THE WAY TOWARD WISDOM
An Interdisciplinary, Intercultural Introduction to Metaphysics

Benedict M. Ashley, O.P.

Chapter II: The Historical Varieties of "Metaphysics" in Western Culture

A: The Unification of Knowledge by One Material or Spiritual Principle

This chapter is not intended to be a refutation of the various views of metaphysics with which I do not agree, but a narrative typology (see Diagram 1) of the chief views that have been held of the ways in which human knowledge can be unified, a task generally regarded as "metaphysical." Since the very term "metaphysics" indicates its Greek origin, it is to the Greek tradition that we must first turn in asking whether a "metaphysical" unification of knowledge is possible. This tradition will then be compared to others still current in the global ecumene.

Greek culture even after it became literate preserved much wisdom that had arisen in oral form, such as in the great Homeric epics. It also borrowed much from the older Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Mycenean cultures. Their sages, because they presented the wisdom of the culture poetically through traditional myths about the gods, were called "theologians." In contrast certain later thinkers were considered "philosophers" (lovers of wisdom) to indicate that they were not just handing down traditions but were searching for a wisdom still to be discovered.

The central problem in early Greek thought was how it can be possible to arrive at certain knowledge in a world constantly subject to change. These thinkers asked, "Does not any statement we make about a world in constant flux become false even while we are saying it?" It was Heraclitus (fl. c. 490 BCE) who said, "All things are changing" (panta rei). Parmenides (c. 515-? BCE) drew the conclusion, made also by Indian thinkers, that since Being is and cannot not be, therefore change must be only an illusion.

Diagram 1
Typology of Approaches to the Unification of Knowledge in the Western Tradition

Some consider Parmenides the originator of metaphysics because he pondered the nature of "Being, but he also said that this Being is a motionless sphere! [1] Leucippus and his pupil Democritus (c. 460-c. 370 BCE) proposed the most explicit and developed materialism according to which all reality can be reduced to unalterable atoms falling aimlessly in a void. The notable exceptions to such materialism were the views of Pythagoras (d. c. 497 BCE) who taught that the soul is eternal and transmigrates from one body to another, and Anaxagoras (d. 487 BCE) who held that "Mind" was the first cause of motion.

The search for wisdom (sophia) in Greek education centered on the reading of the theological poets, especially Homer, and was at first dominated by the Sophists or self-proclaimed wise men. These Sophists, of whom Protagoras(c. 450 BC) is the best known accepted the customary values of their times and centered their teaching on the rhetorical skills required for Greek citizens in the public forum. [2] Hence these Sophists, like politicians today, unified knowledge only by its practical use for political and legal persuasion and hence were little concerned with whether their arguments were certain as long as they gained public favor. Hence they were cultural and moral relativists content with the popular opinions of the times. As the self-confidence of Greek and Roman culture rose and fell, skeptical authors also appeared who mocked the pretensions of the philosophers, such as Pyrrho of Elis (c. 360-270 BCE) and much later Sextus Empiricus (c. 200 CE). [3]

It was Socrates (470 ?-399 BCE) who vigorously opposed the pragmatic relativism of the Sophists and thus reversed the Pre-Socratic materialistic reductionism. He followed Pythagoras in accepting the immortality and spirituality of the human soul This became central to the thought of Plato (427-347 BCE) who agreed with Pythagoras that the soul is only temporarily in the body and with Parmenides that certain truth cannot be derived from our sensations of the changing world. But Plato went beyond the Pre-Socrates to distinguish clearly the ever-changing material realm from the unchanging spiritual realm. Certain truth, therefore, is to be achieved only by turning from the sensible, material world to one's spiritual interior where one will discover innate Ideas. As we recover these Ideas from the forgetfulness caused by the entombed of our souls in our bodies, they lead us upward, finally to the supreme Idea of the One that draws us to itself through love and hence is also the supreme Good. The meditative process through which this all beautiful, all good, and all true One can be reached is the Dialectic (conversation, discussion) that Socrates had used to compare and then discard probable ideas so that at last true insight could be reached.

DIAGRAM 1: PLATO'S DIALECTIC

The Idea of the One or Good
á
The Realm of the Ideas
whose classification is the work of Logic
á
Mathematics
as the bridge between Physics, Ethics, and Logic
á
The Realm of the Pursuit of the Good Through Love
whose study is the task of Ethics that presupposes
knowledge of the natures of things.
á
The Realm of Sensible, Changing Things
whose natures are understood mathematically
in natural science (Physics)

In Plato's Academy, the mother of all universities, studies were divided into logic, physics, and ethics, a division later followed by the Stoics. Logic obviously dealt with the method of dialectics. Mathematics was greatly stressed because it was thought that, though it deals with the measurement of material things, it clearly produces certain knowledge. Thus its study is the critical point at which our probable knowledge of the changing physical world transcends its flux to arrive at changeless Ideas, the "Mathematicals." Plato in his dialogue the Meno portrays Socrates as proving that mathematics is based on our innate ideas of its "self-evident" axioms. Thus natural science, though it can only attain probabilities, when it uses timeless mathematical models to explain physical change rises dialectically toward absolute certitude.

Since mathematics deals with One and the Many and the Many reduce to the One, the dialectic moves beyond numbers to the ultimate Ideas of the Many and then to the supreme idea of the One. Thus for Platonists the "dialectic" was identified with "physics" (study of the nature, physis of things). Mathematics was not clearly distinguished from the study of material things, since these were described mathematically as Pythagoras had done. Ethics was reduced to knowledge of the Good, since Plato followed Socrates in holding that we do wrong only out of ignorance of the Good. As for logic it was the dialectical method itself.

Therefore Platonists really held that there is only one type of philosophy or science, namely, the Dialectic. From whatever question one raises about anything at all the Dialectic, if faithfully pursued, inevitably ends in questions about the One that is also the True and the Good whose beauty reflected in the universe draws eternal souls to return to the One. This fundamental Platonic attitude that attempts to reduce all knowledge to one single principle that alone has unqualified validity has continued to inspire thinkers throughout the history of Western thought and has obvious similarities to Eastern spirituality. But this reduction of knowledge to a single principle has taken not only spiritualist forms, as for Plato himself, but also materialist ones as for most of the Pre-Socratics and later for the Stoics and Epicureans and for modern scientism. This, therefore, is one major way of approaching the problem I am raising in this book: "How can we unify human knowledge?" It is not, however, the only possible approach, as Plato's pupil Aristotle was quick to declare.

In the period of the Middle Academy after the first disciples of Plato had died it soon became apparent that the dialectic seemed to go on endlessly without arriving at the promised certitude of a vision of the One. By the time of the leadership of Carneades (fl c. 155 BCE) the Platonic New Academy had come to be content with mere probabilities. Socrates' attempt to refute the rhetorical pragmatism of the Sophists seemed to have utterly failed. Moreover in that period materialist reductionism again became influential in Hellenistic culture through the Stoicism of Zeno of Citium (c. 336- c. 264) who revived the dynamism of Heraclitus. Epicurus (c.342-270) also revived the atomism of the pre-Socratic Democritus. Thus the Greek tradition remained predominately dedicated to a unification of knowledge through a descending reduction to a single material principle or by an ascending reduction to a single spiritual principle.

The so-called Middle Platonists made serious use of Aristotle's Metaphysics, yet the Neo- and later Platonists remained true to the dialectical conception of philosophy and hence to the reduction of all knowledge to the spiritual principle of the innately known One. [4] This remained true even when, as already noted, in the last half century before the coming of Christianity the whole Aristotelian Corpus as we know it became available to the Greek commentators. The Christian era, however, also saw the development of Neo-Platonism developed. Plotinus (205-270 CE), its great leader, was a pagan who in part wrote in reaction to Christians' claims that their faith gave them true certitude. He systematized Plato's thought to show that even in this life dialectic can attain the One. Yet it does so not merely by argument but by culminating in ecstatic, mystical, insight, which Plotinus claimed to have personally experienced. Thus Neo-Platonism comes very close to that of India's mystic sages that Plotinus may have met on a trip to Persia. [5]

When this Platonic tradition was taken up by Christian thinkers, notably by Origen (c. 185- c.254 CE), St. Gregory of Nyssa, (332-394 CE), the Pseudo-Dionysius (5^th century CE), and in a more qualified way by St. Augustine (396-430 CE), philosophy was not distinguished formally from Sacred Theology but treated only within the compass of Christian faith. Hence Sacred Theology became the real unifying principle of knowledge and metaphysics as an autonomous discipline received little attention. The Arabian Muslim commentators who borrowed Aristotle's works from the Christian Byzantines gave more attention to his classification of the sciences and hence to metaphysics as a distinct discipline. Yet even the most influential of these Islamic writers such as Avicenna (Ibn Sina 980-1037) and Averroes (Ibn Rushd, c. 1126- c. 1198) still Platonized. [6]

B: The Unification of Knowledge by Coordinating Autonomous Disciplines

It was Aristotle (385-322 BC), the greatest student of Plato, as Plato had been of Socrates, who in his Metaphysics sought a mediating position between these two reductionisms, materialism and spiritualism. Aristotle thought that Plato had too easily accepted the belief of Parmenides that sense knowledge cannot yield certain knowledge. For his own part Aristotle also fully accepted Heraclitus' emphasis on change, but pointed out that in the midst of such change many objects remain relatively stabile and identifiable. Heraclitus could marvel at the flow of the river only because the water, the trees on the riverbank, and his own bodily self, for a while at least, endured. Changing objects maintain their identity as objects of knowledge and are known to us as what they are through these very changes. One can recognize what the water is by the way it flows, freezes, and evaporates. Such a relative stability in sensible things, Aristotle claimed, is sufficient for us to distinguish their essential natures and properties from their more superficial and accidental conditions and to search out the causes for their existence and characteristic features.

Hence genuine scientific knowledge (episteme) can be based on intellectual analysis of sense data. [7] Thus there is no need to posit the innate ideas Plato thought necessary to guarantee the certitude of scientific knowledge. In particular mathematical truth need not be based on innate ideas, as Plato claimed, since quantity is a basic property of changing bodies and can be known by us abstractly, leaving out the motions and alterations of actual concrete bodies. We need no innate idea of 10, since we can count our ten fingers and we are certain that we have ten and not eleven or nine. Thus we know the number 10 as applicable not only to ten fingers, but to our ten toes and many other 10.'s

Hence Aristotle contended that though mathematics is the simplest and clearest science yet it depends on natural science (physics) because natural science is the only discipline that directly studies sensible, changing reality objectively as it is most independent of our ways of thinking about it. Mathematics and natural science are thus both true sciences arriving at certitude, yet they are formally distinct from each other as critically organized disciplines because of their different first principles that give to each its proper type of certain truth. Hence it is utterly absurd to accuse Aristotle's thought of being too static and deductive, as is often done, since of all the Greek thinkers after Heraclitus he is the most insistent on starting from the fact of change as the most inescapably certain and certain truth about reality on which all other assertions of truth must rest. Today Alfred North Whitehead is admired for his "process philosophy," but in fact, as I have argued elsewhere, is in the Platonic tradition, [8] Aristotle's thought is a more radical process philosophy than is Whitehead's. Thus, although the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions agree in many important ways, so that Aristotle has often been interpreted as just another Platonist, actually their epistemologies or criteria of verification are radically opposed.

