Just recently, Nov. 6, there was an attempt to bridge the worlds of philosophy and economics here at our university. That we should build a bridge, there is no doubt. Deciding how to do it remains a task.I’m sure that, at the present, philosophy, theology and its distant cousin, Catholic school thought, have not made an effective entry on the public stage in our day. The dominant currents of thought in our day, while sympathetic in some ways to Christian values, do not seem to want or need the sacred, the spiritual, the ecclesiastical or the philosophical.The bridge that we are attempting to build raises many questions. What kind of relationship does, in fact, exist between Catholic school thought and economics? What is actually going on in the process of the production of economic knowledge that renders irrelevant the horizon offered by philosophy, theology and Catholic school thought?One part of the bridge needs to demonstrate that the introduction of Catholic Social thinking into the development process of economic thinking can widen, not restrict, the cognitive range of economic science, thus enabling it to firm up its grip on reality.Can we humanize the economy? If so, how? Is it not possible to devise a model of market capable of including all human beings and of every aspect of the fulfillment of the individual person? Can’t we teach our students how to have life and how to live it more abundantly? Do they have to settle for less?The debate we entered was of the liberal-individualistic doctrine of rights. When we examine and reflects on the pre-suppositions of individualism, when we spell out its anthropology, we see immediately the limits of rights, the denial of the common good and the limitations of visualizing civil society simply as the sum of monad individuals. This concept of person, self-interested and even greedy, denies precisely what is essential to a person: interaction with others and the relationship to others as a value per se.Is it possible today to expect the fulfillment of a humane model of market economy? A more adequate philosophy of the human, of being a person, has to be enunciated. Being human is not basically or exclusively individualistic, as axiological individualism has it, nor exclusively “socializing,” as axiological holism claims. Pro-sociality and reciprocity are “exceptions,” as are the ethical enterprises. Ethics is an exception to a selfish, narcissistic life. It is born by overcoming the lack of fundamental thinking. It is the result of a conversion of the very structure of consciousness into which we were born and a cage in which we have been trapped.The economist has reduced the human to a measurable, certifiable, predictable number. That is an abstraction – the human is more than that. We need philosophy to make us question, to help us reflect. What does it mean to be human? To be a person? The science of economics needs to be opened up to philosophical reflection, even to religious thinking.Are not those who experience in their lives an eschatological dimension of the sense of time better equipped than those who live within an enlightened dimension, which, although scientifically certain, lacks inventiveness and leaves aside a residue of the disposed? Let’s build that bridge.You have to be a good philosopher to be a good theologian and a good economist. Linking them up is the role of the University.

The Rev. David A. Boileau is the Philosophy Chair