THE SEARCH FOR WISDOM

In previous chapters I attempted to provide a multidisciplinary and multicultural context for the achievement of a genuine Human Wisdom and in particular to show that a careful analysis of the foundational part of natural science makes clear that natural science is not this Wisdom but is the necessary path to it. In this chapter I will try to bring all this to provide an adequate defense for a science of First Philosophy validly constituting that Human Wisdom. Therefore I ask the patience of the reader with the repetition of previous arguments that will be necessary to summarize all the elements of this defense.

In the last chapter the foundations of natural science were analyzed and it was shown that natural science cannot explain the world of change without ultimately concluding that is the effect of immaterial causes that exceed the scope of its own principles and method. It was shown that this is true also of the other practical and theoretical sciences because they must be are grounded in natural science. Therefore, since natural science cannot serve as First Philosophy, neither can they. Thus the first of the four scientific questions about First Philosophy seems adequately answered, namely, "Does a First Philosophy exist?" in the sense that there exists a proper subject for such a science formally distinct from that of natural science and the other sciences derived from natural science. It must be a science grounded in our knowledge of material being, since that is the formal object of the human intelligence, in which immaterial being is only potentially included, but whose scope can be extended beyond material being to immaterial being once it has been proved that the ultimate cause of material things cannot be material. From this point on, however, I drop the terms "Metaphysics" and "First Philosophy," in spite of the great tradition behind them, both because of the ambiguities that I have described in the modern use of the term "philosophy" and of the medieval confusions about the adjective "First" produced by Scotus' reading of Aristotle. This will entail some awkwardness in ascribing (except in quotations) to other authors who speak of "metaphysics" a term "Meta-Science" that they do not use, but I hope this warning to the reader will suffice. Today the term "meta" as in "meta-mathematics" or "meta-linguistics" is common enough to indicate a reflection over the principles and methods of a discipline that presupposes the details of that discipline itself. Consequently it should be clear that "Meta-Science" presupposes the other special species. Some ambiguity remains, of course, due to the fact that the term "science" commonly brings to mind natural science rather than any of the other disciplines. Perhaps this is not too confusing, since my contention is that natural science has an epistemological priority to the other sciences. In any case I use the term "science" in the broad Aristotelian sense of any discipline that is critical, systematic, and attains at least some certain conclusions.

This brings us to the second scientific question about Meta-Science, "Granted that a proper subject exists for such an autonomous science (the answer to Scientific Question 1) exactly what is this subject essentially? (Question 2)." "Immaterial" is a purely negative notion of this subject, but for Meta-Science to be a science it must seek a positive knowledge of the essence of its own subject and from that essence as their cause demonstrate the subject's properties (Questions 3 and 4). Does this mean that the subject of Meta-Science is about immaterial being, or does its subject include both, material and immaterial being, as it would seem an architectonic science must do? Does the subject of Meta-Science also include the First Cause that utterly transcends other kinds of being? And further, how can such a "science of everything" leave any room for the autonomy of natural science, mathematics, ethics, and logic?

Since immaterial beings are only known to exist as the cause of material beings, their essences must knowable through their effects. Effects must somehow resemble their cause, since a cause can only give to its effects what itself already possesses. Yet "Being as Being" if is taken to include all reality, both material and immaterial, at first seems an utterly empty notion. John Duns Scotus argued that since "being" can be said of anything that in anyway exists in that sense that whatever exists is not nothing, being as it is the subject of Meta-Science should be understood in the precise same sense univocally of everything that exists. [1] He held that Being in this univocal sense is the most universal concept we possess and is presupposed to all our other concepts. Hence Meta-Science as the science of Being as Being is epistemologically first among the sciences.

It might seem that this would make "Being" a generic concept of which every kind of being would be a species. Scotus, however, did not consider "Being" a genus, but instead distinguished between degrees (modes) of Being. Thus he held that God is Infinite Being and creatures are finite being, though are both Being in exactly the same sense. In this Scotus was true to the Augustinian tradition of the Franciscan Order and ultimately to St. Augustine's Platonic background, since for Plato all things emanate from the One in descending degrees of intensity of being, like rays emanating from the sun grow dimmer and dimmer.

Yet it seems evident that the subject of this Meta-Science cannot be known simply negatively, since Being that is merely "not-nothing" is meaningless except as a negative of "something" that is positive. For Scotus, therefore, Being must have meant primarily all that is really possible. Hence in proving the existence of God he prefers to proceed from the possibility that God exists rather than from the changeable beings that by our senses we know actually exist. He insisted on this way of proving God's existence because what is possible is necessarily so, while what we known from our senses as actually existing is only contingent and thus only hypothetically necessary. While he accepted Aristotle's insistence that we know reality only by the aid of our senses, he held that this restriction is either due to original sin or simply for the sake of harmony among the spiritual and bodily faculties. This limitation does not prevent us, he says, from directly grasping the univocal notion of Being as Being as it actually includes all really possible being. [2]

For Aristotle and Aquinas, however, as was said in the discussion of the Four Scientific Questions in Chapter IV, we cannot know what is possible except from what is actual. Is not Aquinas, therefore, on firmer grounds in following the view developed in the last chapter when he begins from our knowledge of changeable being and moves through the proof that such being is the effect of a First Immaterial Cause? It is, of course, true that this changeable being known through the senses factual necessity is contingent, but although it is contingent, it does certainly in fact exist, and such necessity is sufficient for a logically necessary demonstration of the existence of the First Cause. That the existence of the First Cause has an absolute, not merely a factual existence, that is, that it exists necessarily, can then be shown in Meta-Science. In this way Scotus' daring but dubious attempt to show that the existence of an infinite Being is possible can be avoided.

The efforts of Suarez and later Leibnitz and Christian Wolff to follow Scotus in making the subject of Meta-Science Philosophy also extend to all possible being prior to proving the existence of the First Cause also left them open to the charge of accepting Anselm of Canterbury's (1033-1109) famous "ontological proof" of God's existence. [3] Anselm attempted to show that from the fact that we can conceive of a "Perfect Being " such a Being must exist, otherwise it would not be perfect. Aquinas pointed out the fallacy of such an argument lies in the false assumption that we not only think about a Perfect Being by negating the imperfections found in contingent beings, but that we cannot know what a Perfect Being would be positively. Thus we know that God's existence is possible only when we have first proved that in fact he exists. Kant, however, tried to reduce all proofs of God's existence to Anselm's proof and then to show that all such proofs are based on the same fallacy. [4] But Aristotle's demonstration and Aquinas' expansion of it in the Five Ways does not rest on this fallacious assumption.[5]

A special difficulty not found in the special sciences arises in the case of Meta-Science. Natural science is primarily about all substances that can be classified in the Category of Substance descending from the broadest genus down to the species of changeable things. The name of a genus applies to all its species in exactly the same sense (univocally). For example, vertebrate and invertebrate animals are very different, yet they are all called animals, living substances that have sensation, in exactly the same sense.

Secondarily, natural science is about the properties of these substances, but again these properties can be classified in the nine Aristotelian categories of accidents, and in each category the genera and species will have univocal names. It is only when we try to find names that apply to both substances and their accidents, or to more than one of the categories of accidents, that our terms become "equivocal," that is, have more than one sense so that we must be careful to make making proper distinctions between their different uses. Thus, the terms "change" used for both substantial and accidental change, or "property" used both for "place" and for "time" are equivocal, yet not merely equivocal, since the terms in question are not simply unrelated sounds but refer to things that have a real relation to each other and can be named analogically. Accidents exist in substances and qualify them, and the property of place is related to that of time. Hence the use of the same word to signify different but related things is a form of equivocation or use of a name called "analogy."