Sometimes Aristotle is also accused of excessively a priori or deductive reasoning from cause to effect. Certainly for Plato philosophy can be certain only if it deduces its conclusions from truths that are innate and self-evident. But this is by no means the case for Aristotle for whom the certitude of principles must first be grounded a posteriori by reasoning inductively from observed effects to their causes. Only after principles have been established in this empirical way can they be used as the basis for deductive reasoning in the systematic organization of a science. It is essential to distinguish these two line of reasoning, one of research or discovery that moves a posteriori, from effect to cause, in contrast to the other that moves a priori from cause to effect in the systematic organization of the results of research and proof. [9] Even mathematical demonstrations, generally considered the model of deductive argument, presuppose the a posteriori establishment of the axioms of mathematics that must be first grounded in the observation of real measurable and countable things if they are to have certitude. [10]

DIAGRAM 2: ARISTOTLE'S DIVISION OF THE SCIENCES

SCIENCES:	| | | | | | | | |	Theoretical------------------ Practical---------------------	| | | | | | First Philosophy or Theology (Metaphysics) Physics (including modern physics, chemistry, biology and psychology |Mathematics |Arithmetic |Geometry | | | | Ethics: |Individual |Family |Politics Arts or Technologies (many subdivisions)
METHOD (Logic)	| | | | |	Analytics (formal and material) Topics (dialectics) Rhetoric Poetics Grammar (linguistics)

When, after Plato's death, Aristotle broke with the Academy, he founded his own proto-university, the Lyceum, where natural science was studied, including the whole range of physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology and psychology. [11] Here too logic, freed of the doctrine of innate ideas, was taught as an Organon (instrument) that deals only with the purely mental ordering of knowledge already gained from natural sciences about the real world.

Since Aristotle also rejected the Socratic notion that one cannot choose to do evil if one really knows better, Aristotle also sharply distinguished ethics from physics. Because he was also convinced that mathematics was an abstract study of the quantities of physical objects he distinguished it from physics, yet held that it could be used in physics as a dialectical instrument to provide models to guide research. As for the arts, he classified them with ethics because both techne ("art," "technology") and phronesis ("prudence" of which ethics is the theoretical part) are practical disciplines, not theoretical ones like physics and mathematics.

Thus for Aristotle the study of wisdom does not consist in a single discipline with various stages of advancement toward certitude, as Plato thought, but a set of distinct, autonomous disciplines each with its own principles, methods, and goals. Each of these disciplines in its autonomy is truly a "science" and, if formed in a critical manner according to the laws and the truth criteria provided by logic, can in its own right be called a kind of "wisdom." Yet to be wise about how to live (ethics), wise about making useful or fine produces (art), wise about how to solve problems about quantities (mathematics), or wise about the visible world nature (physics) are very different kinds of wisdom. Thus the problem of what today is called "interdisciplinarity" arises not just from the tendency of the human mind to unify its thinking but from the interrelations between things in the world and therefore among the sciences that study such things. Hence for the Aristotelian tradition the term "philosophy" includes all these varied disciplines, since each is an autonomous episteme (science) capable of describing and explaining its own proper subject matter without direct reference to any other science and arrives at least to a few certain conclusions. To unify this array of autonomous disciplines in a way that did not destroy their autonomy was for Aristotle a major concern. Hence Aristotle sometimes identifies "the philosopher" with the thinker who engages in this kind of philosophy par excellence dealt with in his Metaphysics." [12]

Aristotle was still perfecting an answer to this problem of interdisciplinarity when he died without finally editing that work that some follower, probably Eudemus of Rhodes, called the Metaphysics only because in this edition it was placed after (meta) the work called the Physics. That Aristotle himself regarded this work as a study of the highest type of wisdom is evident from passages in which he refers to it as "First Philosophy," that is the supreme architectonic form of "science" in the inclusive sense of a discipline that unifies all the special sciences, or as "theology", that is, a divine (theos) wisdom. It is an "architectonic" discipline because, like the expertise of an architect who has under him many different craftsmen, all of whom he directs in producing a building, First Philosophy unifies the activities of the other sciences. [13] Yet an architect leaves each craftsman to exercise that one's special skill that the architect need not personally possess.

Thus Aristotle is the first to raise this question of a First Philosophy, the architectonic form of theoretical knowledge that historically has generally been called "metaphysics." He states this problem in Books I (Alpha Major) and II (Alpha Minor) of his Metaphysics by dialectically describing the nature and difficulty of establishing a First Philosophy that is based on sensible experience of a changing world by rational analysis of that experience. Since this work in progress was never finally edited and has baffled its interpreters.

Plato's Academy in Athens continued its teaching until 529 CE when the Christian Emperor finally closed it down because he believed it to be a source of the heresies that were dividing the Christian Church. But after the deaths of Aristotle's immediate disciples, Eudemus of Rhodes and Theophrastus (whose own brief Metaphysics survives) the Lyceum did not have a very long life. Yet a former student of the Lyceum, Demetrius Phalerus soon after 258 BCE induced King Ptolemy Philadelphus to found in Alexandria in Egypt the school called the "Museum" with the largest of ancient libraries and a large student body that kept alive the Aristotelian tradition. This Museum seems to have lasted to at least the second century BCE. Many of Aristotle's works, especially his dialogues, famous for their literary polish, have survived only in fragments cited by later writers. According to recent studies of Abraham P. Bos, [14] at least some of these dialogues were written late in Aristotle's life and were in part devoted to theological topics, similar to those found in Plato's dialogues. .

The main corpus of Aristotle's writings, including the Metaphysics were for long inaccessible, but were again, especially in Alexandria, read and commented on by various authors, beginning with Alexander of Aphrodisias (fl. 200 CE). [15] Yet these commentaries demonstrate that while much of the material of Aristotle's thought became generally available, his fundamental epistemological disagreements with Plato went largely unrecognized. Thus Platonism, along with Stoicism, continued to dominate Hellenistic and Roman culture. Though Plato had never used the term, later Platonists often used "metaphysics" for their whole transcendentally unified systems of thought. In his Enneads Plotinus covers logic, physics, and ethics as a single discipline in which logic and ethics are fused with a total cosmology. Clearly this is not what Aristotle intended in his own Metaphysics. This confusion about whether "metaphysics" is more or less identical with the whole of "philosophy" or is a distinct disciplines among the philosophical disciplines has obscured Aristotle's intentions ever since.

It should also be noted that Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were not religious skeptics as have been so many philosophers since the Enlightenment, but were in fact religious reformers, who might reasonably be grouped with Zoroaster, Buddha, and Confucius. They did not deny the existence of the gods of pagan religion, nor oppose their worship, but sought to give them a more spiritual interpretation and to promote a higher ethics. Even the Stoics, although materialists, taught an elevated pantheism and strict moral standards.

C: Medieval and Renaissance "Metaphysics"

The same conflict between philosophy and theology occurred in the medieval Christian universities. The Scholasticism of the 13^th century strongly defended the possibility of achieving objective and certain truth by reason in a manner consistent with Christian faith. The Franciscan Order, with its two great theologians St. Bonaventure and Bl. Duns Scotus, remained more committed to the Platonism of St. Augustine. The Dominican Order was led by St. Albert the Great and his pupil St. Thomas Aquinas into an Aristotelian but respectful criticism of the Augustinian tradition. Yet Meister Johannes Eckhardt (c.1260-c.1328), a Dominican also influenced by St. Albert, proposed a radically Neo-Platonic mysticism.

The Franciscans criticism of Aquinas was motivated principally by their fear that his Aristotelianism would end in the errors of Averroes that had penetrated the Arts School of the University of Paris. These suspicions led to the notorious condemnation of Aristotelianism in 1270 by the Archbishop of Paris, implicating but not naming Aquinas. The error most feared by these theologians was Averroes' denial of God's freedom because it struck at the heart of monotheism. Yet the defense of divine freedom in the work of Duns Scotus (c. 1265-1308) and much more radically in the Nominalism of the Dominican Durandus de St. Pourcain (c. 1270-1332) and of the Franciscan opponent of Scotism, William of Ockham (c. 1280-1349) led, for reasons that will be explained later, to a growing distrust of the power of reason to deal with ultimate questions. [16] Thus in defense of reason the Church had to condemn the Cistercian John of Mirecourt (fl. c 1344) for teaching that we cannot be certain about the existence of external reality because God can cause illusions to seem to be real. Nicholas of Autrecourt (fl. c. 1340) taught that only sense knowledge is certain and that we cannot know causal relations or the existence of substances. He declared, "In all his natural philosophy and metaphysics Aristotle hardly reached two evidently certain conclusions, perhaps not even a single one." [17]

In the Renaissance and Reformation the rivalries between the Greek schools of philosophy and their epistemologies were renewed, but interest shifted more to literary classics and to mathematics. A Ciceronian eclecticism in philosophy became the order of the day. Soon the religious wars that set in with the Reformation had the effect of again promoting fideism. Luther in order to reassert the primacy of the Bible in theology vehemently rejected the use of Aristotle by theologians. Calvin was trained in the law and somewhat influenced by Stoic philosophy that had become popular in the Renaissance and hence was more systematic in his theology than Luther. Yet due to his great emphasis on the preached Word Calvin favored a rhetorical rather than a philosophical approach to theology. [18] Because these religious quarrels of the Reformation and Counter Reformation were never satisfactorily resolved, Skepticism became very prominent again in the last half of the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth century in such thinkers as Michel de Montaigne (1533-92) who had resort to an unenthusiastic fideism. Even more radical was Francisco de Sanchez who in 1581 published a book with the title Quod Nihil Scitur (That Nothing is Known). This Renaissance skepticism was to yield only to the euphoric confidence of the anti-Christian Enlightenment in modern science as the sure road to objective truth.

D: Modernity and Metaphysics

1). Cartesian Idealist Metaphysics

Descartes (1596-1650), a mathematicians of genius, fearful that skepticism might undermine the new science, in his famous Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy took the famous "turn to the subject" that has made him the widely recognized father of modern philosophy. [19] Under Augustinian influences Descartes returned to the Platonic conviction that certitude can never be found in the sensible, material world of change but must be grounded on innate ideas that possess the clarity and distinctness of mathematics. Yet he did not think of these ideas as objective realities envisioned by the spiritual intelligence, as Plato had done, but rather as mental processes that gave him assurance of his own reality as a thinking subject. He expressed this conviction in his Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore, I exist) that he claimed could not be doubted. From this principle he argued for the existence of God as the guarantor that our senses do not deceive us in manifesting the existence of an external, material world. Thus he believed that he had found an irrefutable ground both for a metaphysics of spiritual substances and a natural science of material substances, corresponding to his awareness of himself as a compound of Mind and Matter. Therefore Descartes, Influenced by Democritean atomism that seemed to him most amenable to thorough mathematization, attempted to develop a purely mechanistic natural science. [20]

Among the thinkers most influenced by this Cartesian turn to the subject were the racially Jewish philosopher Benedict de Spinoza (1632-1677) [21] and the German, ecumenically minded Protestant, G. W. Leibniz (1646-1716) [22]. Spinoza sought to overcome the matter-mind dualism of Descartes by a pantheism or monism in which matter and spirit are two modes of a single Divine Substance. For Leibnitz, who was influenced by Suarez and thus remotely by Scotism, this meant that the subject of metaphysics is not actual but possible being based on self-evident principles known a priori, that is, independent of sense experience, just as Descartes had supposed. [23] For both thinkers metaphysics was a deductive system based on certain self-evident principles, such as they conceived mathematics to be.

Thus in the seventeenth century a radical semantic change in the notion of a priori knowledge took place at this time. In Aristotelian and Thomistic thought, as already noted, knowledge always begins from the senses and proceeds to the intellect. Hence a science proceeds from effect to cause (a posteriori). Once, however, the causes of the sensible effects have been demonstrated a posteriori, the science then proceeds to demonstrate the effects from the causes (a priori). On the contrary, in modern philosophy with its turn to the subject it is generally supposed that we have a priori knowledge independent of and logically prior to sense experience.

