This post is part of a series of interviews with our incoming class for the “Virtue, Happiness, & Self-Transcendence” 2017 Summer Seminar. Marta Faria is a PhD student in Philosophy at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Rome. Valerie Wallace is Associate Director, Communications, for Virtue, Happiness, & the Meaning of Life.
Valerie Wallace: Where are you from?
Marta Faria: I am originally from Portugal and I am studying in Rome even though I spend half of the year in Lisbon and half of the year in Rome.
VW: Tell me about your research.
MF: I am doing a Ph.D. in Thomistic Metaphysics. My topic is the Common Good of the Universe in Saint Thomas Aquinas. I am mostly interested in the metaphysical foundations of Ethics, Politics and Human Action in general. As a philosophical topic of inquiry, the common good has traditionally been a topic of disciplines like Ethics and Political Philosophy. When one analyzes the common good from these intermediate perspectives, it calls for a relative definition: it is the good of a certain collective subject such as the family, the city, or the state. Additionally, we see that, in the doctrine of Saint Thomas Aquinas, these intermediate subjects are conceived as parts of a whole (eg: a particular family is a part of civil society) and can only be fully understood as such. This implies that the intelligible character of these intermediate conceptions of the common good needs to be derived from the good to which each is immediately ordered. For instance, the proper good of the individual is ordered to the common good of the family, which is ordered to the common good of the city, which is ordered to the common good of the state, which is ordered to the universal common good. This happens to be the case because the common good is a good and therefore an end. Consequently, the formal character of the common good must be derived from the ultimate end to which all intermediate partial common goods are finally ordered: the common good of the universe.
Along with being fundamental for the understanding of the intermediary common goods, the question of the universal common good is also interesting for another reason. Saint Thomas makes his own the Dionysian adagio “bonum diffusivum sui”, which implies that for the Angelic Doctor the “good qua good” is communicable. Therefore, the comprehension of the universal common good is also necessary to fully grasp the same nature of the good as intrinsically communicable. There is no other good whose communication is more pervasive than the universal common good, therefore, it must be the highest good of all, not just extensively, as that comes from its own definition, but also intensively. My research being mostly metaphysical aims to study the metaphysical foundations of the good, the key concept of any ethical project.
VW: What are you most looking forward to about this summer’s seminar?
MF: Even though it is obvious that I expect to learn greatly from the talks of the main speakers I also find that the interaction and discussions with the other participants are extremely interesting. I will get to learn different perspectives over topics that I am used to frame in a specific manner and I will have the opportunity to confront my ideas with other people and to test how consistent they are.
VW: What are your non-academic interests?
MF: All sports in general but mainly jogging and volleyball.