Similarly in mathematics in geometry words like "point," "line," plane, "solid" and their various species are univocal. It is especially this univocity of its language that makes mathematics so clear. Hence in every science we seek to find as univocal a terminology as possible in order to get precision and avoid confusion. It is important, however, as Ralph McInerny has shown, [6] to note that, properly speaking, "analogy" has to do only with the use of words or terms, and as such pertains to logic and hence will be more fully discussed in Chapter IX. We use analogical terms to talk about related realities, but the realities and their relations are not properly "analogical" since any reality is what it is and not several different things. It is only the processes of human thought and the inadequacy of human language in which we express that thought that lead us to understand something we do not understand through what we know better and express it by analogical terms.

Yet in an improper sense we can speak of the "analogy of being" insofar as these human limitations force us to use analogical language to call different but related beings by the same name. The reality before us, however, is that of many kinds of being that exist in very different ways and that can be included under the single name of "Being" only by reason of their relations to each other, not because they can be reduced to a single genus, nor even, as Scotus claimed, to degrees or intensities of a single kind of perfection. To suppose that the difference between the necessary First Cause and its contingent effects is only a matter of degree, even when it is said to be "infinite," cannot be decided at the level of the establishment of the subject of Meta-Science, but will be taken up later when the question of the nature of the First Cause is addressed positively. Thus in contrast to any Platonic reduction of all beings to a single notion of Being, the Aristotelian-Thomistic view of the subject of Meta-Science is aimed at preserving the uniqueness of every existing being while maintaining their intricate interrelatedness.

There has also been considerable controversy on whether "Being" (ens commune) as the subject of Meta-Science is known conceptually or by a judgment. Yet it should be clear that its employment as the subject of Meta-Science requires that Question 1,"Does it exist?" be answered and thus that the judgment made that "Being" as ens commune exists means that all the items included under that term exist, have ultimate actuality, their actus essendi. The truth of this judgment is evident once the existence of immaterial beings has been established in the way already shown in Chapter IV but only then. The subject of Meta-Science, therefore, is not known simply by the intuition of a concept but by a judgment of existence. Yet the judgment the "Being is" or "has esse" would be meaningless unless the subject of the judgment "Being "in the sense of ens commune were somehow known conceptually, even although only analogically. It is precisely the work of judgmental predication to actualize or clarify what is only potential or implicit in the subject of that judgment.

Thus when we make the judgment, "Water is H2O" we are defining or making clear what "water" is and answering Question 2,"What is it? We could not make that judgment unless we first knew that "Water is (exists)" and thus had answered Question 1. Yet, as I have said before, this implies that in answering Question 1 we have at least some vague notion of what "Water" is simply in knowing that it exists. In answering both Questions 1 and 2, therefore, we are taking two steps in our clarification of our knowledge of some object. Similarly to judge that "Being as such" (ens commune) as it is the subject of Meta-Science "is" clarifies the meaning of the concept "Being as such" by making explicit that precisely what all the kinds of being that are included in "Being as such" have analogically in common is the actuality of esse. They do not, however, have esse as if they were species in a genus, nor, as Scotus thought, simply by the degree in which they are remote from non-being, but analogically, that is, in ways that are in some respect or other similar, yet more different than alike. In this way Aristotle and Aquinas save both the real diversity of the substances that make up our universe yet leave room for their many relationships. Hence it is an exaggeration to assert, as some do, that according to Aquinas the subject of Meta-Science is Esse, to be, as if all real things have in themselves some common reality called Esse. That would return us to the Scotistic univocation. It is only the analogical comm-unity of all these beings that permits them to be considered in the one Meta-Science.

Thus Meta-Science has no data of its own but compares and relates the findings of the special sciences, since its subject is too diverse to be reduced to a single genus or degrees within a single common essence. Existents are often only minimally like each other, as different as a man from an oyster or an oyster from a quasar, and (if we have proved they exist) angels from material bodies, and above all the Creator from the creation. Each kind of being is a being in a unique way and only in the First Cause is every possible way of being positively realized. Therefore, to talk about all these diverse but related realities we must use the analogical term "being" and are justified in speaking, although, improperly, of the "analogy of being." We must keep in mind, however, that there is no such thing "as Being" distinct from all these diverse beings. Ens commune, the subject of Meta-Science is "common" only in that all these different kinds of beings are variously related to each other.

Although material and immaterial things are so different that they cannot be simply reduced to a single genus or to modes of a single kind of being, it is not fallacious to reason from what we know by observation of material things to conclude something about their immaterial causes. Aquinas points out that reasoning that extends to immaterial entities is of three kinds and can be expressed in analogical terms is three ways. [7]

First, as already shown, it must be based on relations of cause and effect, since only if we reason from material effects to immaterial causes, can we be sure that our conclusions are existential or real.

Second, since a cause is equal to or greater than its effects, we must extrapolate from the observed effects in our material world to concepts of immaterial reality that exceed anything we know directly. Thus we should attribute to immaterial substances only the positive properties of material things. Moreover these properties must first exist in their immaterial causes in a greater perfection than in their material effects, because they are not limited by the material conditions to which they are necessarily subject in these effects. If there are spirits they are far more intelligent than we are and far more powerful, because their intelligences are not limited by dependence on bodies.

Third, we must be careful not to think that our conceptions of these more perfect things are adequate. Immaterial things far exceed our capacity to understand them essentially, since what we know of them is minimal compared to the reality. Some writers argue that immaterial reality, if it exists at all, must be so different than material reality that nothing meaningful can be said about it. This argument, however, is refuted by the fact that we can demonstrate the existence of immaterial things from their observable material effects and it would be contradictory to say that a cause in no way resembles its effects, since that amounts to saying that it gives what it does not have.

These three ways of reasoning by causality, eminence, and negation enable Meta-Science to arrive at a true, though very modest, idea of the totality of reality far greater than our limited powers of direct observation. Thus Meta-Science is valid but is especially to be called "philosophy," the love of wisdom, rather than wisdom itself. Yet Aristotle rightly says that although our knowledge of divine things is minimal it is worth more than all our knowledge of lesser things that we can know so much better. [8] Thus by the natural science proof of the existence of ens commune (Common Being) that includes both the totality of material things as effects and things that are not material at least as their causes, we can proceed to a more positive knowledge of the totality of the real. But we must always reason from what we sensibly experience to what we cannot experience or express except in analogical terms.

Thus the proper subject of Meta-Science is "Being" taken in all its many different but related senses. As previously mentioned, Thomists have often compared this formal subject to that of the other speculative sciences by using the notion of "three degrees of abstraction" proposed by the great Thomistic commentator, Thomas de Vio, Cardinal Cajetan. (1469-1534). [9] According to this schema, natural science is of the first degree of abstraction simply by the fact that all science is of universals, mathematics is of the second degree by abstracting quantity from material substance and its other properties, while logic and Meta-Science are of the third degree of abstraction, since they wholly transcend the conditions of matter. This is correct provided that it is not understood as if these "degrees" were three steps in one process, since in fact the three processes are of different types.

Moreover, while mathematical abstraction (the only type Aristotle calls by that name [10]) excludes all of material being except its quantity, meta-scientific "abstraction" includes all reality, material and immateriality but in a totality who unity is merely relational. Since this book follows Aristotle's epistemology, as did Aquinas, I will henceforth use "Being" (as such) with a capital as an analogical term, grounded in existence by the relation of cause and effect and able to be used to understand something of the essential natures of immaterial entities. Thus we can proceed from the demonstration of the existence of Being as it includes both material and immaterial beings to a consideration of the essences of immaterial beings in relation to material beings.

