dean and Associate Dean of the Faculty in the Busch School. He is a Senior Fellow in the Institute for Human Ecology at the university.
Pakaluk received his Ph.D. in philosophy at Harvard University, where he studied philosophical logic with W.V. Quine, Burton Dreben, and Warren Goldfarb, philosophy of science with Hilary Putnam, and political philosophy with John Rawls. Rawls directed his dissertation, “Aristotle’s Theory of Friendship,” and Sarah Broadie (then at Yale) also served on the thesis committee.
Pakaluk counts as his main philosophical influences: Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Reid, and John Henry Newman. He encountered all four as a Marshall Scholar at the University of Edinburgh, where he wrote a thesis on Hume's Dialogues ("Hume's Naturalism and the Argument from Design"), became an expert in the main figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, and studied Aquinas and Newman under the guidance of the Dominican fathers there.
Pakaluk’s main work as a researcher has been in ancient philosophy, as he has authored many papers and three books concerned with Aristotelian ethics: Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, books VIII and IX (Oxford); Aristotle’s Ethics: An Introduction (Cambridge); and (with Giles Pearson) Moral Psychology and Human Action in Aristotle (Oxford). His work is typified by the drawing of philosophical consequences from careful attention to philological considerations. His deeper concern is the recovery of a just appreciation of the classical mind.
But his interests span many areas of philosophy, including political philosophy, philosophy of psychology, philosophical logic, and professional ethics. His anthology of philosophical essays on friendship, Other Selves (Hackett), has played an important role in the recent revival of interest in the philosophical study of friendship. His groundbreaking work in accounting ethics, which is also highly technically informed, won extraordinary recognition for a philosopher when in 2009 he was invited to give a seminar for the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) on issues in accounting professionalism. His textbooks in accounting ethics, co-authored with Mark Cheffers, have been translated into various languages and influential for promoting a virtue-based approach and for their emphasis on a recovery of professionalism.
Pakaluk has held appointments of Associate Professor at Clark University in Massachusetts--where he also served in a long and distinguished tenure as the Director of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy--and as full Professor at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences and at Ave Maria University.
He has been Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Brown University, Santa Croce (Rome), and Holy Cross College; Visiting Scholar in Classics at Cambridge University; and Visiting Scholar in Public Philosophy at the University of St. Andrews. His blog, Dissoi Bloggoi, currently inactive, has been influential in classical philosophy. His opinion pieces have appeared in The Catholic Thing and the Boston Pilot, where he is a regular contributor, as well as First Things, Crisis, Crux, The Catholic Herald, The Times Literary Supplement, and The National Review. In 2011 he was appointed to the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas. He was a Founding Trustee of the Abby Kelley Foster Charter School in Worcester, Mass., a Director of the Worcester Public Library, a Trustee of the Catholic University of Lviv, and is member of the James Wilson Institute. He serves on numerous advisory boards and has held numerous distinguished lectureships.
His most recent book, The Memoirs of St. Peter, is a new translation with commentary of the gospel of Mark (Regnery Gateway, 2019). He is currently at work on books on the philosophy of John Henry Newman, the gospel of John, the foundations of natural law, and is completing a new textbook on accounting ethics (Accounting Professionalism and Ethics for Practitioners), besides numerous book chapters and scholarly articles.
Pakaluk's avocations include golf, tennis, hiking, the French horn, espresso drinks and single malt scotch. His skill in mixing cocktails has won him among friends the moniker, "Cardinal Martini." He lives in Hyattsville, Maryland, with his wife, Catherine, a professor of economics at the Busch School, and their eight children.
Supervisors: John Rawls and Sarah Broadie
Phone: 202-319-6879
Address: Michael Pakaluk
Ordinary Professor
Room 309a
McMahon Hall
The Busch School of Business and Economics
The Catholic University of America
620 Michigan Ave NE
Washington, DC 20064, USA
Pakaluk received his Ph.D. in philosophy at Harvard University, where he studied philosophical logic with W.V. Quine, Burton Dreben, and Warren Goldfarb, philosophy of science with Hilary Putnam, and political philosophy with John Rawls. Rawls directed his dissertation, “Aristotle’s Theory of Friendship,” and Sarah Broadie (then at Yale) also served on the thesis committee.
Pakaluk counts as his main philosophical influences: Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Reid, and John Henry Newman. He encountered all four as a Marshall Scholar at the University of Edinburgh, where he wrote a thesis on Hume's Dialogues ("Hume's Naturalism and the Argument from Design"), became an expert in the main figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, and studied Aquinas and Newman under the guidance of the Dominican fathers there.