Leibnitz' industrious disciple Christian Wolff (1679-1754) promulgated this aprioristic conception of metaphysics in a series of systematic works that became widely used textbooks in German universities. [24] It was Wolff, also, who introduced the novel distinction between "philosophy" as a deductive system concerned with possibility and the "empirical sciences" concerned with an inductive, experimental study of concrete reality. Throughout the history of "philosophy," as we have seen in this survey, although the term was often used to refer to metaphysics because it was philosophy par excellence, it had always extended to the whole range of critically developed knowledge. With Leibnitz and Wolff "philosophy" became divorced from the then rapidly developing empirical natural sciences and was restricted to a deductive, a priori metaphysics of the possible. The two types of knowledge were coordinated, however, by assigning to metaphysics the task of establishing the principles of the sciences: a "philosophy of nature," "philosophy of mathematics, "philosophy of ethics," etc.. Hence in the philosophy departments of modern universities these subjects are often provided as special courses or fields within "philosophy" as an inclusive whole.

Thus in the Enlightenment the terms "philosophy" and "metaphysics" began increasingly to mean something very different from what the ancients and medievals had meant by them. By Wolff's distinction philosophy in universities was gradually relegated to the "soft" humanities over against the "hard" empirical sciences. In the twentieth century philosophy and theology (if it was taught at all) were to be even more marginalized and sometimes even reduced to an analysis of language or phenomenological descriptions of subjective experiences. [25]

2). British Empiricism

From the first, however, English thinkers, found the Cartesian innate ideas unconvincing. In the Enlightenment epoch there remained not a few advocates of skepticism, eclecticism, or a sophistic reliance on public consensus, but the rapid advance of science provided a strong antidote to such pessimism about the powers of human reason. The founder of British Empiricism, Francis Bacon (1561-1626) argued successfully for the pragmatic value of experimental science and its technological possibilities. He urged a reliance on induction against a deductive epistemology. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), well acquainted with the dualism of Continental Cartesian thought, frankly defended materialism. [26] More moderately John Locke (1632-1704) accepted the Aristotelian principle that all our knowledge is derived from the senses not from innate ideas as Descartes contended.

Nevertheless Locke's understanding of this principle remained influenced by the Cartesian turn to the subject, since for Locke what we know are not the sensed objects as such but "ideas" or representations of these objects. [27] Thus in opposition to Continental Cartesianism, British Empiricism ceased to distinguish intellectual knowledge essentially from sense knowledge. It thus reduced all knowledge to sense impressions (Sensationalism) so that abstract ideas ("ideas of reflection)" are considered merely images that in our thinking processes have been rendered less vivid and precise than actual sights and sounds.

In England the Cartesian theory of natural science was soon replaced by the empirically better verified system of Isaac Newton (1642-1727). Newtonianism, however, like Descartes' natural science, was grounded in mathematics and Democritean mechanism, although Newton was aware of some of the conceptual problems this entailed. [28] Another important factor in this English empiricism was the trend toward Deism and Unitarianism in religion that was encouraged by the Enlightenment disillusionment with theological controversy. Locke and Newton, although believers in the Bible, tended to rationalize much of the Christian tradition of faith.[29]

The weakness of this Empiricism that it shared with medieval Nominalism was that by resting knowledge on the concrete individuals accessible to the senses and making universal concepts purely mental constructions it seemed to render certitude in science impossible and thus ended in skepticism. Another empiricist, Anglican Bishop George Berkeley (1685-1753) pressed Locke's notion that the object of our knowledge is ideas to a logical conclusion that even Descartes had hesitated to make. Since we have no way of knowing whether these ideas correspond to extra-mental reality, why need we suppose they are anything but representations produced in our minds by God? [30] Esse est percipi, "to exist is to be perceived."

Yet this new confidence in reason based on sense experience received a rude shock from David Hume (1711-1776) who frankly opted for probabilistic skepticism somewhat like that of Sanchez. Yet Hume also supported the sophistic public consensus theory of truth in that he admitted that we must live our lives by the common sense expectation that things will go on as usual. [31] In opposition to Hume's skepticism his fellow countrymen of the Scottish School of Common Sense led by Thomas Reid (1710-1796) made appeal to our natural certitudes that are presupposed to any evaluation of probabilities.[32] The views of this school had wide influence, notably on the founders of our United States government. Though bracing in their defense of the capacity of human nature for truth, the thinkers of the Scottish School remained in the Lockean perspective by failing to carefully distinguish intellectual cognition from that of the senses. Eventually a nineteenth French thinker, Auguste Comte (1798-1857) proposed a Positivism according to which science only describes nature without seeking to explain it causally.

Thus arose the two seemingly opposed traditions of modern philosophy, Continental Philosophy, one stemming from Descartes and the other, British Empiricism, fathered by Locke the apparent opponent of Descartes. Yet both share, though very differently, in the Cartesian turn to the subject. Both no longer focus epistemologically on the objects of knowledge, as had been predominantly the case in the whole history of philosophy before Descartes, even for Platonic idealism, but on one's awareness of what one is thinking. How then can one escape solipsism (solus, alone, ipse, self), the denial that I know anything but my own thoughts? I am reminded that a contemporary of Descartes the great Baroque Spanish poet, Lope de Vega (1562-1635) wrote a famous play called Life is a Dream!

Yet in this new perspective certain interesting problems concerning the knowing subject previously passed over become startling evident. Of course Plato too had believed that truth could be uncovered only by looking within the self. The Aristotelians had also admitted that "What is received is received according to the condition of the recipient," (Quidquid recipitur, recipitur secundum conditionem recipientis). Nevertheless, both older traditions were confident that "Science is of the universal" not of the individual in its concrete, historical circumstances. Both were also sure that intellectual knowledge unites the knower to the real object. These convictions had prevented Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and Scotus from giving much attention to the individual subjectivity and historicity of different knowers in their concrete circumstances. The chief positive achievement of modern philosophy has been to face such problems, recognizing more fully the diversity of perspectives that necessitates intersubjective and intercultural dialogue if there is to be a meeting of minds.

3). Kant and the Post-Kantian Critique

It was, however, the reply to Hume's skepticism worked out by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) that was to dominate the German universities that became the models for the universities of Europe and America. As the thought of Plato and Aristotle dominated ancient times, and that of Aquinas, Scotus and Ockham that of the middle ages, so Kant is generally recognized as the central thinker of modernity. His early writings were in the field of natural science and he was a great admirer of Newton. Yet he was also influenced by the German mystical writer Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) [33] in regard to the possibility of the existence a spiritual realm and by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in regard to ethics and politics.

Kant had been raised in a pietistic Lutheran milieu but was an enthusiastic advocate of the Enlightenment and shared its confidence in reason and intellectual freedom. Thus he was concerned to present a Religion within the Limits of Reason, as one of his works is entitled, yet wanted to leave room for a Christianity of faith for those who needed it as a support for civic virtue. [34] Yet he was also constrained by his education in the Leibnitizian Wolfe tradition to suppose that the task of metaphysics was to provide a priori principles for the empirical sciences, a perspective from which he never freed his thinking. Thus for him, metaphysics seeks to establish the conditions of the possibility of the various kinds of knowledge. Hence it resembles Aristotle's metaphysics in that it too has the task of coordinating the autonomous sciences, but differs fundamentally from Aristotle's perspective by its aprioristic view of human intelligence.

Early in his career Kant was disturbed by the "dogmatism" with which these a priori truths on which he believed all science and morality must be based were being presented in the universities. He says that when he read the attack by the British empiricist David Hume on the Cartesian a priori, "I was awakened from my dogmatic slumber." Thus he was aroused to rethink metaphysics critically in order to ensure that his advocacy of Newtonian science and Rousseau's Enlightenment politics might be soundly grounded. Some consider Kant as the thinker who eliminated metaphysics from modern thought, but his intention was quite the contrary.

Kant believed he would save a critical metaphysics for Enlightenment culture and escape Humean skepticism by mediating between idealism and empiricism somewhat as we have seen Aristotle attempted to do between Plato and Democritus. Kant saw no way to do this except by a radical revision of the very notion of "truth." For pre-Kantian thought most philosophers supposed that "truth," however they thought it could or could not be achieved, meant "the correspondence of the mind of the knower to the reality known" (the Correspondence Theory of Truth). Kant undertook what he claimed was a "Copernican revolution" in philosophy and proposed that truth should be defined as, "the conformity of the known reality to the mind (the Conformity or better Consistency Theory of Truth).

By this Kant meant that, on the one hand that, as empiricism holds, all our true knowledge is derived from sense experience for its raw data. But on the other hand, he maintained that this data is given a necessary order by the constructive activity of the mind itself, thus agreeing with the idealists that truth is derived from within the subject not from the extra-mental reality as such.

Hence for Kant the human intelligence is no longer, as for Aristotle, primarily passive in relation to its object, but primarily active. This active ordering of sense knowledge by the intellect is made possible by two factors. First the senses themselves intuitively produce an ordering of all raw sense impressions in a pattern of absolute place and time. Second the intelligence contains not innate ideas, as Descartes held, but innate categories such as the Principle of Causality, attacked by Hume yet necessary for Newtonian science. By ordering sense impressions, already initially ordered by the senses themselves in the patterns of place and time, the intelligence can present a consistent picture of reality ("the unity of apperception"). This picture receives its certitude from its conformity to the categories common to all human minds and therefore presupposed to all possible knowledge.[35]

This Kantian synthesis is called "Transcendental Idealism" because it holds that our view (apperception) of reality manifested in sense experience receives its order and unity from ideal, a priori truths that transcend experience. Without sensible phenomena these ideal categories would remain empty, meaningless, and without reference to the hidden reality from which the sense data arises. The obvious objection to this way of reconciling empiricism and idealism, however, is that it seems to eliminate the possibility of any positive content for our notions of a spiritual reality, of God, an immortal soul, and moral freedom, since these utterly transcend sense data. Even the material world becomes positively knowable only with regard to its phenomenal aspects, not as to its substantial existence and essential nature (the Ding an sich or "thing in itself"). Yet Kant was neither a Berkeleyan idealist nor a materialist since for him questions of morality and religion remained central concerns

What Kant argued was that while these real beings are transcendental in respect to our theoretical knowledge, nevertheless, they remain regulative with respect to our practical knowledge. Practically speaking we must make moral decisions, just as Hume had admitted. But for Kant these require us to believe (1) in a God who makes moral laws; (2) in a spiritual self that has the freedom to obey these laws responsibly because it sees them to be reasonable, and (3) in a universe governed by the Newtonian laws of natural science. [36] These practical conclusions are not merely probable, as Hume contended, because they also are governed by a priori categories innate to the human mind. Hence the reality of the world studied by science, responsible human freedom, and a moral law enforced by a just God is convincing to all rational persons, provided only that they freely will to follow their reason, rather than their feelings, which Kant admitted tend to overwhelm reason. [37]

This remarkable Kantian synthesis of idealism and empiricism has been so influential in modern culture that all schools of thought have had to take a position with regard to it. Kant had apparently saved metaphysics by giving it a critical foundation that freed it from a presumptuous dogmatism. Yet during the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century this mediating synthesis broke down into a complex diversity of philosophies. On the one hand was Absolute Idealism as variously proposed by the German triumphirate of J. G. Fichte (1762-1914), F. W. J. von Schelling (1175-1854) and G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831). Fichte supported metaphysics as a ground for ethics and held that it begins not with particular realities but with the unity of the free, thinking subject (Ego). In its freedom the Ego acts according to a threefold dialectic: first it affirms itself in its own existence, and then it affirms the existence of the Non-Ego (world) that limits it; finally, it affirms the human situation in which the Ego is limited by the Non-Ego but in its freedom perpetually struggles, as Kant had said, to attain moral perfection. Schelling, whose thought was influenced by Spinoza and went through a bewildering number of stages, proposed a philosophy of history that he thought was already implicit in mythology. The Absolute that contains both God and creation unfolds itself step by step, arriving at full conscious in the human subject. It was Schelling who raised the question, later to be taken up by the Existentialists and especially by Heidegger, "Why does anything at all exist?"