The question of whether God, as First Cause, is included in the subject of Meta-Science is a famous question. Avicenna was thought to deny this to be so, but later Averroes, Duns Scotus, and Suarez held (though in different ways) that God is included in the meta-scientific concept of Being. [11] Aquinas explicitly denies that God is included in Being as Being in the sense of ens commune, since he is the cause and principle of ens commune not a part of it. [12] The question of how creatures can be said to "participate" in God's being will be discussed later. Thus it is better to say that to know the first Cause is the aim or goal of Meta-Science rather than its subject.

Granted that although the special sciences generally have univocal subjects Meta-Science can only have an analogical one, how are we to define it essentially? From the time of the Greek Aristotelian commentators there have been heated arguments about what this proper subject of Meta-Science might be. Platonizing commentators supposed that since Meta-Science concerns immaterial things it is primarily a theology (theos, "divine" and logos, "science of ") although one based on reason not faith. Others consider it to be an ontology (ontos, "being, " logos, word -the term was invented in the eighteenth century by Christian Wolff- treating of Being as Being. Giovanni Reale has shown, however, that Aristotle's Metaphysics is at the same time a theology, an ontology, a study of the causes or etiology (aitai, causes), and an epistemology (episteme, scientific knowledge). [13]

What, indeed, does "to exist" (Latin esse, "to be," the act of existing) signify? From the outset Aristotle and Aquinas in opposing Plato separated themselves from any form of idealism by saying that "to be" first of all means to be independent of the human mind. Berkeley's famous assertion esse est percipi, "to be is to be perceived" is thus radically inconsistent with Aristotle's view that the proper object of the human intelligence is the essence of material things that existed before we did and will exist after we are gone.[15] One might of course argue that perhaps someone else knew them before I did and no doubt will know them after I am gone, but as they clearly exist independent of my mind, there is no sufficient reason to suppose that they depend on your mind or on any human mind whatsoever. [16] Thus for Aristotle the purely mental relations that are the proper object of logic are "beings" only in a secondary sense that we reserve for the discussion of that discipline later.

Mind-independence, however, is not the only note of the analogical term "Being." As we have seen in the last chapter, in establishing the foundations of natural science in the Physics Aristotle demonstrated that the nine categories of accidents depend for their existence on substance, which alone is independently existing being. Hence the "Being" that is the proper subject of Meta-Science, although it can also be said of accidents that have a kind of being dependent on substances, is principally said of substances, material or immaterial, that are mind-independent primary existents. It is said of accidents, whether they are properties or mere accidents only secondarily. Moreover, contrary to Scotus, Leibnitz, etc., the subject of Meta-Science cannot be possible being. For something, whether it is caused or uncaused, to exist (Latin esse, Greek einai) must be not only "outside nothing" but also "outside any cause." The purely possible, if it does not exist in a cause that actually exists, does not exist at all. It is only a mental construct that for all one knows about it may even be self-contradictory. Since it is nothing it cannot be the subject of any science.

Since, however, that there are many kinds of "to be" that are only analogically alike, if the term "Being" is to have specific content we must determine which kind of being is best known to us and then look for its relations of likeness and unlikeness to other modes of "to be." We have also seen that the kind of being that for us is the principal analogate through which we must know other kinds of being by causal connections is ens mobile "becoming being" not static being. We know material things only as we interact with them and change them and are changed by them. We come to know them essentially only by watching their uniform behavior. In the first phase of its history modern science largely ignored the fact that any scientist-observer is part of what she or he observes. With Einstein and quantum physics it has become apparent that this is never entirely true. We are part of the universe and can know it only as it interacts with us. Yet surely it is unreasonable to suppose that material things change only when we think about them, an odd notion entertained by some writers on quantum physics. [17]

How then can "all that which is" be defined? Obviously "to be," since it is the most general feature of all reality, cannot be defined by classifying it under some broader term and distinguishing it from other things. But, as we have already seen, Aristotle in the Posterior Analytics and Physics proposed a more profound way of defining than merely by classification, namely, through a causal analysis in terms of the four "causes: (Greek aitiai), material, formal, efficient, and final. He did this by showing that the proper subject of natural science, namely, changeable being (ens mobile) is intelligible only if every changeable thing is constituted from an actual principle by reason of which it is what it is. Yet precisely because it is changeable it is also constituted by a correlative potential principle by which it is capable of becoming something else. This analysis establishes the existence of actual causes (formal causes) and potential causes (material causes) as the intrinsic components defining any changing thing.

Aristotle, by also showing that nothing can move itself because it cannot give itself the new actuality it does not yet have, proved that change would be impossible unless extrinsic efficient causes (the ordinary English meaning of "cause") and final causes also exist. As shown already, by final cause Aristotle did not mean either some conscious purpose in things or some other occult type of efficient causality, as some suppose. He simply meant that since science is about uniform changes that result in relatively stable states of affairs, it primarily studies those natural changes that are repeated and therefore predetermined in their effects. This predetermination of natural efficient causes, their "directedness" is what Aristotle meant by final causation (teleology) and this is necessarily a part of scientific explanation.[18]

Therefore, this same method of analysis as that which the Physics applies to material beings can be applied to ens commune, the totality of contingent known or knowable things that exist, whether material or immaterial, but only reasoning from effect to cause. Thus we must conclude that in the case of existing material things there must be not only a composition of matter and form to constitute their essences, but also a composition of essence and existence as really distinct actuality and potentiality to account for their factual not merely their possible existence.

If material things were not thus composed of essence and existence as distinct principles analogous to their composition from matter and form, they would exist necessarily. Hence they would be unchangeable even as regards local motion. By analogy the same must be true of immaterial things that are the causes of material things. Although pure spirits are not mortal, since they have no bodies, and thus once they exist retain a permanent existence, this existence and its conservation is the effect of the First Cause, and hence, as argued in Chapter IV, is only a hypothetical or conditional existence. Thus only the absolutely first immaterial Uncaused Cause has an existence that is identical with its essence and hence is absolutely necessary. Thus all beings other than the First Cause are contingent, that is, they do not exist necessarily, or to put it another way, they are constituted from existential acts really distinct from their essences, a distinction that remains in their existential state. Esse is the actus essendi, an act by which an essence is part of our real world.

This is the famous Thomistic "real distinction "between essence and existence in creatures and their identity in the First Cause," [19] mentioned in the previous two chapters. This distinction was vigorously rejected by many medieval and baroque scholastics. Scotus and Suarez as mentioned in Chapter IV did not hold, as did Aristotle and Aquinas, that matter is pure potency in a strict sense, but assigned to it a certain degree of positive being, while Scotus held that God could have created prime matter with any further form, since prime matter has a minimal actuality of its own. [20] Hence for Scotus and Suarez the analogy between the matter-form relation and the essence-existence relation had to mean that essence has a positive entity of its own apart from existence such that they one can speak of the esse essentiae and the esse existentiae of things. Thus existence would be added to an essence that already had its own esse These authors could not admit this real distinction because it seemed to them that this meant that created things would not be absolutely contingent but would have a certain innate necessity, a notion absolutely repugnant theologically, especially to Scotus who wished above all to emphasize the absolute freedom of the Creator. Consequently these authors rejected the Thomistic view. Scotus held that essence and existence are only formally distinct in thought although he did not deny that this distinction was somehow founded in reality. [21] For Suarez this foundation was simply the fact that the existence of the thing is the result of the efficient causality of the Creator. [22]

If with Aquinas we hold that there is a real, not simply a formal distinction of essence and existence in contingent beings, does the subject of Meta-Science include or exclude the First Cause? To this query Aquinas answers that the First Cause, as the absolutely Prime Mover in whom alone essence and existence are identical, is not included in the subject of Meta-Science, since this First Cause infinitely exceeds realities whose existence it causes. Nevertheless some understanding of the First Cause is possible within Meta-Science not indeed as part of its subject but as the principle or cause of the subject. Hence it is not the subject but the aim or goal of to make use what we can know of its subject, namely, contingent Being as Being (ens commune), to arrive by reasoning from effects to cause at some knowledge of their Creator. It is this knowledge of the Creator that is most truly the Human Wisdom that we seek.