Pakaluk’s main work as a researcher has been in ancient philosophy, as he has authored many papers and three books concerned with Aristotelian ethics: Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, books VIII and IX (Oxford); Aristotle’s Ethics: An Introduction (Cambridge); and (with Giles Pearson) Moral Psychology and Human Action in Aristotle (Oxford). His work is typified by the drawing of philosophical consequences from careful attention to philological considerations. His deeper concern is the recovery of a just appreciation of the classical mind.
But his interests span many areas of philosophy, including political philosophy, philosophy of psychology, philosophical logic, and professional ethics. His anthology of philosophical essays on friendship, Other Selves (Hackett), has played an important role in the recent revival of interest in the philosophical study of friendship. His groundbreaking work in accounting ethics, which is also highly technically informed, won extraordinary recognition for a philosopher when in 2009 he was invited to give a seminar for the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) on issues in accounting professionalism. His textbooks in accounting ethics, co-authored with Mark Cheffers, have been translated into various languages and influential for promoting a virtue-based approach and for their emphasis on a recovery of professionalism.
Pakaluk has held appointments of Associate Professor at Clark University in Massachusetts--where he also served in a long and distinguished tenure as the Director of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy--and as full Professor at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences and at Ave Maria University.
He has been Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Brown University, Santa Croce (Rome), and Holy Cross College; Visiting Scholar in Classics at Cambridge University; and Visiting Scholar in Public Philosophy at the University of St. Andrews. His blog, Dissoi Bloggoi, currently inactive, has been influential in classical philosophy. His opinion pieces have appeared in The Catholic Thing and the Boston Pilot, where he is a regular contributor, as well as First Things, Crisis, Crux, The Catholic Herald, The Times Literary Supplement, and The National Review. In 2011 he was appointed to the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas. He was a Founding Trustee of the Abby Kelley Foster Charter School in Worcester, Mass., a Director of the Worcester Public Library, a Trustee of the Catholic University of Lviv, and is member of the James Wilson Institute. He serves on numerous advisory boards and has held numerous distinguished lectureships.
His most recent book, The Memoirs of St. Peter, is a new translation with commentary of the gospel of Mark (Regnery Gateway, 2019). He is currently at work on books on the philosophy of John Henry Newman, the gospel of John, the foundations of natural law, and is completing a new textbook on accounting ethics (Accounting Professionalism and Ethics for Practitioners), besides numerous book chapters and scholarly articles.
Pakaluk's avocations include golf, tennis, hiking, the French horn, espresso drinks and single malt scotch. His skill in mixing cocktails has won him among friends the moniker, "Cardinal Martini." He lives in Hyattsville, Maryland, with his wife, Catherine, a professor of economics at the Busch School, and their eight children.
Supervisors: John Rawls and Sarah Broadie
Phone: 202-319-6879
Address: Michael Pakaluk
Ordinary Professor
Room 309a
McMahon Hall
The Busch School of Business and Economics
The Catholic University of America
620 Michigan Ave NE
Washington, DC 20064, USA
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Classical Philosophy by Michael Pakaluk
If we put aside unrealistic expectations of what it would be for an earlier thinker to be “determinative of thought,” we find Adams relying on Aristotle and distinctively Aristotelian ideas at key moments in his life: in his summation for the defense in the Boston Massacre case; in his account by memory, long after the fact, of James Otis’ stirring argument against Writs of Assistance; and in the heartfelt recommendations for legal study that he hands down to his grandsons, John Adams Smith and George Washington Adams.
Adams also held distinctive views about the history of thought which would have led him to magnify resemblances between Aristotle and other political thinkers whom he regarded as principal defenders of liberty: such as his conviction that many works of Aristotle known to be lost were destroyed by enemies of liberty; his belief that what we should call “deism” was an esoteric doctrine held by most serious thinkers in history; and his tendency to accept Cicero’s own presentation of philosophers, as falling on one of two sides as regards the question of the reality of natural justice and the obectivity of the bonum honestum.
Given these real ways in which Aristotle was, as it were, a living authority for Adams, we are in a better position to identify positions held by Adams, or proffered for general belief by him or other Founders, as being attributable to the influence-- direct or mediated, focused or extended--of Aristotle.
Draft chapter for *Dissenting Philosophers*, edited by Allan Hillman and Tully Borland, forthcoming, Palgrave.
Comments welcome. pakaluk@cua.edu