Michael Pakaluk

Ordinary Professor of Political Economy, The Catholic University of America
Ordinary Member, Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas
Distinguished Senior Fellow, The James Cardinal Gibbons Institute
Editor, American Catholic Quarterly Review

I am a philosopher in the classical tradition and Aristotle scholar, although I was trained as an analytic philosopher at Harvard. My beloved teachers there included W. V. Quine, Hilary Putnam, and Burton Dreben. John Rawls supervised my dissertation, with Sarah Broadie joining the committee.

Between undergraduate and graduate studies, I studied David Hume at the University of Edinburgh on a Marshall Scholarship.

Today I am Ordinary Professor of Political Economy at the Busch School of Business in The Catholic University of America. I was appointed Ordinarius of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas by Pope Benedict.

I often find myself wondering how the grandchild of potato farmers, peasants from Ukraine and Poland, is living a life so different from that of his immediate ancestors—and I thank God that I was born in the United States and that I have enjoyed what was bequeathed to me. I hope to pass on such blessings to others.

Books on Aristotle

Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics, Books VIII and IX, translated with a commentary by Michael Pakaluk
Clarendon Press
Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics: An Introduction, by Michael Pakaluk
Cambridge University Press
Moral Psychology and Human Action in Aristotle, edited by Michael Pakaluk and Giles Pearson
Oxford University Press — co-edited with Giles Pearson

Some Recent Papers

Cleaving the Natural Law at Its Joints
The Thomist, 2024

Against the influential reading of Germain Grisez, argues that St. Thomas's account of natural law in Summa Theologiae I-II, 94.2 identifies a natural kind: a set of precepts, corresponding to the Decalogue, naturally evident to everyone through three orders of inclination—self-preservation, procreation, and rational sociability. Recovering this classical framework exposes the errors of "New Natural Law" theory and grounds a firmer basis for social criticism of modern liberalism.

After Passion
Proceedings of the XXVI International Conference of Philosophy, Pontificia Università della Santa Croce, forthcoming

Traces the wholesale replacement, over the past two centuries, of the classical vocabulary of "the passions" by the modern vocabulary of "the emotions," and argues that this shift amounts to the very abolition of man that C. S. Lewis warned against. Recovering Aquinas's teleological account of the passions is shown to be a necessary complement to the contemporary revival of virtue ethics.

What the Manager is Managing: An Aristotelian Approach to the Market and Business Activity
With Michael Troilo. Springer Handbook of Philosophy of Management, forthcoming

Develops an Aristotelian account of markets and firms grounded in the natural sociability of human beings and the inherently social character of individual prudence. Reinterpreting Adam Smith's "propensity to truck, barter, and exchange" through this lens, the chapter proposes an alternative to the standard transaction-cost theory of the firm.

A Claim of Conscience: The Duty to Prove Oneself a Resistor
With Catherine R. Pakaluk. The Linacre Quarterly, 2024

By analogy with cases of conscientious objection to complicity in other historical injustices, argues that those who in conscience decline vaccines developed using cell lines derived from abortion are engaged in a legitimate act of resistance to a gravely unjust system—not merely a case to be settled by the narrower categories of formal and material cooperation.

Some Favorite Papers

On the Unity of the Nicomachean Ethics
In Jon Miller, ed., Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics: A Critical Guide, Cambridge University Press, 2013

Identifies the editorial structure binding the Nicomachean Ethics into a coherent whole—five treatises on virtue, self-control, friendship, pleasure, and happiness, unified by Aristotle's recurring appeal to the standpoint of political science. Extends this account to resolve three long-standing puzzles: the apparent tension between Books I and X on the nature of happiness, the two separate discussions of pleasure, and the integration of the disputed "Common Books" shared with the Eudemian Ethics.

A Defence of Scottish Common Sense
The Philosophical Quarterly, 2002

Reads Thomas Reid as an "encyclopaedist" in Alasdair MacIntyre's sense—a scientist contributing to the field he called "pneumatology"—rather than as an epistemologist offering a rival theory to Hume's. On this reading, Reid's appeal to common sense is simply the ordinary scientific postulation of a natural endowment shared by members of a kind, and the standard objections to it dissolve once this is seen.

Reading Aristotle
In James Warren and F. C. C. Sheffield, eds., The Routledge Companion to Ancient Philosophy, Routledge, 2018

A guide to the distinctive demands of reading Aristotle in translation—the compact, dialectical, sometimes elliptical style of the school treatises, and the interpretive habits a careful reader needs to follow the arguments on their own terms. Written as an entry point for students approaching Aristotle for the first time, but useful to any reader of the ethical and psychological works.

The Doctrine of Relations in Bertrand Russell's Principles of Mathematics
Tópicos, 1992

A systematic examination of Russell's early treatment of relations—whether a relation exists apart from its terms, the intensional character of relations, the difficulties posed by reflexive relations, and whether simple relations can relate more than two relata—filling a gap left by the absence of any extended discussion of the topic in the secondary literature on early Russell.

Review of Marko Malink, Aristotle's Modal Syllogistic
Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 2014.03.04

Malink proposes a formal system meant to show that Aristotle's judgments about modal syllogisms form a consistent set. This review credits the technical achievement while questioning what it establishes about Aristotle himself: the system's artificiality, and its distance from Aristotle's own reasoning and language, leave open whether it vindicates Aristotle's modal syllogistic or simply replaces it with something more tractable.