Therefore the subject of Meta-Science is defined (or better, described, since it is an analogical term that cannot be classified in a genus) as all existent substances, whether material or immaterial, as they are contingent, i.e., composed of an essence (the potential) really distinct from their existence (the actual) and considered precisely as existing in various modes that are related as causes or effects of each other in subordination to the First Uncaused Cause as their ultimate principle.

Note that in this definition the subject of Meta-Science is not (as I will show later in this chapter some Thomists seem to claim) esse, the "to be," or act of being (actus essendi) or ens ut participium (being as a particle, be-ing) but "Being as Being," that is, primarily all existing substances as they are actual in their substantial, independent existence and secondarily the properties of these substances as these exist in their proper substances. This means that the formality under which this subject of (the substances taken together analogically, ens commune) is known is esse, because esse is their ultimate act and perfection. Yet the subject of Meta-Science it is not merely this formality, as such, but what is known through that formality, namely the totality of existing substances and their properties in their analogical relations..

Thus when it is to said that this subject is "Being as Being," the term "Being" is used in two different senses. "Being" as subject of the judgment "Being is" (and as subject of Meta-Science) is Being as substance (ens ut nomen, Being taken as a noun), while "Being" taken as predicate and the formality under which Meta-Science studies substances is "Being" as the ultimate act of existence (esse� ens ut participium, being as a participle, that is as be-ing, a verbal term indicating an action) in distinction from the essence of the subject. In all contingent substances these are distinct. Hence just as the subject of natural science is ens mobile, changeable being, that is, real substances that change, studied precisely under the formality of change; and the subject of mathematics is real substances considered precisely under their formality of having the property of quantity abstracted from their other properties, so the subject of Meta-Science is all that is real, habens esse� namely all material and immaterial substances along with their properties, under that formality of esse. Since the esse of each and every real thing is their ultimate act without which they would neither exist nor be intelligible, all our knowledge and each of our sciences is accessible to us only through the esse of things. Yet it is only Meta-Science, Human Wisdom that has as its proper task to consider all things under the formality of their interrelated yet marvelously diverse and dynamic existences.

Thus Meta-Science must be an "ontology" because its proper subject is Being, i.e., the totality of contingent beings considered under the formality of what is analogically common to them all, esse. It must, however, also be a "theology" because, though the First Cause is not part of the subject of Meta-Science, it is goal. Finally it is an "epistemology" because it treats of Truth as it is a property of Being as such and thus provides a critique of all the special sciences. Finally it is (to use another modern term) an "axiology" (study of values, from Greek axios, "worth") because it also treats of Goodness as a property of Being.

I have pointed out that the notion of a Meta-Science makes sense only in the context of Aristotle's system and to those who accept that system in its foundational terms, principles, and theorems. Yet, of course, it is common to speak of the "Meta-Science" of many types of worldview. Is the term Meta-Science or metaphysics meaningful when used outside its Aristotelian context? There are four senses in which, it seems to me, the term serves a purpose.

First this is the sense in which something like a Meta-Science has often been defined as "the study of ultimate questions." For example, it is in this sense that John Paul II has used it in his encyclical Fides et Ratio where he says that philosophies, though different in method and perspective, have a responsibility to go beyond mere superficialities and face ultimate questions. It is in this sense also that Plato was a great meta-scientist and so were Hindu thinkers like Shankara and Ramanuja and Chinese thinkers like Lao Tse and Mo Tzu. In this sense Kant, though he attacked traditional Meta-Science in the Wolffian form that he knew it, was a great meta-scientist. It was by reviving this question that Martin Heidegger, in spite of his obscurity and political scandal, became the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century. Thus every thinker who seeks to get to the bottom of thought about the world and human life is in that sense a "meta-scientist."

A second sense in which something like a "Meta-Science" is relevant is with regard to denote systems of thought that try to answer the question "Is ultimate reality spiritual not material?" In this sense the majority of the great thinkers of the world have made some room in their thought for a non-material Absolute or a God, but not all. Some important philosophers have been materialists like the Stoics or Marxists yet they have not been merely superficial thinkers. Indeed they have tried to show that materialism is the honest answer to these ultimate questions. One could, therefore, by a certain stretch of the term, speak of Stoic or Marxists "Meta-Science" or "ontology." In a sense Idealism in all its many forms, like the very different idealisms of Berkeley or Hegel, support a Meta-Science, because Idealism posits a non-material mind or Mind, such as the Transcendent Subject. One must even admit that the various occultists and theosophists, whose serious intellectual claims are minimal, have the right to speak of their fancies as "Meta-Science" in that they posit the existence of a spiritual realm. Yet insofar as these idealist systems deny or minimize the reality of the material world they are not the meta-scientists in the Aristotelian way of understanding the term, since for this Meta-Science explicitly recognizes and studies both material and immaterial realities.

Still a third sense of the term "meta-scientific" refers to systems that claim some kind of knowledge a priori in relation to sense knowledge as the basis of philosophy without prejudging whether there is a spiritual world or not. Again Plato, Descartes, Kant and the great Idealists are also meta-scientists in this sense.

Fourth, one could say that to compare and discuss in dialogue any worldview and value system is a meta-scientific or meta-scientific task, since it requires a dialogue between those that in some sense defend some kind of meta-science and those that are opposed to all such systems. One can imagine a meaningful dialogue between the logical positivist Rudolf Carnap who considered Meta-Science "meaningless nonsense" and the "process" philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) who proposed an acknowledgedly hypothetical Meta-Science. Any discussion about what is "meaningful" and what is not can profoundly deal with ultimate questions, if only both sides will admit that it is worthwhile discussing what is the "meaning of meaning." Perhaps this could include even Deconstructionists.

Thus the very notions of interdisciplinarity and intercultural dialogue or "ecumenism" depend on an exploration of the presuppositions of different intellectual perspectives.

I have, however, based my exposition of a Meta-Science on the thought of Aristotle and Aquinas, precisely because they offer us a well thought out defense of the validity of a Meta-Science that asks ultimate questions in the context of an empirical argument for the existence of a spiritual realm. Even an anti-foundationalist or deconstructionist who honestly doubts that any privileged "foundations" can be found for thought, must confess that this anti-foundational conviction is itself "foundational" in the sense that it must be debated in any attempt at dialogue. Thus those dialogue partners who wish to question the Aristotelian-Thomist argument for the existence of immaterial being must do so either with empirical counter evidence, a criticism of their logic, or a defense of their own position on the basis of a non-empirical epistemology. Of course, since Duns Scotus in the Late Middle Ages and Francisco Suarez in the sixteenth century and especially since Ren� Descartes in the seventeenth century, it has been denied that Aquinas' Aristotelianism is a valid approach to these fundamental questions. In direct contradiction to Aristotle Descartes held that physics (natural science) is derived from Meta-Science. [23]

Admirers of Aquinas' thought today are among the most ardent current defenders of the validity of Meta-Science. Yet some Thomists also claim that St. Thomas' Meta-Science (metaphysics) is radically different from Aristotle's. Since my own opinion is that the understanding of the Meta-Science developed by these two thinkers is essentially the same and is founded on the conclusions of foundational natural science, I will devote considerable space in the rest of this chapter to these difficulties.

