This past year, Wayside was fortunate enough to have two faculty members who are active scholars, winning academic awards and publishing their research in leading academic journals.
Prior to coming to Wayside, high school humanities teacher Matthew Acton obtained his Master’s degree in philosophy from Katholieke Universiteit, in Leuven, Belgium. In the fall of 2022 and spring of 2023, he published a two-part article series in the journal Rivista di Filosofia Neo-Scolastica. In the series, Acton examines how Aquinas accounts for the perception of time.
Meanwhile, in May, headmaster John Jalsevac won the Canadian Philosophical Association’s “Congress Graduate Merit Award” for his paper, “The intentio of Pastness in Aquinas’s Philosophy of Memory.” Coincidentally, Jalsevac’s paper also dealt in part with the perception of time in Aquinas’s philosophy, albeit from a different angle.
Both scholars noted that the questions of memory and time perception have been almost entirely neglected in Thomistic scholarship. Neither was previously aware that the other was researching this topic.
Jalsevac’s paper on memory and time has since been accepted by Dialogue, the official journal of the Canadian Philosophical Association, where it will be published soon.
Earlier in the year, headmaster Jalsevac also learned that he had won the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly’s (ACPQ) “Rising Scholar” award. Jalsevac won for his paper, “Mitigating the Magic: The Role of Memory, the Vis Cogitativa, and Experience in Aquinas’s Abstractionist Epistemology.”
In the paper, Jalsevac argues that scholars have overlooked the crucial role that memory and the so-called “cogitative power” play in Aquinas’s account of how humans come to know universals. It was published in the summer edition of the ACPQ.
Over the summer, Acton was accepted to a PhD program at Tor Vergata University in Rome, and has since moved on to continue his graduate studies.
Meanwhile, Jalsevac recently successfully defended his dissertation at the University of Toronto (Centre for Medieval Studies). This year he is putting his philosophical expertise to use in the classroom at Wayside, where he is teaching an introduction to philosophy course, and another course on metaphysics and Scholasticism.
Congratulations to both scholars on their accomplishments! May they inspire Wayside’s students to strive for excellence in their own academic endeavours.