International Conference on Wisdom will be held at IPC
In celebration of its 50th anniversary, the IPC (Faculteés Libres de Philosophie et Psychologie) will hold an International Conference from March 12 to 14, 2020, in Paris, France, on “Charles De Koninck and Maurice Dionne: The Wisdom of Habitus”.
The Conference is sponsored by ICUSTA and by some member institutions of our network, such as Sociedad Tomista Argentina, the Centro de Estudios Tomistas of the Universidad Santo Tomás (Chile), and the University of St. Thomas (Houston). Other sponsors are Laval University (Canada) and Thomas Aquinas College (California).
Founded in 1969 by students of Charles de Koninck and Maurice Dionne, the IPC celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. It is an opportunity to commemorate and honor these thinkers who have inspired its pedagogy. The conference aims at gathering people who know the thought of de Koninck and Dionne in order to give a representative overview of the continuing usefulness of their contributions for today’s academy. That is, the aim is not merely to look back and recall their work, but the contributions will show the relevance of their approach to the challenges that philosophy now faces and will have to face in the future. A book of the conference’s presentations will be published by Presses Universitaires de l’IPC in 2021.
During the years they taught at Laval University, Charles De Koninck and Maurice Dionne bequeathed to their students a crucial heritage: the importance of the light given by the architectonic order of the different intellectual virtues (habitus). In this light, their disciples were able to discern the proper place and true scope of each type of knowledge, as differentiated by its object. They found this importance through their focused attention to the commentaries of Aristotle by Thomas Aquinas, especially the proemium that begins each commentary. This serene certitude of the importance of the order of the intellectual habits according to their proper “modus procedendi” enables to unify every branch of knowledge within a single sapiential vision, with neither confusion nor disintegration. In consequence, this approach provides the principles for understanding, for example, the link between philosophy and modern natural sciences, theoretical and practical knowledge, philosophy and theology, or moral philosophy and social sciences.
Some of the main speakers of the Conference will present lectures directly related to the teachings of Professors De Koninck and Dionne, such as the disciple of the former and founder of the Association pour la Formation Chrétienne de la Personne (AFCP), Aline Lizotte, and the disciple of Monsignor Dionne and President of the Société d’Études Aristotélico-Thomistes (SÉAT), Yvan Pelletier. Other lectures will focus on the applications of sapiential principles in specific areas such as politics, economics, science and psychology.
For more information, you can see the Conference’s official site.