In Chapter II seven current interpretations of Aquinas were listed: (1) Essentialist or Conceptualist, (2) Transcendental, (3) Existential, (4) Phenomenological, (5) Analytic,[24] (6) Semiotic, and (7) Aristotelian Thomisms. Of these the Analytic, and Semiotic views have up to now little concerned themselves with the question of the subject, or more properly, as I have shown previously, the object of Meta-Science. The Transcendental Thomists differ so much epistemologically from the Existential and Aristotelian positions that I will leave their position, including its nuanced exposition by W. Norris Clarke, S.J., to Chapter VIII that treats of epistemology. The Phenomenological view seems to be reconcilable either to an Existential or an Aristotelian position. Therefore, here I need discuss only the objections of the Conceptualist or Essentialist and Existentialist Thomist to what I am calling the Aristotelian interpretation.[25] I am not concerned with the much-debated questions about whether Aquinas' reading of Aristotle is historically correct. In calling the view I favor the "Aristotelian approach" I claim nothing more than that Aquinas attributes it to Aristotle. Nor am I primarily interested in defending Aquinas himself or settling arguments as to what he personally thought. My concern is only to show the validity of Meta-Science in view of its present bad repute. Hence I refer to historical and textual questions only when this is necessary to explain the objective arguments.

The Conceptualist or Essentialist position is now generally considered outmoded and my friend Lawrence Dewan, O.P. would not accept any such label for the views he has recently expressed in criticism of my position. [26] Yet, since he avoids the kind of arguments used by the Existentials influenced by �tienne Gilson against the Essentialists, I will treat his arguments as an up-dated example of the Essentialist approach. I will also pass over his argument ex silentio in which he points out that even in the texts on which the Aristotelian position relies, Aquinas does not seem explicitly to state that position but generally discusses all philosophical questions as a meta-scientist. I have already pointed out in Chapter II that St. Thomas, like medievals generally, had no reason to defend the validity of Meta-Science (metaphysics) against materialism. Hence nothing can be concluded from the fact that Aquinas usually simply assumes the validity of Meta-Science or from his habit of discussing questions from for the broadest possible perspective, the meta-scientific attitude.

Dewan relies chiefly on two important philosophical arguments: (1) Meta-physics, as Aquinas certainly maintains, proves the first principals of all the other sciences, including those of natural science. Therefore, the establishment of the object of metaphysics must be independent of any demonstration from within natural science of the existence of immaterial causes. [27] (2) The proper object of the human intelligence, as Aquinas also certainly maintains, is ens, being. Being universally considered is the object of metaphysics not of the special sciences each of which deals only with a special kind of being. For example, natural science deals not with Being as Being but only with ens mobile, being as changeable.

As to the first of Dewan's arguments, it should be recalled that Aquinas himself takes up much the same argument as an objection in the Commentary on Boethius' 'De Trinitate' q. 5, a. 1, and provides an answer. [28]

I have argued in Chapter IV that such first principles as that of Non-Contradiction and of Causality are shown in via inventions to be directly evident principles only as principles of natural science restricted to its scope as a science of the sensible. Only when natural science has proved that immaterial being exists can these principles be extended analogically to become universal principles common to all the sciences. Thus if taken in this universal sense they are first principles of all the sciences and are proved by Meta-Science in via resolutions. It remains true, therefore, that as Aristotle and Aquinas say, [30]

Thus this first argument of Dewan fails because it assumes that natural science is based on principles that are known in their meta-scientific extension when in fact he has not shown that Meta-Science is needed to know these principles. Since for Aquinas, just as for Aristotle, every science is based on evident first principles why does natural science need a Meta-Science to makes its own first principles evident, especially since, for Aquinas, natural science is more directly based on sense experience than any other science. [31]

Dewan's second argument concerns the proper object of the human intelligence. He says, [32]

In Chapter III A2 I discussed the material and formal objects of human intelligence and the difference between its formal object quod and quo and I need not repeat this here. I showed that it is true that what is intelligible to us in real objects (objectum formale quod) must always be their actuality or being. Otherwise we would be studying some supposedly possible essence, although we cannot know that an essence is possible without first knowing of some real instance of such a being. Thus it is correct to say that every science is about being and what is true of it. But meta-scientific being in the sense of Being as it extends to immaterial as well as material beings is not immediately evident to us. Hence we cannot begin our thinking as meta-scientists, as Dewan claims. It is only through following the order of the sciences presented by Aquinas in the Commentary on Boethius' 'De Trinitate' that the terms used in the principles of the different sciences become clear enough to us through a judgment that the first principles proper to each science can be said to be evident simply from their terms. This is supremely true of Meta-Science that enjoys the highest degree of immateriality and thus of intelligibility in itself, but is most obscure to us in our human way of knowing.

Dewan's real concern appears in the second part of his article, "Thomas on the Formation of the Educated Mind" where he quotes the beautiful text In Eth. VI, lect. 5, n. 1181 that shows why Meta-Science is the architectonic science (the very point to which the present book is dedicated) and again cites Aquinas:

He refers to S. Th., I-II q. 89, a. 6 ad 3 in which Aquinas indicates that in its earliest truly human acts the child must have some knowledge of the ultimate end in view of which every moral decision must be made, and of course in fact this end is union with God, to which Dewan remarks, [34] "Already, when one undertakes one's first moral act, one has knowledge of God. However, it does not have scientific perfection" [italics added]. Thomists, however, have generally recognized that this does not mean that to perform a moral act anyone, including a child, must have an explicit, formal knowledge that union with God is in fact the true ultimate end that alone constitutes human happiness. But this presents no difficulty for the Aristotelian approach to Meta-Science of which Dewan disapproves. St. Thomas teaches we have "a natural desire to see God," but that this desire demands the perfect beatitude, possible only in the order of grace, is not evident to reason. Indeed it is not evident to reason that such beatitude is even possible for finite beings. All that reason can show is that we are capax Dei since intelligence, whether human or angelic, has dynamic openness to receive truth.

Indeed Dewan's qualification, "However, it does not have scientific perfection" nullifies his argument, since it admits that the "knowledge of God" to which he refers is merely implicit and virtual. Therefore we must still ask by what stages of thought one comes to a scientific, critical knowledge of the object of Meta-Science as distinct from that of any of the specials sciences. Dewan, as far as I read him, provides no answer.

The Existential Thomists, like the Essentialists, argue that a valid Meta-Science need not presuppose the demonstration of the existence of immaterial substances, but they reach the same conclusion as Dewan but by a different route. They do not accept as Aquinas' own view that which he states without criticism in his Commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics: [35]:

Gilson adopted the Existential approach because he was convinced of the originality of Aquinas on the object of Meta-Science as esse or existential act as against Aristotle's conception of Meta-Science. [36] Thus he says, [37]

Would it not be more correct to read Aristotle as saying that "being primarily is existing substance" so that for him (and for Aquinas) to say that Meta-Science is about "Being as Being," and hence primarily about existing substance, rather than simply about its act of esse? How can one speak of the act of something, without saying what that something is that is made actual by its esse? Thus Gilson, in spite of his important study of Scotus whom he compares unfavorably to Aquinas, comes, like Dewan, perilously close to the position that David Burrell describes as follows: [38]

What is relevant in this historical thesis for our philosophical purposes here is only that it raises the question of what exactly it means to say that Meta-Science deals with "to be" (esse), as Gilson and his school so much insist. Once Question 1, "Does it exist?" is answered affirmatively, what more in fact remains to be said about that existent than to ask and answer Questions 2-4 about its essence and its properties? Gilson obviously thinks that much remains to be said, but he does not tell us what that might be, or what questions he would ask about esse that are not questions about what kind of a being is actualized by this esse.