It was, however, Hegel who proved far more widely influential than the former two idealists. From them he took the view, seemingly contrary to Aristotle's dictum that "Philosophy is of the universal," that history could be the subject of philosophy. From Fichte, Hegel took the notion that history proceeds not merely by a gradual evolution but through revolutionary crises in a dialectic of affirmation (thesis), negation of this thesis (antithesis), and negation of the negation or inclusion of the thesis in it contradiction (synthesis). Hegel divided this process into a Logic, a Philosophy of Nature, and a Philosophy of Spirit. In these three disciplines history is portrayed as the advance of the Spirit through the Logic of Being, Non-Being, and Thought. It then develops through the human struggle to understand and control nature and form the human community. Finally the Spirit achieves full self-consciousness through art, religion, and ultimately philosophy. In such a system metaphysics becomes not only an all-compassing wisdom but the totality of reality itself and hence, Hegel believed, transcends mere subjectivity and should be called Objective Idealism.

Though to many Hegel's grandiose system appeared fantastic, it stimulated and still inspires many trends in current philosophy because it seems to recognize all the subjective, individual, and historical aspects of reality that it has been the aim of modernity to uncover. For example, Karl Marx (1818-1883), founder of the Communist revolution that was at the center of politics throughout the twentieth century, was provoked into "turning Hegel on his head" by interpreting Hegel's dialectic of history in strictly materialist terms as a basis of communist activism in behalf of the oppressed.

The Dane Sören Kierkegaard (1813-1855), the acknowledged father of Existentialism, was himself influenced by St. Augustine. [38] He reacted strongly to what seemed to him the abstract rationalism of Hegel's philosophy of history. For him the role given by Kant and Fichte to the will rather than to reason was taken as fundamental and he held that for each of us reality is determined by our free choices for which ultimately there can be no rational criteria. For him the Christian faith to which he was fervently committed had to be "a leap in the dark."

Somewhat similarly Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) revised Kant's thesis that the self pertains to the noumenal realm and is thus unknowable by claiming that the subject is directly conscious of the will in its ceaseless striving that always remains frustrated. [39] He was one of the first European thinkers to engage Buddhism in dialogue. He found in it support for his own conclusion that these universal miseries of human existence in its endless frustrated strivings can be overcome only by the total renunciation of desire. To the contrary Friedrich Nietzche (1844-1900) proclaimed the "end of philosophy" and proposed to replace the notion of a wisdom based on truth with the "joyous wisdom" of the "will to power." [40] For him the will to power was the life force to be manifested in the heroic Superman of the future who would "transvalue all values" by which oppressive bourgeois society cripples the human will. He declared that this total human freedom of the heroic will requires the rejection of the enslavement of Christianity and the declaration of the "death of God." In the place of God Nietzche adopted the ancient "Myth of the Eternal Return" by which history is fated to repeat itself in an unending cycle. The tendency exemplified by Schopenhauer and Nietzche is often called "Life Philosophy" since it shifts attention from abstract metaphysical thought about "Being" to emphasis on the importance of the forceful human will. With Nietzche, however, doubts about the whole enterprise of rational philosophy again emerged in Western thought.

Yet very different from the anti-rational tendencies of this "Life Philosophy" is the Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) who was the Jewish disciple of the philosopher and psychologist Franz Brentano (1878-1917). [41] Brentano was a Catholic priest who had left the Church in the controversy over papal infallibility, but in his thought retained elements of a scholastic metaphysics. Husserl hoped to produce a thoroughly scientific and rigorously logical system free of all "presuppositions" and what he considered Brentano's "psychologism." He thought this could be achieved by using a phenomenological method that "bracketed" the concrete existence of the objects we observe so as to precisely describe their "essences." This sounds quite Aristotelian, but in fact Husserl was preoccupied not so much with identifying particular kinds of essences but with trying to isolate a pure transcendental human consciousness that "constitutes" such essences. This "transcendental consciousness," however, is no longer Descartes' ego of the cogito ergo sum, but a temporal consciousness of the pure flux of time in which thought constitutes concrete entities. Hence Husserl came to a strict Idealism in which empirical reality is constituted by pure awareness.

Husserl's many brilliant pupils, including the martyr St. Edith Stein, did not accept his idealism but his "phenomenological method," whose merits will be further discussed in Chapter VIII, has had wide influence. The Existentialists lead by Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) [42] adopted this method, as can be seen in Sartre's major metaphysical work Being and Nothing. The real concern of the Existentialists, however, was similar to that of the Life Philosophers, namely how we humans create our own lives by our free decisions.

Nietzche's thought was interpreted by Martin Heidegger, (1889-197) --perhaps not fairly-- to signal not only the end of Enlightenment thought but of the whole Western tradition of rational philosophy. Heidegger, under the influence of Brentano and Husserl , claimed that from Plato on this tradition had inevitably led to a "forgetfulness of Being." By "Being" he meant the totality of the human knower (Dasein) in relation to "the world" but remained silent on the question of the existence of a First Cause transcending finite reality. [43]

While Continental philosophy was thus suffering increasingly from a lack of confidence in reason itself, in Great Britain and United States more hopeful empiricist attitudes generally prevailed during the twentieth century. One of the nineteenth century developments of Empiricism had been the extension by such thinkers as Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) [44] of Charles Darwin's (1809-1882) theory of biological evolution as a unifying principle to explain the whole development of human culture. Since this project could easily be assimilated to Hegel's philosophy of history, as notably was done in the historical materialism of Karl Marx, it is not surprising that Hegelianism was influential for a considerable period in both England and the United States.

In the United States also the Kantian emphasis on practical thought influenced the development of the various forms of pragmatism represented by Charles Sanders Pierce (1839-1914), William James (1842-1910), and John Dewey (1859-1952). [45] Pierce was influenced, oddly enough, by John Duns Scotus, but became the principal modern promoter of semiotics, an important feature of post-modern thought. Neither Pierce or James, who wrote the still influential The Varieties of Religious Experience, were closed to religious spirituality; but Dewey, originally a Hegelian, was principal author of The Humanist Manifesto that promoted a Secular Humanism that reduces religion to a kind of reverent, ethical scientism. [46]

It Great Britain Bertrand Russell (1872 1970, much influenced by the Empiricism of David Hume) and the Logical Positivists of the Vienna circle, notably Rudolph Carnap (1891-1970), [47] came to believe that the real task of philosophy is to clarify the language of the various disciplines by precise logic. Russell and Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) [48] even attempted to show that mathematics can be reduced to logic. Whitehead, on the other hand, influenced by Leibnitz and the evolutionary philosophy of Henri Bergson (1859-1941), [49] developed a hypothetical and cosmological metaphysics of process in which the ultimate principle is "creativity" of which both God and the universe are evolving exemplifications.

The Logical Positivists were perhaps the first school of philosophy in history that came to admit its own failure. This failure became undeniable when the mathematician Kurt Gödel demonstrated mathematically that a purely formal logical system cannot be known from within itself to be consistent nor sufficiently complete to deal with all problems that can be formulate in that same system. [50] After this collapse of Logical Positivism's project to create a unified, logical language for all the sciences, its proponents resorted to Ordinary Language or Analytic Philosophy that contents itself with "language games," or different ways of using and interpreting texts. Such thinking, however, remains within the empiricist tradition, since it is concerned chiefly with clarifying the language of natural science, but also extends to ethics and issues of "value" as well as of "facts." Most Analysts, but not all, [51] are determinedly anti-metaphysical, since they find no way to give definite meaning to metaphysical language that seems to them mere verbalization, just "nonsense." For the most part in America universities today it is this Analytic Philosophy that enjoys hegemony.

Yet throughout the twentieth century suspicions about the real value of philosophical efforts increased. While the Marxists had strongly defended the validity of natural science and claimed to extend it to include social science, the Neo-Marxists, especially the Frankfort School headed by Theodore Adorno (1903-1964) with its "critical theory" had emphasized the ideological and politically interested factors in knowledge. Adorno himself believed that Western rationality destroys human freedom whose only hope lies in the liberating effect of the fine arts. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and later even more radical psychoanalysts like Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) and Jean-Francois Lyotard 1926-1998) emphasized the role in thought of the pressures of the unconscious. Michael Foucault (1926-1984) dug into the "archaeology of knowledge" to show human views are socially determined. Even in the "hard-sciences" of nature Thomas Kuhn (d. 1996) in his theory of scientific "revolutions" argued that theories are accepted not so much on objective evidence as on cultural factors that produce "paradigm shifts" in thinking. With these thinkers the trust in objective certitude in knowledge was again in decline.

Even those thinkers who in some measure attempted to save the achievements of the Age of Reason did so chiefly by a return to something like the Sophists view of the ancient Protagoras, as with Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) and Jürgen Habermas (1929-) and still more persuasively in the United States with Richard Rorty (1931-). This can be called the Public Consensus Theory of Truth and can be formulated as "Objective truth is that which is agreed on publicly in a community or in a special group after rational discourse." To a degree in the present book I am appealing to this theory in promoting interdisciplinary and inter cultural dialogue as a way not only to social reconcilation but also to honest objectivity based on openness to different perspectives and the pooling of experience and other data. Yet public consensus can hardly be the ultimate criteria of truth, since rational discourse has to make appeal to objective evidence that transcends the subjective biases of those in dialogue.

The influence of Heidegger's announcement of the death of philosophy, the triumph of technology with its threat of a nuclear holocaust and environmental pollution, the collapse of Marxism and other utopian social hopes, and the domination of the public media, have all contributed to a skeptical mood in philosophy and widespread cultural and moral relativism. Skeptical trends are evident in so-called "post-modernism" that, in the wake of Heidegger, is typified by the brilliant "deconstructionism" of Jacques Derrida (1930-). His notoriety was preceded by the rather brief popularity of the Structuralism of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-), and certain literary critics. The Structuralists held that human thinking is based on patterns of binary opposition that are manifested both in language and in cultural symbolism. Derrida has proposed a "grammatology" that emphasizes that human thought always privileges one of the opposing pairs discovered by structuralism. Thus he maintains that thought inevitably fuses these dichotomies in endless ambiguities of différance so that their meaning is always differed, that is open to endless reinterpretation. The real import of these fashionable but evanescent views seems to be an attack on the secular humanism of the Enlightenment epoch (modernity). Positively they seem only to end, as Heidegger did, with a vague, mystical hope for some state of future justice, peace, and better dialogue. [52]

In a vast study God in Exile: Modern Atheism Cornelio Fabro argues that while older denials of the existence of God were based either on the notion that the visible universe can be rationally explained by the laws of natural science with no need of the "hypothesis that God exists," or on the contention that the world is absurd not rational and therefore cannot be a product of a good God. But Fabro argues that the real source of the atheism that affects our times is to be found in the immanentism of modern philosophy that began with Descartes. Once one begins with a universal doubt, as Descartes did, and then escapes skepticism only by finding certitude in one's own self-aware mental processes and not in objective reality, it become impossible to affirm the existence of God. This explains, Fabro holds, why modern post-Cartesian thought split into an Idealist and an Empiricist tendency, the former reducing everything to intellectual thought and the latter to sensible impressions. Its only consensus has been to accept as the object of all mental activity subjective self-consciousness rather than awareness of the reality (being) of objects having existence independent of the human mind. Obviously a First Philosophy as Aristotle conceived it cannot be simply atheistic. To deny the existence of immaterial realities reduces First Philosophy to natural science or to empty skepticism.

4) The Varieties of Thomistic Metaphysics

Thus at the end of the twentieth century "metaphysics," either in its ancient and medieval sense, or as modified by the Cartesian and Kantian turn to the subject, seemed largely abandoned, except by Catholics. The Enlightenment, especially after the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century had caused a precipitous decline in the Catholic religious orders. Hence the Scholastic systems that these orders had supported and that were already imperiled by the rise of modern science and by Cartesianism seemed utterly obsolete. On the other hand, Catholic attempts to translate theology into the concepts of the new idealist or empiricist philosophies, themselves at war with each other, proved not only futile but spawned gross heresies. [53]

To meet this grave challenge Pope Leo XIII's in 1879 in his encyclical Aeterni Patris required that all Catholic education should be grounded in the "solid doctrine" of Aquinas as the system of thought that had proved most consistent with Christian faith. In doing so, however, he urged that Thomism be freed of obsolete elements and reconciled with the positive achievements of modern thought. He did not intend to reject other philosophies or the theologies that made use of them except insofar as they were inconsistent with faith. [54] Since in the Medieval and Renaissance universities various, often quite opposed, philosophies were permitted to be taught, this admission of the inevitable pluralism of merely human theories is entirely consistent with the Catholic Church's tradition.

At the beginning of this Thomistic Revival it was, however, not at all clear exactly what reading of Aquinas had been canonized by Leo XIII. In fact the state of Thomism at the time when Aeterni Patris was issued was seriously decadent, colored by the Suarezian attempt to reconcile Aquinas and Scotus and by the lingering influence of Leibnitz and Wolff. But in the period before Vatican II brilliant attempts were made to recover the original thought of Aquinas in its authentic texts and proper historical perspective. Vatican II and John Paul II's encyclical Fides et Ratio reaffirm that Aquinas' philosophy and theology are a model for Christian scholars, but also insist that the Church is committed only to the Christian faith not to any particular system of human thought. [55]

The Church has no philosophy of her own nor does she canonize any one particular philosophy in preference to others. The underlying reason for this reluctance is that, even when it engages theology, philosophy must remain faithful to its own principles and methods. Otherwise there would be no guarantee that it would remain oriented to truth and that it was moving towards truth by way of a process governed by reason. A philosophy which did not proceed in the light of reason according to its own principles and methods would serve little purpose. At the deepest level, the autonomy which philosophy enjoys is rooted in the fact that reason is by its nature oriented to truth and is equipped moreover with the means necessary to arrive at truth. A philosophy conscious of this as its "constitutive status" cannot but respect the demands and the data of revealed truth.

Indeed, the Thomist Revival has exposed the lack of agreement on how St. Thomas' teaching was to be interpreted. Yet it is the Thomists in Catholic universities who continue to give the most consistent support to the concept of metaphysics as a unifying discipline according to the Aristotelian tradition in which it had originated. Hence it is important to understand how Thomists have today attempted not only to defend the validity of metaphysics but also to assimilate the positive advances of modern thought.

Modern followers of St. Thomas do not believe that his philosophy is in conflict with sound science nor wholly independent of it, since they argue that, as John Paul II says in Fides and Ratio, [56] the Christian faith and human reason cannot be contradictory but are complementary. This complementarity, of course, implies that a religion based on revelation and philosophy and a natural science based on reason are formally distinct. Yet this distinction raises the question of how a positive relation of complementarity among them is to be established. Ian G. Barbour in Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues [57] speaks of four attitudes in regard to the relation of science and religion. Scientists can view natural science (1) as in conflict with religion, (2) wholly independent of religion, (3) in dialogue with religion, or (4) possibly integrated with religion.

The adoption by Thomists of one or the other of these attitudes conditions and is conditioned by their view of metaphysics and its relation to the other disciplines that Aquinas recognized and wrote about, and in particular its relation to natural science. This is necessarily so because for Aquinas metaphysics is a "natural theology" directly in the service of sacred theology. [58] There are today at least seven chief ways of understanding Aquinas' views on the nature of metaphysics marked by different concerns about how it can best be employed to solve present day problems. These concerns are not necessarily contradictory yet are not easy to reconcile. While all Thomists hold that the subject of metaphysics is Being as Being understood analogically, they differ as to how we know this subject. I will gives these the names usually used by critics, but not always acceptable to the proponents of a given view. They are the 1) Essentialist or Conceptualist, (2) Transcendental, (3) Existential, (4) Phenomenological, (5) Analytic, (6) Semiotic, and (7) Aristotelian Thomisms. [59]

The first phase centered of the Thomist Revival was centered on the efforts, principally of members of the Dominican Order, to present an authentic Thomism instead of the Suarezian Thomism of the seventeenth century that tried to synthesize Thomas with Scotus. By the 1930's the fundamental differences between these two giants of metaphysics were generally recognized. This effort to recover an authentic reading of Aquinas was a chief occupation of the French Dominicans and is exemplified by the work of Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange (1877-1964) characterized by his critics as Essentialist or Conceptualist Thomism. This school holds that the subject of metaphysics is conceived in the third degree of abstraction according to the analysis of the Dominican Thomist Cardinal Cajetan, O.P. (1468-1534). [60] According to Cajetan natural science is in the first degree of abstraction, mathematics in the second, and metaphysics and logic in the third. Thus Essentialists generally assume without further discussion that this degree of abstraction is realistically valid. This reading of Aquinas was formulated in the famous "XXIV Theses" approved by Pius X as expressing the "solid doctrine of St. Thomas" as it had been canonized by Leo XIII. [61]

To some Catholic thinkers, however, this Essentialist Thomism seemed too negative in its failure to assimilate what was sound in modern thought. The first efforts toward a more open Thomism were the "philosophy of immanence" of Maurice Blondel (1861-1949) and of evolutionary "process," influenced by biological evolutionary theory and represented by Henri Bergson (1859-1941). These tendencies soon raised opposition at the Vatican. Consequently some philosophers, concerned for a more open attitude to modern thought while remaining within the limits of Catholic orthodoxy, sought common ground between Aquinas and Kant. Outstanding in this effort were two Jesuits, Pierre Rousselot (1878-1915) and Joseph Maréchal (1878-1944). [62] Both in somewhat different ways considered that Aquinas had thoroughly transformed Aristotle's epistemology. Rousselot emphasized the intuitive character of intellect as primary in comparison with its rational, discursive mode.

The University of Louvain under Joseph Désiré, Cardinal Mercier (1851-1926) had been one of the first centers of the Thomist Revival and was less concerned to assert the uniqueness of Aquinas' metaphysics than rather to bridge the gap between it and modern thought as expressed first in Leibnitz-Wolffian metaphysics and then in Kant's criticism of that version of their system. In this milieu Maréchal in his five volumes Le Point de Départ de la Metaphysique [63] accepted Aquinas' view that human intelligence depends on the senses, yet attempted to reconcile this with Kantianism by finding in Aquinas also a certain a priori in metaphysics in the self-consciousness of the knower. Although for Aquinas the proper object of our intelligence is sensible, material being, in knowing it we indirectly know our own immaterial act of knowing and experience an innate dynamic of questioning that can be satisfied only by God as the Absolute answer. This is sufficient, Maréchal argued, to form a transcendental horizon for knowledge in which the Absolute Being and his creation are included. Thus, Thomists can use Kant's transcendental method and still overcome his limitation of theoretical knowledge to sensible reality and can thus establish the certainty of metaphysical thought for modern thought.

A somewhat different Transcendental Thomism was developed by Bernard Lonergan, S. J. (1904-84), a Canadian but for a long time a professor at the Roman Gregorian University. [64] He sought to defend the validity of metaphysics through a "cognitional theory" that analyzes the special sciences so as to uncover an a priori element in knowledge. Transcendental Thomism is the most radical re-reading of Aquinas but is regarded by the other schools as a surrender to modern philosophy. Yet through its advocacy by a major theologian at Vatican II, Karl Rahner (1904-1984), [65] it has attained wide influence among Catholics and, wholly contrary to Rahner's intentions, has often been used to support dissent from official Church teaching. In the United States W. Norris Clarke, S. J. in his recent The One and the Many," probably the best of current Thomist treatises on the subject, still grounds metaphysics in the "Radical dynamism of the human spirit toward all being as true and good." [66]

The participants in the controversies just described were principally clerics, especially members of the Dominican and Jesuit Orders, the former more concerned for an authentic understanding of Aquinas ad litteram and the Jesuits more concerned to make his thought acceptable to moderns in the face of the rising cultural dominance of the empirical natural sciences. Two brilliant laymen, Jacques Maritain (1882-1973) and Étienne Gilson (1884-1978) became the most influential guides to Thomistic metaphysics, especially in the United States and Canada, because they were both ardent defenders of St. Thomas' originality and fully conscious of the problem raised by the contrast between its medieval and modern historical contexts. They vigorously opposed Transcendental Thomism because of its Cartesian, Kantian, idealist tendencies, but also attacked Essentialist Thomism, earning the label of proponents of Existential Thomism.

Gilson began as a historian of the roots of modern Cartesian thought in medieval philosophy and then became the paramount historian of the whole range of medieval thought. He was indignant at the lack of appreciation of medieval thinkers in the French universities and to remedy this neglect worked to show the originality of Aquinas as a philosopher. He thought this originality could be found in the fact that St. Thomas, though an excellent commentator of Aristotle, quietly but radically transformed the pagan Greeks' metaphysics in the light of the Christian doctrine of creation. [67] Thus for Gilson, Thomism, though formally a matter of reason, is in fact a "Christian Philosophy." Today, however, most adherents to Existential Thomism desert Gilson on the issue of "Christian" philosophy, preferring to maintain the autonomy of metaphysical reason. [68]

Thus, according to Existential Thomism, although Aristotle's metaphysics is a metaphysics of Being as Being, for him "Being" is nothing more than substance actualized by essential form. For Aquinas, on the contrary, metaphysics is about "Being as Being" in the sense of esse, "to be," actus essentsi, "existential act." God is Pure Act, the One Who Is and creatures must be understood as participants in that "to be." Our knowledge of this "to be," moreover, cannot be intuitive or conceptual, but must be through an existential judgment that asserts real existence but leaves the plenitude of Being as such a mystery that transcends adequate conceptualization. Jacques Maritain originally inclined to the Essentialist position, but later joined Gilson in emphasizing esse as the subject of metaphysics. The proponents of both Essentialist and Existential Thomism are generally content to criticize the developments of modern philosophy rather than enter into dialogue with its perspectives. Gilson thought that modern science has made Aquinas' natural science entirely obsolete and hence was concerned only to defend the unique validity of his metaphysics. Maritain, on the other hand, applied this existential view of metaphysics to a number of typically modern problems, without, however, accepting the perspectives of modern thought. Furthermore, he attempted to save a Thomistic "philosophy of nature" distinct from modern science and a Christian philosophy of ethics, positions I will later examine.

Strong support was given to the chief points of Existential Thomism by Cornelio Fabro (who probably would not have liked the label) in his contention that Thomism is a synthesis of Plato and Aristotle. For Fabro, Aquinas was able through the doctrine of esse to assimilate the great Platonic notion of "participation" neglected by Aristotle. [69] L. B. Geiger, O.P. went even beyond Fabro by relegating the real distinction of essence and existence and their composition in created things to a secondary importance in the doctrine of participation, insisting rather on the formal hierarchy of essences as participations in the infinite perfection of God.

Phenomenological Thomism has gained prominence especially through its use by Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II, born 1920) and the Thomists of the Polish University of Lublin. [70] He was a pupil of Garrigou-Lagrange and remains faithful to an unquestionably authentic Thomism but has attempted to meet modern concerns by the adopting the phenomenological method of Husserl, while retaining the critical realism of Aquinas against Husserl's constitutive idealism. This approach to metaphysics focuses on Personalism (as Maritain had also done), that is, on the human person as manifesting the harmony of the material and the spiritual in the analogy of Being. Its special concern is to emphasize the dignity of the human person and its moral responsibilities in the face of modern materialism and moral relativism.

Analytic Thomism exemplified by, Gertrude Elizabeth Anscombe (1919-2001), [71] the editor of Wittgenstein's works, is also concerned to be authentically Thomist by applying the methods of Analytical Philosophy to the clarification and defense of the logical meaningfulness of metaphysical terms and the logical consistency of its arguments. In common with other Analysts, however, these Thomists usually avoid epistemological questions as self-defeating, and thus so far have been content to show that those who call metaphysics "nonsense" are talking nonsense.