Surely Meta-Science could not be called a wisdom, or even a science, if it amounted to nothing more than enthusiastic declarations that "Being is Being"! Certainly it is true, as Aquinas shows, that existence is the act of essence. As act is causally correlative to the potency of essence, esse causes the essence to be and the essence as the correlative potency of esse causally limits esse. When Gilson asserts that "The true Aristotelian name for being is substance, which is itself identical with what being is" he seems to forget that for Aristotle "substance is that which has independent existence." Hence it is quite correct to say that the study of "to be" is the study of substance as such, Being qua Being, along with any proper accidents it may have which are dependent on it for their existence and hence are Being in various different senses.

In the First Cause alone esse is identical with its nature or essence, because it is that very nature or essence to exist necessarily. Every effect of the First Cause by reason of the contingency of its nature or essence must receive its existence from an efficient cause other than itself, either directly from the First Cause or mediately through causes that can cause only when caused. Hence the existence of all beings other than their Creator is really distinct from their essences, yet this existence, esse, or actuality is nothing other than the various acts of their correlative essences. Hence nothing more can be known about an existent being as it is analogically included in Common Being, the subject of Meta-Science than its essence and its proper efficient cause. Thus it is puzzling that Gilson should complain because Aristotle after finding an answer to the question "Does it exist?" occupied himself with exploring what that existent substance was and what caused it to be what it was, rather than to trying to further explore an undefined esse that can have no meaning apart from the essences of which it is the act.

Indeed it is the contingency of the essence of changeable things with its consequent real distinction from its esse that is the basis of Aristotle's demonstration that the efficient cause of that existence must ultimately be immaterial. Thus far from neglecting esse the use of the demonstration of immaterial causes for material effects manifests its primary importance. Moreover, a Meta-Science established in this manner will not content itself with declaring the primacy of esse, but by exploring every kind (essence) of being in its different ways of being in act and the various relations between these ways of being to each other, it will seek to enrich the initial zero of "Being as Being" by giving it positive but diverse content. [39]

George Klubertanz, S.J., Leo Sweeney, and many others have also followed the Gilsonian version of Existential Thomism. It also ultimately gained the support of Jacques Maritain. His position, however, has an interesting relation to that of the Transcendental Thomists and in Chapter VIII I will discuss its epistemological significance for Maritain's important insights on "connatural knowledge." Since, however, the most thorough recent exposition of the Gilsonian view is that of John F. Wippel, it is in his formulation that I will discuss it here. [40]

Some Existentials reject the Aristotelian approach to Meta-Science outright because they think the demonstration in Physics VIII of the Prime Mover in fact proves nothing more than the existence of an ensouled outer celestial sphere and not God as the First Cause. [41] The Aristotelian approach, as we have seen, requires nothing more for the establishment of the validity and independence of Meta-Science than a proof that some being is immaterial. The positive essence of this immaterial being is for Meta-Science to explore. Wippel is willing to grant that this proof may be valid. [42] Yet he raises difficulties about it, minimizes its importance, and contends that Aquinas provided a better way of establishing Meta-Science. [43] He and others of this school generally rely on Gilson's reading of the history of medieval thought according to which Aquinas' commentaries on Aristotle do not reflect his own views and hence seek, as Wippel puts it, to "reconstruct" a better view from texts that more certainly express Aquinas' personal views. [44]

Wippel sums up of his reconstruction of this supposedly superior and more authentically Thomistic view on the object of Meta-Science as follows:

But just what is this "intelligible content" of "that which is" other than the actuality of the different kinds of being that are analogically included in it, but way that are more different than alike? To avoid the circularity we have seen in Dewan's arguments, however, Wippel insists that [45]

Yet he does not say what the difference is between recognizing that material things are of the different kinds (essences) yet have esse in common and saying that their essence and existence are really distinct. The distinction that Wippel makes is between (1) a "primitive" awareness of being acquired simply by recognizing that, although sensible things differ greatly in kind or essence, they have existence in common,[46] and (2) a fully developed grasp of the meaning of esse that is required for it to serve as the object of Meta-Science. This latter awareness of esse must be known not by the first operation of the human intelligence, simple apprehension, but by the second, judgment. Thus Aquinas in his Commentary on Boethius' 'De Trinitate,' q. 5, 3 contrasts the way that the object of metaphysics (Meta-Science) is known with the ways in which the objects of natural science and mathematics are known. [47]

Louis Geiger, O.P. first brought this text of Aquinas about the judgment of separation that is somehow involved in establishing the object of Meta-Science into prominence in 1947. [48] He read it as supporting the natural science approach to Meta-Science that gave a better view of Aquinas' position on the distinction of the sciences than the classical view of Cajetan that distinguished them by "three degrees of abstraction. For Wippel and other Existential Thomists, however, this text is read as the chief textual support for their own position.

What point is Aquinas really making in this text? The reason for the distinctions he makes is that an abstraction cannot be valid unless what is abstracted can be separated in existence from that from which it is separated. This is the case in the first way in natural science that only separates essences from accidents and in a second way in mathematics that separates the accident of quantity from the other accidents, since it is prior to them in existence. On the contrary, however, although the esse of things that is the intelligibility under which things are studied in Meta-Science is really distinct from their essences, it cannot be separated from them in extra-mental reality. This is so because esse is nothing but the very actuality of things, their actus essendi. Thus esse cannot be validly known by abstraction but only by a judgment that the object of the science does in fact exist.

It should be noted, however-and this is often overlooked in citing this text-that Aquinas is not claiming that the objects of the sciences other than Meta-Science are validated simply by a first operation of the mind. The first principle of any real science, not just that of Meta-Science, must be asserted by a judgment of separation that judges on the basis of evidence (ultimately the evidence of the senses) that this object exists. Natural science and mathematics can judge that their objects somehow have real existence, because these are known by a legitimate abstraction from objects known to be real. Thus we can truly judge that the object of natural science, namely, changeable being really exists, although that science considers it apart from its accidental properties that are to be demonstrated of it and from its mere accidents. Similarly we truly judge that the object of mathematics exists because we consider quantity as it really exists in material substances, though we study it in abstraction as the first property of these substances. The object of Meta-Science, however, since it is the very actuality of all that exists, Being as Being, cannot be validly abstracted, since nothing real would remain.

Thus for Being in this inclusive meta-scientific sense to play its role as the first principle of an independent science, it must, like the subject of any science, be truly judged to exist. And if it is to be the first principle of an independent science it must somehow be evidently judged to be true simply from its terms. This does not mean that the first principles of every valid science (especially metaphysical principles, as Dewan claims) are immediately evident to every one. Mathematics is an independent science with first principles evidently true from their terms, but its axioms are not immediately evident to every student. It was the great achievement of the Greeks among all the world cultures to be able to formulate them precisely. The terms of first principles must be made evident by a process of abstraction or in some other manner and their reality must be grounded in some direct or indirect evidence. That is why St. Thomas in the Commentary on Boethius' 'De Trinitate' devotes so much attention to the "order of the sciences." Hence as regards Meta-Science, the ultimate science, we must ask how we can judge that Being as Being, in the sense proper to Meta-Science as an independent science, really exists, rather than an empty verbalism as so many modern philosophers claim.