Semiotic Thomism is exemplified by John Deeley and his co-worker the Dominican, Ralph Austin Powell. [72] Their contention is that to save metaphysics from the dead-end debate between Idealism and Realism is possible only through semiotics. This discipline was initiated by St. Augustine, but was first critically developed by a Thomist contemporary of Descartes, Jean Poinsot, O. P. (John of St. Thomas, 1589-1644) and later by the American, Charles Saunders Pierce (1839-1914).[73] According to this view we must return to an initial concept of thought that abstracts from the real and the ideal (mental), that is, from Being and Non-Being and hence through this distinction overcomes Cartesian solipsism. The initial concept of Being is a sign that confusedly contains both mind-independent signs and mind-dependent signs and thus transcends their opposition. Hence it includes both the objective (real) and subjective (mental) aspects of human knowledge. Modern thought has the merit of fully recognizing the subjective aspects of knowledge that pre-modern thought too much neglected, but has been unable to reconcile these with the objective aspects of knowledge that pre-modern thought had dealt with more adequately.

Aristotelian Thomism is also sometimes referred to as "River Forest Thomism" because the members (of which I was one) of the Albertus Magnus Lyceum for Natural Science located in that Chicago suburb (1950-1969) contended for this interpretation of Aquinas. [74] James A. Weisheipl (c.1923-1984) of the Medieval Institute, Toronto and William A. Wallace (1918-) of the Catholic University of America provided it with a good historical grounding. It has, however, other independent supporters. [75] For this position, which I have adopted in the present work, the validity of metaphysics depends on two conditions: [76]

a). There can be no valid metaphysics formally distinct from natural science unless its subject, Being as Being (esse) as it analogically includes both material and immaterial being, has first been validated in a manner proper to the foundations integral to natural science by a demonstration of the existence of immaterial being as the cause of material beings.

(b) Modern natural science can achieve such a demonstration, but only if its own foundations are rendered unequivocally consistent with sense observation by an analysis such as is exemplified by Aristotle's Physics as interpreted by Aquinas.

This position, therefore, seeks a positive dialogue with natural science looking toward the integration of philosophia naturalis with the foundations of modern science and the establishment of a valid metaphysics formally distinct from natural science yet open to the possibility of Christian revelation or some other divine revelation.

The reasons for preferring this Aristotelian version of Thomism of how we can validly arrive at the subject of metaphysics will be developed step-by-step in what follows in a manner that remains in dialogue with the other views and attempts to assimilate their insights.

From this typological sketch it should be evident that the question of the need and validity of metaphysics has been in serious question since Descartes and is difficult indeed to defend against the remarkable advance of a modern natural science that is not only independent of metaphysics but seems to render it unnecessary. As soon as Leo XIII revived Thomism and made it for a time the official philosophy of the Catholic Church it was apparent that it had to meet this challenge. Unhappily most Thomists simply assumed, as the medievals generally had done, that there is such a valid discipline as metaphysics and sought to defend Aquinas' version of metaphysics by elevating it to a level of certitude beyond the probabilities of empirical natural science.

The Transcendental Thomists achieved this elevation by making self-consciousness the point of departure for metaphysics. Garrigou-Lagrange and others vilified by the Existential Thomists as "essentialists" largely ignored the problem, while the Existential Thomists, such as Maritain, Gilson, and Fabro, did so by claiming access to esse, known intuitively or through a judgment, prior to all considerations of essence. Maritain, who of all these thinkers took the problem of natural science most seriously, tried to bolster existential metaphysics by recognizing modern natural science as a science formally distinct from Aquinas' natural philosophy, but only as a study of appearances without ontological content.

Recently, as exemplified by the fine work of my fellow Dominican Thomas O' Meara, Thomists are rightly emphasizing that Aquinas was a theologian, not a professional philosopher, and should be read as theologian. In effect this was what Gilson did in his presentation of Christian Thomism based on the Summa Theologiae with little regard for Aquinas' strictly philosophical commentaries on Aristotle. It was also what the theologians Karl Rahner and Lonergan did with their Transcendental Thomism. Yet it can hardly be denied that what, in part at least, made Aquinas so great a theologian was his critical use of philosophy in the service of faith. This harmony between faith and reason is why John Paul II, when declaring that "the Church has no philosophy of its own," still pointed out Aquinas as a model for philosophers.

In my own opinion, the reason that Aquinas so successfully used philosophy in his primary work as a theologian was that he alone among patristic and medieval theologians fully appreciated the full significance of the epistemological stance of Aristotle. Although he certainly advanced Aristotle's thought, he never, I believe, deviated from Aristotle's epistemological commitment to the grounding of all purely human knowledge in our experience of a material changing world known through the senses. Hence whatever value Transcendental Thomism may have in its own right, and I do not dispute this here, it fails to preserve this important feature of Aquinas' work. I would say this is also true of the Existential Thomists, Maritain-Gilson-Fabro and their followers, because of their failure to appreciate how this epistemology made it possible for Aristotle to propose a valid metaphysics and for Aquinas to defend and develop it. The more recent developments of Analytic and Semantic Thomism may cast light on the causes of these disagreements among Thomists. In this book I will not be able to take full account of these developments but welcome the clarification of language and discourse that they promise. The reasons for preferring the Aristotelian reading of Thomism as to how we can validly arrive at the subject of metaphysics will be developed step-by-step in what follows in a manner that remains in dialogue with the other views and attempts to assimilate their insights. Before pursing this, however, it is necessary to describe a little more fully the present state of the question at this beginning of the twenty-first century when modern philosophy itself is reeling under violent attack by "postmodernism."

E: Post-Modernism and Metaphysics

Martin Heidegger (1989-1976) was in many respects the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century, although generally contemned by Analytic Philosophers as a purveyor of verbalizing nonsense. Moreover, as his disgraceful collaboration with Nazi totalitarianism has been more exposed, he appears as a sinister figure. [77] But the collaboration of other modern thinkers such as Sartre with Marxist totalitarianism was no less disgraceful. Heidegger echoed Nietzche's proclamation that "philosophy is dead" and in his What is Metaphysics? (1953). proposed to "overcome" that discipline. Hence, although his main work was in the first half of the twentieth century, he deserves to be considered the herald of post-modernism with its anti-foundational doubts about any common ground for differing modes of thought or even the possibility of communication between worldviews.

We must, therefore, said Heidegger, again raise the question of "Being as different from that of "beings." He had written his doctoral dissertation on Duns Scotus' univocal concept of Being and this view seems to form the background of his own thought. He came, however, to the position, very different from Scotus' and more like that of Husserl or even the Transcendental Thomists, that this Being forms the "horizon" of all authentic human thought. According to John D. Caputo, [78] although Heidegger was greatly influenced by Husserl's ambition to construct a presuppositionless, scientific philosophy, he launched an all out attack on the possibility of any "metaphysics of presence" such as the Idealists had attempted to develop. Against Descartes he insisted that our knowledge of ourselves is always as "beings in-the world." Against Husserl, Heidegger denied that we have a pure consciousness that transcends our world. In his own famous work Being and Time he claimed that the fundamental problem of modern philosophy is that once long ago Parmenides and Plato initiated a metaphysics of presence that was fated to work itself out until it self-destructed in the twentieth century with both the "death of philosophy" and "the death of God," just as Nietzche had so prophetically announced.

The human being is essentially that being which is conscious of its inevitable death and therefore whose experience exists only in the flow of time. Consequently any metaphysics of presence can only be false, since the truth of the world and ourselves is never simply present to us in knowledge. Being conceals itself at the same moment that it reveals itself in different ways in different epochs of time. Thus Being is not only aletheia (Greek for "truth") but also letheia (from Greek lethe for "forgetfulness."

By this Heidegger seems to have meant historical being as the essential mode of human existence. He believed this sense of our historical being has been forgotten in our times because it has been smothered in modernism's triumphant search for technological control of nature and human life. His own conception of metaphysics, which he identified with philosophy, was that it was not a science but was "philosophizing," the uniquely human mode of exploring the relation of man (Dasein) to the world as a totality. Thus, since is not a science, metaphysics began to degenerate when it broke up into logic, physics, and ethics, and forgot the totality of Being. Nor is it a "worldview" in the sense of a framework for living, because the truth of Being not only reveals but conceals itself and therefore it is a continuous questioning."

Later Heidegger tended to "overcome" any kind of metaphysics that had originated with Plato and Aristotle, because it led to a rational control over thinking that was destined to end in the modern ambition to control rather than to be open to nature as it is. Hence he pushed his notion of Being as temporality or historicity still further by insisting that our focus should not be on the human knower who can only provide "an opening" for the experience of Being. Instead it should attend to the flow of history itself as in successive epochs it so conditions human knowledge and human existence in lived experience that what appears as "true" in one epoch appears quite differently than it does in another. Consequently philosophy became "hermeneutical" or interpretative, concerned not so much with the attainment of some unitary "Truth" but with how to interpret the thinking of different epochs and of translating one mode of truth into another.

Heidegger was less optimistic about such convergence. Instead he hoped for a reversal of the trend from the original Pre-Socratic awareness of Being to the "forgetfulness of Being" that has culminated in our purely pragmatic technological culture. This reversal will only come through a new "sending" or "event' (German Ereignis) of Being that initiates some new historic epoch of thinking. Heidgger made the horrific mistake of thinking for a time that Hitler's revival of German nationalism was this epochal "Event." Afterwards he looked forward to the emergence of some utterly different form of thinking, even suggesting that might be the mysticism of the East. While he did not deny the existence of God, he held that this matter pertained to faith not reason, since to philosophize about God is "onto-theology" that reduces God to finitude. Moreover, he could not see how a philosopher could have faith, since faith, as he understood it, excludes questioning and that is what philosophy does.

Hence it is not surprising that under Heidegger's potent influence Jacques Derrida (1930-)[79] has produced the much more radical hermeneutics of "deconstructionism." He seeks not only to puncture Heidegger's hopes for the recovery from oblivion of "Being" but even to squelch the lingering hope that in some new "event" it will be again revealed. For Derrida such a hope is the product of just another worldview or metaphysics of presence. All thought, he argues, is expressed in "words" or "texts" that are inherently ambiguous. Hence in interpreting such texts we should have completely free play, and in the Nietzchean manner should revel joyously in this freedom of "deconstruction." Caputo shows that this deconstructionism is motivated by a political attitude that wants to undermine authoritarianism whether in the state or the academy by revealing its hidden purpose to dominate. Hence he seeks to expose the blind rigidity of thought that authoritarian domination inevitably enforces.

It should be evident that this type of hermeneutical attack on the possibility of metaphysics is relevant only if "metaphysics" is identified with a Platonic conception of philosophy and an Hegelian historicism. A metaphysics of presence is one that supposes we can arrive at a vision of ultimate truth that is an exhaustive, "revealment" free of all "concealment." Caputo shows that such views ignore the Aristotelian emphasis on kinesis (motion, change, dynamism) in favor of Parmenides' denial of the reality of change or at least of a Platonic reduction of change to a mere imitation of real being. On the other hand, Caputo himself sometimes seems to praise Derrida for adopting Heraclitus' panta rei, "All is flux." Michel Foucault (1926-1984) also has proposed a "archaeology of knowledge" that seems to undermine metaphysics by showing how historically and culturally conditioned are even our most basic understandings of reality.[80]

In Chapter IX I will discuss the nature of historical knowledge and will argue that all theories such as Heidegger's that imply some "law" of history accessible by human reason are untenable. If history has a predetermined goal it can only be known by revelation not by reason. Derrida is right that to suppose, as Heidegger did, that Plato's views initiated an inevitable historical process of "the forgetting of Being" is mere myth making. More fundamentally, however, I will try to show in this book that Aristotle's conception of a Human Wisdom is based precisely on his recognition that the only being we directly know is changeable being, being in process, being becoming. Hence, our knowledge of reality, although it can be in some respects certain, is always inadequate and capable of further refinement.