I have previously granted that we have an "awareness" of being that enables us to answer Question 1, "Does it exist?" and that this answer already confusedly contains the answer to Question 2, "What is it?" Hence this awareness can be called "primitive" in contrast to an explicit answer about essence that answers Question 2 and thus makes clear that the "to be" of any contingent thing is not identical with the kind of thing it is. Thus, as Wippel says, we know that the act of esse is other than essence it actualizes, since we observe that different essences all have esse in common. We cannot, however, on this basis alone assert that this esse that is common to different kinds of material things is other than the actus essendi of material things.

Though some Existential Thomists have argued that natural science is only about the appearances of changeable things and not about their ontological being as such, this could be true only if they were considered merely as possible not as real. Wipple is firm in denying that metaphysics is about the merely possible. [50] In any case there cannot a real science about the merely possible, since possibility can be known only through what is actual. All real sciences first ask the question "Does it exist" and whatever they say about "What is it that exists" what is being considered is being as it has esse.

Therefore, in order to get beyond this primitive awareness of esse, Wippel has to argue that the judgment of separation specific to metaphysics renders this awareness "unrestricted" to merely material being, or as Wippel sometimes says, "negative" to material and immaterial being alike. Yet if the object of Meta-Science (metaphysics) is ens commune it cannot be "neutral" to material and immaterial being, since, as Wippel certainly admits, it positively includes them both. The statement that ens commune is "neutral" brings us much too close to the Scotistic univocal concept of being as "that which is merely not nothing." More correctly, Wippel also says that metaphysical Being is "unrestricted" to the material. But how can we judge this to be the case if the only being that we know is material being? While it is true that ens potentially, or if you like, virtually contains whatever is or can be known, our direct knowledge of it based on the senses tells us only about but the material and sensible things directly experienced by us.

Thus the judgment of separation of "being" from the "kinds" of being, as Wippel describes it in the foregoing summation, can be made only on the basis of our sense experience of real material beings which all in common have being but only a being restricted to materiality. How can we make the further step of extending the term "being" in that limited sense to immaterial beings by an analogical reasoning from effect to cause and thus establish that the object of Meta-Science exists, which is the first principle of all properly meta-scientific truth? In all his discussions of the existence of immaterial beings Aquinas insists that they are known to be included in ens commune only by a demonstrations from their material effects. Once their existence has been demonstrated a posteriori as the cause of material effects, it then becomes evident that the term "Being" can be extended without restriction to include whatever is common to both material and immaterial beings in a single judgment that Being as Being (in that extended sense) truly is-that it has esse. In this way, as Aquinas explicitly states in the texts I have cited, the subject of Meta-Science is validated, while it is not validated by the reconstruction that Wippel on the basis of a "few remarks" conjectures to be Aquinas' way. Thus the negative judgment of separation on which this allegedly superior way depends is evidently true only if its terms have first been established by natural science as real and not merely nominal.

For that reason, however, the subject of Meta-Science must indeed be "unrestricted" with regard to any kind of real being. It is insufficient however, merely assert that it is "unrestricted" without further validly judging that immaterial being as well as material being does it fact exist. It is in this precise sense that the term "separation" is needed to establish the object of Meta-Science. We can validly judge that the universal essence of changeable beings can be abstracted from their concrete condition of existence without losing their existence. And we can judge that mathematical beings can be abstracted from the other properties of really existing changeable quantified beings without losing their existence. But how can we judge-but without abstraction-that the object of Meta-Science includes both material and immaterial beings without losing its status as the actus essendi. Without that status it would, contrary to Wippel's claim, be reduced to mere possibility, a figment of the mind, as modern materialists claim that it is.

Thus, as with Dewan's remarks, I find nothing in Wipple's careful exposition of the Existentialist thesis, or in that of others of this school that answers that inescapable question. I grant with them that the object of metaphysics (Meta-Science) is known only by a judgment of separation, but for that judgment to be valid, somehow it must first be known that immaterial substances really exist. Wipple says, [51]

One may indeed make this judgment, but what validates it? Wipple in his lengthy chapter on "The Discovery of the Object of Metaphysics" casts no further light on this inescapable question. It is true, as he says, that the intelligibility of two material beings known to us to have have esse is not the same as the intelligibilities of their different essences. This, however, does not validate the judgment that this esse also includes the totally different esse of immaterial things, who existence we know only by a demonstration through their material effects. Therefore, as John Knasas also notes, [52] Wippel's argument from separatio leaves us completely in the dark.

Therefore Joseph Owens took another Existential approach to our question, Joseph Owens, [53] Owens was an expert on Aristotle's Metaphysics, and his solution to our question is stoutly defended and developed by John Knasas in his work cited above. Knasas for his own part maintains [54] that the arguments for a First Immaterial Cause in Aristotle's Physics, Book VIII and an immaterial human soul in De Anima III, are (at least as Aquinas' reads them) already meta-scientific arguments. Owens and Knasas cannot accept as adequate the position of Wippel, Sweeny, etc. nor the Aristotelian approach because, as Knasas puts it, [55]

Therefore Owens and Knasas, though they also hold that the object of a Meta-Science is known by a judgment of separation that frees it from all immateriality, they deny that this judgment is necessary to begin that science. For them all that is required in establish the validity of a Meta-Science independent of natural science is to recognize that the material beings that we directly know from sense experience are beings that have the act of existence (habens esse). Therefore the demonstration of the existence of immaterial beings can be left as a task for Meta-Science to perform in the due course of its argumentation.

One would like to know, just as one would for Wipple, how Owens shows that his project is Thomistic or feasible, yet Knasas admits [56] that, although Owens has written extensively on this object, "As far as I know, Owens offers no such direct textual proof for his position." [57] Consequently, Knasas seeks to provide such a proof. He begins by referring to Aquinas' description in the Summa Theologiae I, q. 44, a. 2 c. of the three historical steps by which the object of a Meta-Science was historically established. [58] Knasas interprets these three steps not as degrees of immateriality but of "increasing profundity," in understanding the intelligibility of things as having esse. He understands these deepening insights to have been: (1) the materialism of the pre-Socratics; (2) the approach to Meta-Science through natural science of Plato and Aristotle; (3) the approach through habens esse that he accredits to Aquinas and which is that of Owens.

This interpretation is highly questionable, since the mention of Plato and Aristotle at stage (2) does not say that Aristotle (nor Plato) got no deeper in their thinking than that stage. In seems to me that Aquinas mentions them there only to indicate that as Greek thought moved from the first to the second stage a division arose between Plato's theory of Ideas and Aristotle's theory of the celestial spheres. Aquinas certainly cannot be saying that Aristotle got no further, since he knows perfectly well that Aristotle held that celestial spheres are moved by immaterial intelligences and hence arrive at immaterial being. Moreover, Aquinas does not claim the third stage as his own discovery but simply speaks of "Some who understood."

Though Knasas thinks that this text "catches Aquinas in presenting metaphysics simply in terms of habens esse," [59] yet he raises the question whether knowing that material things have esse guarantees that this same esse can be considered without materiality, as it must be for a Meta-Science to be a science other than natural science. He has to answer this difficulty since he has himself raised it as an objection to the position of Wippel and others who share his views. Knasas resorts to the text so much favored by the Wippel on the "judgment of separation." Knasas understands this, however, to mean that the first operation of intelligence attains the essence of material being, but the second operation, namely, judgment attains its existence. He then cites texts of Aquinas to show that in every science when a judgment has been made that separates a universal essence from what is accidental to it, the intelligence by a reflex act then judges that this essence exists concretely together with those accidents, yet is utterly different than they are.