Even those things that are immediately evident from experience and hence can be used as principles to acquire other knowledge are always capable of more profound and precise formulation in view of further experience. It would be a serious error to suppose that to avoid Parmenides' denial of kinesis we need to accept the pure flux of Heraclitus. Aristotle shows a middle way between Heraclitus and Parmenides that made possible natural science and from it derived a Human Wisdom that was always open to the event of more adequate experiences and deeper understanding. Such a "metaphysics" never claims a truth of perfect "presence."

Moreover, it must be said of Heidegger's thought in particular that to hold that the human essence or openness to Being is no more than openness to temporality or historicity is to jump to an insufficiently explored conclusion. While it is certainly true that by reason of our embodiment we live in the flow of time and all our knowing is conditioned by temporality, this only raises, not answers, the question of what it is to be human. Since only we human beings in the material world of change ask about Being and time, about our own being toward death, or about that Being to which we must remain always open for further truthfulness, we cannot avoid the question of whether there is not some aspect of our being that transcends the temporal. Heidegger avoided that question but we will have to ask it.

Another important factor in post-modernism comes from Analytic Philosophy through the work of the Viennese Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) who did much of his work in England and had connections both with the Logical Positivists and the Analyticists.[81] His later writings are obscure, but are best interpreted as an attack on the Cartesian dualist and idealist conception of metaphysics. In this sense they indicate a return to the Aristotelian insistence that if there is to be a valid metaphysics it must rest on ordinary human experience of the world of sensible objects and the human body not with "the turn to the subject." Wittgenstein, however, did not propose a positive direction that such a recovery of a no-nonesense metaphysics might take. [82]

More positively Peter F. Strawson, generally grouped with the Analytics, (1919-) in his work Individuals has nevertheless sought to develop what he calls a descriptive metaphysics. [83] A trend more positive than deconstructionism is also to be found in Hermeneutic Philosophy of Hans Georg Gadamer (1900-) and Paul Ricoeur (1913-). [84] They deny that the older metaphysics was meaningless and argue that a critical interpretation of classical and serious contemporary texts can yield profound insights. They are joined also by the followers of Charles Sanders Pierce who argue that Semiotics enables us not only to interpret written texts but the human meaning of the world, since not only humanly invented languages signify but also real objects are meaningful signs. It is this view that Semiotic Thomism attempts to assimilate to a Thomistic metaphysics. [85]

In view of the foregoing, necessarily oversimplifying, typology, from which the attitudes of many important thinkers to "metaphysics" are necessarily omitted, it should be evident that there are rich but confusing resources to solve the problem of finding a unifying ground for interdisciplinarity and multicultural dialogue. This typology shows that in Western thought this question began with Greek thinkers among whom Aristotle provided the most important mediation between the idealist and empiricist poles of opinion. It also shows that for the Middle Ages and Renaissance Aquinas, in direct continuity with Aristotle, played a similar mediating role. Yet for modern times this mediating position was assumed Kant, with little appreciation for either Aristotle or Aquinas. This inadequate Kantian resolution and the other solutions it generated is now at the beginning of the twenty-first century under devastating attack by post-moderns. In what follows I will reexamine he Aristotleian-Thomistic view of metaphysics as a basis for effective interdisciplinary and intercultural dialogue in the perspective of the achievements of modernity and its criticism by post moderns.

This sketch of the fate of metaphysics during the "modern period can thus be summed up. With the breakup of cultural unity of Western Europe by the Protestant Reformation and the consequent religious wars, the intellectual elite began to abandon a worldview based on revelation and, after to replace it with a purely rational philosophy .From the seventeenth century this elite was able to give substance to this new worldview by its sponsorship of the growing importance of modern science with its roots in Aristotelian and other Greek empiricist tendencies, especially as it led to an increasing technological control of nature. This Enlightenment or Secular Humanism, though it had its scientific origins in the debates between Platonism and Aristotelianism in the medieval Christian universities, ultimately in the nineteenth century was to give rise to the modern university.

In the modern university natural science came to be more and more dominant, but was also revised so as to rest on quite different foundations than those that Aristotle had supplied to medieval and renaissance science. Cartesianism introduced a dualism between mind and matter that was the beginning of the profound split in modern universities, already described, between the "Two Cultures" of the "soft" humanities and "hard" sciences. Natural science, conceived as the typical value free, hard science, was now reconstructed on purely mechanistic, mathematically formulated foundations.

This dualism that Kant unsuccessfully attempted to overcome has survived in the current conception of "scientific method" as the purely mental creation of theoretical models into which the data of sense observation are to be fitted as neatly as possible. Yet today multiculturalism raises questions whether these Kantian categories are common to all human minds, or whether they are simply cultural constructs. Even for Kant himself a metaphysics that could treat of God, the soul, or other immaterial entities transcending space and time for which there is no sense data, could only be an unverifiable construct that might pragmatically support the ethical conduct needed for social order, but could claim no objective truth. Yet modern philosophy in all its conflicting trends contributed to Western thought the exploration of the historical, individualistic, and subjective perspectivism that was largely lacking in the thought of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and thus prepared us to face today's interdisciplinarity and multiculturalism. John Paul II deplores this as that…[86]

…deep-seated distrust of reason which has surfaced in the most recent developments of much of philosophical research, to the point where there is talk of "the end of metaphysics". Philosophy is expected to rest content with more modest tasks such as the simple interpretation of facts or an enquiry into restricted fields of human knowing or its structures."

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Bibliographical Note

Since a brief typology such as I have given in this chapter does not do justice to the authors schematized in the following notes I have tried to provide secondary materials that provide the reader with bibliography and varied interpretations of the authors cited here.

[1] See Patricia Cord, The Legacy of Parmenides), pp. 94-97 for Fragments 7 and 8 of Parmenides with commentary. Also Giovanni Reale, A History of Ancient Philosophy, vol. 1, pp. 86-87. Scholars differ on how to interpret this passage but these two scholars and others hold that the sphere of Being is quantitative not immaterial.

[2] See G. B. Kerford, The Sophistic Movement.

[3] See A. A. Long, "Aristotle and the History of Greek Scepticism," in Studies in Aristotle, Dominic J. O'Meara ed. , pp.79-206.

[4] Although in the standard translation of the Enneads by Stephen McKenna the term "metaphysics" is used in I, tr. 3, 3, 4, 5, it does not appear in the Greek original but only the terms philosophia, physica, mathematica, and dialectica.

[5] On the relation of Plotinus to Plato see Loyd P. Gerson's introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Plotinus that he edited, pp. 3-8. Gerson thinks that Plotinus principal polemic is against the materialism of the Stoics. In Plotinus emanation has both a positive aspects and a negative aspect as a fall (tolma); see Joseph Torchia, Plotinus: "Tolma", and the Descent of Being, pp. 130-131.

[6] For a view that the Muslim commentators were more faithful to Aristotle than is usually recognized see Arthur Hyman, "Averroes as Commentator on Aristotle's Theory of Intellect," in O'Meara, ed., Studies in Aristotle, pp.161-192. See also Edward Booth, O. P., Aristotelian Aporetic Ontology in Islamic and Christian Thinkers and Barry S. Cogan, "the Problem of Creation in Late Medieval Jewish Philosophy, " in Ruth Link-Salinger et al. eds., A Straight Path: Studies in Medieval Philosophy and Culture, pp. 159-173 for important relations between the metaphysics of these three monotheistic faiths.

[7] Physics I, 2, 185a 13-20;. Aquinas I, lect. 1, nn. 44-45.

[8] Ashley, Theologies of the Body: Humanist and Christian ,pp. 251-412.

[9] See Aquinas, S. Th. I, q. 1, a. 2. The circularity of such mental processes will be further discussed in Chapter VIII where it will be shown that this is not a vicious circularity.

[10] This point will be further discussed in Chapter VII.

[11] See Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. VI 1138b 18 sq. and Metaphysics Bk VI (Epsilon), c. 1 1025b 2-1026a 32.

[12] For example, Metaphysics IV, c, 3, 1005b 7.

[13] Aristotle, Metaphysics I, 1, 981a31-981b; Aquinas, S.Th. I. q. 1, a. 6 a.; q.112, a. 4, ad 1,

[14] See Cosmic and Metacosmic Theology in Aristotle's Lost Dialogues (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1991) Introduction by Giovanni Reale. I have used the Italian translation (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1989).

[15] On these matters see, Gérard Verbeke, "Aristotle's Metaphysics Viewed by the Ancient Greek Commentators," in O'Meara, Studies in Aristotle, pp. 107-128.

[16] The most recent most satisfactory analysis of Ockham's thought is that of Armand Mauer, The Philosophy of William of Ockham in the Light of His Principles. Maurer shows that Ockham's nominalism was a result of his theology with its emphasis on the freedom of the Creator.

See Nicholas of Autrecourt: His Correspondence with Master Giles and Bernard of Arezzo, a critical ed. of the Latin, with introduction, translation, and notes by L. M. Rijk: "In all his natural philosophy and metaphysics Aristotle hardly reached two evidently certain conclusions, perhaps not even a single one." p. 73. See also Julius B. Weinberg, Nicholas of Autrecourt: A Study in 14^th Century Thought , pp. 96-99.

[18] For Luther's views on Aquinas and the bad influence of the pagan Aristotle on theology see Denis Janz, Luther on Thomas Aquinas: The Angelic Doctor in the Thought of the Reformer, pp. 17-24; see also Robert H. Fischer, "A Reasonable Luther." Calvin's Institutes, although patristically learned and systematically arranged, make little use of philosophy; cf. Charles Parker, Calvin and Classical Philosopy and Wolliam J. Bouwsma, John Calvin: a Sixteenth Century Portrait in which Chapter I gives a good account of Calvin's education. It is fair to say that both great Reformers had only a thn acquaintance with the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition.

[19] Daniel Garber, Descartes' Metaphysical Physics; Nicholas Jolley, The Light of the Soul: Theories of Ideas in Leibnitz, Malebranche, and Descartes; and the Cambridge Companion to Descartes, ed. by John Collingham.

[20] He avoided, however, the notion of "empty space" by filling it with tight vortices of atoms, but did not explain how inalterable atoms if packed tight could move.

[21] See Richard P. McKeon, The Philosophy of Spinoza: The Unity of His Thought especially on his view of God, pp. 161-196; Herman De Dijn, Spinoza: The Way to Wisdom, and Margarie Grene, ed., Spinoza: A Collection of Critical Essays.

[22] See Benson Mates, The Philosophy of Leibnitz and R. S. Woolhouse, ed., Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz: Critical Assessments, 4 vols.

[23] It is important to note the semantic change in the notion of a priori knowledge that took place at this time. In Aristotelian and Thomistic thought knowledge always begins from the senses and proceeds to the intellect, hence a science proceeds from effect to cause (a posteriori). Once, however, the causes of the sensible effects have been demonstrated a posteriori, then the science proceeds to demonstrate the effects from the causes (a priori). On the contrary, in modern philosophy, especially since Kant, it is supposed that we have at least some a priori knowledge independent of and logically prior to sense experience.

[24] See John V. Burns, Dynamism in the Cosmology of Christian Wolff; and John E. Gurr, The Principle of Sufficient Reason in Some Scholastics Systems 1750-1900; also Lewis White Beck, Early German Philosophy: Kant and His Predecessors, pp. 256-275 and Richard J. Blackwell, "The Structure of Wolffian Philosophy," The Modern Schoolman, 38 (1960/1961) 203-218.

[25] "# 47. It should also be borne in mind that the role of philosophy itself has changed in modern culture. From universal wisdom and learning, it has been gradually reduced to one of the many fields of human knowing; indeed in some ways it has been consigned to a wholly marginal role. Other forms of rationality have acquired an ever higher profile, making philosophical learning appear all the more peripheral. These forms of rationality are directed not towards the contemplation of truth and the search for the ultimate goal and meaning of life; but instead, as "instrumental reason", they are directed-actually or potentially-towards the promotion of utilitarian ends, towards enjoyment or power." John Paul II, Fides et Ratio.

[26] See Stephen Gaukroger, Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early Modern Philosophy and Brian Bickers, ed., Francis Bacon. Also Aloysius P. Martinich, Thomas Hobbes, C. Leijenhorst, Hobbes and the Aristotelians: The Aristotelian Setting of Thomas Hobbes' Natural Philosophy and G. A. Rogers and Alan Ryan, eds., Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes.

[27] For a general survey see British Philosophy and the Age of the Enlightenment, Routledge History of Philosophy vol. VI, Stuart Brown, ed. On Locke see John W. Yolton, Locke: An especially his discussion of epistemology pp. 166-205 and on "Thinking Matter), pp. 148-166 as discussed in Locke's Essay on Understanding, Bk. II, c. x, and 27 and Bk IV c. 4. For other current interpretations of Locke's empiricism see Vere Chappell, Locke's Theory of Ideas" in The Cambridge Companion to Locke, pp.26-55 and Roger Woolhouse, "Locke's Theory of Knowledge", ibid., pp. 146-174. Also Michael R. Ayers, "The Foundations of Knowledge and the Logic of Substance: The Structure of Locke's General Philosophy" in Margaret Atherton ed., The Empiricists: Critical Essays on Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, pp. 19-45. Ayer does not entirely agree with Yolton's interpretation of Locke's doctrine of ideas.

[28] On Newton's theological and metaphysical views see Henry, John, "`Pray Do Not Ascribe That Notion to Me:' God and Newton's Gravity" in James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin, eds., The Books of Nature and Scripture: Recent Essays on Natural Philosophy, Theology, and Biblical Criticism in the Netherland's of Spinoza's Time and the British Isles of Newton's Time;. E. McGuire, Certain Philosophical Questions: Newton's Trinity Notebook; Edwin A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern S Science, originally a dissertation with the title Metaphysics of Sir Isaac Newton, rev. ed.. Newton's Philosophy of Nature, edited with notes by H. S. Thayer; and Religion, Science, and Worldview: Essays in Honor of Richard Westfall, edited by Margaret J. Osler and Paul Lawrence.

[29] See Herbert McLachlan, The Religious Opinions of Milton, Locke, and Newton. McLachlan is a proponent of Unitarianism but his study is well documented. These thinkers pushed the Protestant principal of freedom of individual conscience to its limits, and while retaining a belief in the Creator, the immortality of the soul, prophecy, and Biblical inspiration, rejected Church authority, the Trinity, and the Incarnation. Jesus was "savior" in the sense of model of virtue sent by God. Rejection of the Catholic doctrine of Eucharistic transubstantiation played a significant role in Locke's rejection of the scholastic views on substance. Thus these worldviews had a theological as well as a philosophical perspective.

[30] Jonathan F. Bennett, Locke Berkeley, Hume: Central Themes; A. A Luce, The Dialectic of Immaterials; An Account of Berkeley's "Principles"; Locke and Berkeley: a Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by C. B. Martin and D. M. Armstrong .

[31] See The Cambridge Companion to Hume, edited by David Fate Norton, Farhang Zabeah, Hume, Precursor of Modern Empiricism: An Analysis of His Opinions on Meaning, Metaphysics, Logic, and Mathematics; A. J. Ayer, Hume; Tom L. Beauchamp and Alexander Roseberg, , Hume and the Problem of Causation and David Fate Norton David Hume, Common-Sense Moralist, Sceptical Metaphysician; also Lewis White Beck , Essays on Kant and Hume; Ezra Talmor, Descartes and Hume; Terence Penelhum, David Hume: An Introduction to His Philosophical System; Williams Christopher, A Cultivated Reason: an Essay on Hume and Humeanism; and Julius R. Weinberg, Ockham, Descartes, and Hume: Self-Knowledge, Substances, and Causality. Hume's assumption that the empirical basis for the relation of cause and effect is their temporal succession is not admitted by Aristotelians for whom a proper cause and its effect must be simultaneous, for example, a billiard ball begins to move at the moment it is struck. Also it should be noted that Ockham denied that relations are real.

[32] See Thomas Reid, An Inquiry Into the Human Mind: On the Principle of Commons Sense, ed. by Derek R. Brookes; M and. A. Stewart, "The Scottish Enlightenment" in British Philosophy and the Age of the Enlightenment, Routledge History of Philosophy vol. VI, pp. 274-308. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology.

[33] Signe Toksvig, Emmanuel Swedenborg: Scientist and Mystic.

[34] According to Otfried Höffe, Immanuel Kant, trans by Marshall Farrier, pp. 201-208 and the extensive study of Stephen R. Palmquist, Kant's Critical Religion, vol. 2 of Kant's System of Perspectives Kant's aim was not to reject Christianity but to give it a critical foundation according to which no religion can be true except insofar as it conforms to the disinterested type of morality that Kant supported.

[35] The Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed. by Paul Guyet, Lewis White Beck, Essays on Kant and Hume;); Piotr Hoffman. The Anatomy of Idealism: Kant, Hegel, and Marx. H. J. De Vleeschauwer, The Development of Kantian Thought: The History of a Doctrine and Albert W. J. Harper, Discussion and Commentary on Kant's Critique; Henry E. Allison, Idealism and Freedom: Essays on Kant's Theoretical and Practical Philosophy.

[36] "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within. I have not to search for them and conjecture them as though they were veiled in darkness or were in the transcendent region beyond my horizon; I see them before me and connect them directly with the consciousness of my existence. The former begins from the place I occupy in the external world of sense, and enlarges my connection therein to an unbounded extent with worlds upon worlds and systems of systems, and moreover into limitless times of their periodic motion, its beginning and continuance. The second begins from my invisible self, my personality, and exhibits me in a world which has true infinity, but which is traceable only by the understanding, and with which I discern that I am not in a merely contingent but in a universal and necessary connection, as I am also thereby with all those visible worlds. The former view of a countless multitude of worlds annihilates as it were my importance as an animal creature, which after it has been for a short time provided with vital power, one knows not how, must again give back the matter of which it was formed to the planet it inhabits (a mere speck in the universe). The second, on the contrary, infinitely elevates my worth as an intelligence by my personality, in which the moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality and even of the whole sensible world, at least so far as may be inferred from the destination assigned to my existence by this law, a destination not restricted to conditions and limits of this life, but reaching into the infinite." Kant, The Critique of Practical Reason, Conclusion, T. K. Abbott's trans., available on Internet eserver.org.philosophy/kant/critique-of-practical reason. txt.

[37] While Kant viewed human nature pessimistically caught in a struggle between emotion and reason, Rousseau emphasized the goodness of human feeling uncorrupted by civilization. Yet, since Kant's moral theory was very abstract, he tended to look to Rousseau's notion of a "moral sense" to give it a more concrete character.

[38] See John D. Mullen, Kierkegaard's Philosophy and Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard.

[39] See Patrick Gardner, Schopenhauer and Christopher Janaway, Self and World in Schopenhauer's Philosophy.

[40] See Ronald Hayman, Nietzche: Nietzche's Voices.

[41] See R. D. Rollinger, Husserl's Position in the School of Brentano; Joseph J. Kocklemans, Edmund Husserl's Phenomenology and Robert Sokolowski, ed, Edmund Husserl and the Phenomenological Tradition.

[42] See Cambridge Companion to Sartre.

[43] "For if there is any theological program to be deduced from Heidegger and grafted on to any current theology, it comes down to a form of quietism. Heidgger offers the possibility of a divine God being revealed to us, though one that is far removed from the God of biblical revelation, and about whom we cannot say anything at all. ," Kevin Hart, The Trespassing of the Sign: Deconstruction, Philosophy, and Theology, p. 94.

[44] James G. Kennedy, Herbert Spencer and Herbert Spencer: Contemporary Assessments;

[45] See Pragmatism, R. D. Hollinger and David DePew, eds.,; Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy; A Genealogy of Pragmatism. On Peirce see Living Doubt: Essays Concerning the Epistemology of Charles Saunders Peirce.

[46] For Humanist Manifesto I that uses the term "religion" and II that rejects it see The New Humanist 33 (Jan.-Feb), 1973, pp. 13-14 and 4-9) respectively. Dewey's A Common Faith states his secular humanist faith.

[47] See P. A. Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap; Michael Friedman, Reconsidering Logical Positivism. For an answer to the attacks on metaphysics by Logical Positivism and related theories see Max Horkheimer, "The Latest Attack on Metaphysics," trans. By M. J. O'Connell in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, pp. 132-187.

[48] See Routledge History of Philosophy, Vol. X, Philosophy of the English Speaking World in the Twentieth Century for a good survey. See also, Cambridge Companion to Bertrand Russell, Nicholas Griffin, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2001); Ann Banfield, The Phantom Table: Wolff, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism; Bertrand Russell: Critical Assessments, 4 vols., Andrew Irvine, ed.; Victor Lowe, Understanding Whitehead: 1901-1947, 2 vols.; George P. Lucas, The Rehabilitation of Whitehead: An Analytic and Historical Assessment of Process Philosophy.

[49] Lesek Koakowski. Bergson and John Mullarkey, Bergson and Philosophy.

[50] Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman, Gödel's Proof, Harry J. Gensler, Gödel's Theorem Simplified and Egan Boerger, Erich Gradel, and Yuri Gurevich, The Classical Decision Problem.

[51] Lewis E. Hahn, The Philosophy of P. F. Strawson, Introduction by P. A. Schilpp.

[52] See the analysis of Mark Lilla, "The Politics of Jacques Derrida", The New York Review of Books, June 25, 1998, pp. 36-41. For a detailed and generally positive analysis of Derrida's work in relation to Kant, Nietzche, and Heidegger in Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign, note 44 above..

[53] See Gerald McCool, Catholic Theology in the Nineteenth Centuryand From Unity to Pluralism: The Internal Evolution of Thomism and his excellent shorter treatment The Neo-Thomists. McCool, however, largely ignores the trend the Aristotleian trend in Thomism in the United States that I favor.. See also Thomas O' Meara, O.P., Romantic Idealism and Roman Catholicism: Schelling and the Theologians for an account of this conflict.

[54] "#30 And here it is well to note that our philosophy can only by the grossest injustice be accused of being opposed to the advance and development of natural science. For, when the Scholastics, following the opinion of the holy Fathers, always held in anthropology that the human intelligence is only led to the knowledge of things without body and matter by things sensible, they well understood that nothing was of greater use to the philosopher than diligently to search into the mysteries of nature and to be earnest and constant in the study of physical things…Moreover, in this very age many illustrious professors of the physical sciences openly testify that between certain and accepted conclusions of modern physics and the philosophic principles of the schools there is no conflict worthy of the name." #31.While, therefore, We hold that every word of wisdom, every useful thing by whomsoever discovered or planned, ought to be received with a willing and grateful mind, We exhort you, venerable brethren, in all earnestness to restore the golden wisdom of St. Thomas, and to spread it far and wide for the defense and beauty of the Catholic faith, for the good of society, and for the advantage of all the sciences. The wisdom of St. Thomas, We say; for if anything is taken up with too great subtlety by the Scholastic doctors, or too carelessly stated -- if there be anything that ill agrees with the discoveries of a later age, or, in a word, improbable in whatever way -- it does not enter Our mind to propose that for imitation to Our age." Aeterni Patris.

[55] Fides et Ratio¸ n. 49.

[56] Ibid.,