Therefore Knasas asks if it similarly possible for the esse of material things that differ in essence to be judged to be common to them yet free of their common materiality. He quotes Owen as showing that not only real material things have esse. Objects that have only mental existence also have esse, though a cognitional not a real esse. Thus he argues that it is possible to arrive at a judgment that the esse that a material object has in real existence can be considered as common to that same object as it exists intentionally and immaterially in the knower. Therefore esse so understood is neutral to materiality and immateriality and can serve as the object of Meta-Science. He grants that this is not ens commune as this is understood by most Thomists to be the object of Meta-Science, since that is an concept positively including all types of being, not neutral to them. Yet Owens and Knasas are content to leave the task of developing the understanding of ens commune to Meta-Science itself after it has established the existence of immaterial substances..

This solution like the other solutions of the Existential Thomists, in spite of Knasas valiant efforts to defend it, is wholly unsatisfactory even to other Existentials. Thus Wippel says of Owens' view, [60]

Furthermore, Owens' approach, even with Knasas' attempts to strengthen it, neglects a fundamental point that applies also to the approach of Wippel and others. Esse and essence are correlative causes, related as form to matter, and act to potency, hence though they are really distinct, one cannot be separated or known apart from the other. To say that "something has esse" means nothing unless we understand it in relation to the essence of that which has this "esse." It is untenable to suppose, as does Wippel, that what material beings of different kind have in common is simply a neutral esse. It has to be at least some generic essence that is correlative to and limits that esse. The broadest genus that we can judge from direct experience to have esse is ens mobile that is restricted to matter and motion. But though Knasas recognizes this error of Wippel, he makes a similar error when he asserts that for the material things that are the only ones we known directly to "have esse" is sufficient grounds for beginning a Meta-Science as a science distinct from natural science. The esse that material things have is the ultimate act and perfection of material things and as such its study falls within the scope of natural science and leaves nothing over as the object for an independent Meta-Science.

Thus what is common to all these conflicting Existential arguments is the assumption that any consideration of esse must be meta-scientific. In fact, as shown in Chapter III, every real science must first answer Question 1 about its subject , "Does it exist?" before it can proceed to the other questions about it. Hence science deals primarily with the intelligibility of the acts of its object and considers its potential aspects only in relation to its acts, first of all its actus essendi, or esse. Yet Owen says [61] that while Aquinas holds that being is accidental to an essence,

Again this seems an apologetic attempt to find Aquinas superior to Aristotle. Aquinas may be somewhat more explicit than Aristotle on this point, but certainly they are in agreement that material things as such do not exist necessarily, since some material things at least come into existence and cease to exist. Hence for Aristotle, just as for Aquinas, existence is accidental to their essence and any proposition that asserted otherwise would be false. For Aristotle, just as for Aquinas, "the an est is asking precisely 'Does the thing exist?' since this must be affirmed by a judgment (second operation of the intelligence) before it can be defined.

Aquinas would agree that "The definition would not be immediately known, but only mediately" by analyzing and perhaps further observing the confused understanding of the thing known to exist, not, as Owens says, " as the result of a reasoning process." For example nothing can be known about a kangaroo until we observe a specimen and know that it exists as some kind of an animal, or at least a material object. To classify it specifically, however, is not done by reasoning (that is, demonstration) but by observation and classification. [62] When Aristotle requires that we affirm the an est before we can affirm the quid est he is requiring, just as Aquinas does, that this is necessary for the latter proposition to be true, either as an accidental predicate in the case of what does not exist necessarily or an essential predicate in the case of what exists necessarily, if there are such things.

Existential Thomism, as are most of the other types of Thomism, each in their own way, are suspicious of Aristotelian Thomism because they fear it imperils the certitude of a Meta-Science. They think that by making the foundational part of natural science the condition for a valid Meta-Science they are grounding it in a modern science that yields only probabilities and today is liable to post-modern deconstruction. They fail to see that the Aristotelian position does not expect from natural science to do more than to prove the existence of some causes that are not material. It leaves to Meta-Science the positive discussion of the nature of these causes. Moreover the proofs that natural science provides of immaterial existents are entirely independent of any of the details of natural science that are subject to revision because they are only probable. These proofs rests only (1) on the foundational part of natural science that is an analysis of our direct sense knowledge prior to the use of artificial observation or experimentation, and (2) on the argument that our human intelligence as it is presupposed to all science cannot be reduced to a merely material process.

The real question, of course, is not what Aquinas held the subject of Meta-Science to be or how it is to be discovered and validated, but whether in view of modern scientific knowledge his position remains true. Though so many Thomists want to bypass this question while at the same time accepting Aquinas' Aristotelian epistemology, it must be frankly faced. The purely logical coherence of Aquinas' demonstration of the existence of immaterial substances has never been refuted but has been shown to be valid by the modern methods of symbolic logic.[63] The premise of the argument that asserts the impossibility of an infinite regress in efficient causes whose efficiency depends on another agent can be refuted only at the expense of denying, as Hume did, the Principle of Causality on which all natural science depends.

Therefore any realistic attack on this demonstration must center on the other premise, namely that "Nothing moves itself." Scotus had already attacked this principle because it seemed empirically refuted by our freedom of the will to move itself. [64] Suarez also thought that vital activities in general seem to provide an exception to this principle.[65] As we saw in Chapter IV, however, modern biology has shown in detail how living things are self-moving only in the sense that a central organ moves the other organs but must itself be furnished an input of energy. The freedom of the will also is true self-movement, but, as a spiritual power, it still presupposes activation by the First Cause. Indeed we are able to understand vital and free activity only by analogy to physical activity from which this principle is derived. If such reasoning is fallacious then the kind of self-movement possible to contingent things becomes unintelligible.

Similar questions are now raised by modern science about Aquinas' natural science proof of the existence of immaterial movers that would require a much more detailed analysis of the state of modern science than I can give here. An excellent account can be found in the recent work of my colleague and fellow Dominican William A. Wallace, The Modeling of Nature. [66] He shows in great historical and analytical detail that post-Galilean science, for all its marvelous achievements, rests on epistemological and logical foundations seriously in need of revision. What is required is not, as some suppose, a "philosophical" (i.e. meta-scientific) critique of these foundations, but a critique from within natural science itself that recovers the insights lost in that famous "paradigm shift" from Aristotle's dynamic approach to nature to a Platonic dependence on static mathematical models.

This does not mean, however, that we can ignore modern science in discussing this proof that our universe depends on an immaterial cause or causes. That this question pertains to natural science and not, as so many Thomists claim, simply to a Meta-Science has been made startlingly evident, as mentioned before, by the puzzlement of current cosmologists in the face of their own hypothesis that the universe began with a Big Bang. That it is a "scientific" and not merely a "philosophical" (i. e., meta-scientific) issue is evident from discussions going on among scientists. Such questions are today brought to the fore by the data detailed in John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. They argue that if the universe were only a little different than it is in fact human life or scientific intelligence could never have evolved or survived on our planet. Roger Penrose in his The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics, [67] while defending the materialistic reductionism of current science, explores the mind-body problem and concludes that the mind does not act like a computer and hence is difficult to explain materialistically unless we expand the notion of "material" reality.

Still more recently Michael J. Behe, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, has shown that the more we know of life processes the more inadequate seem our present theories of how life and above all human life evolved. Life exhibits an "irreducible complexity" utterly inexplicable by natural selection alone if that is reducible to chance. Such books by scientists make clear that natural science must in its own line of inquiry deal with questions whose answers seem to be presupposed to its own efforts at explaining empirical reality. To hope that someday we can explain the Big Bang by the laws of physics is reasonable, but it is not so reasonable to boast that science will be someday able to explain why this universe is governed by these laws rather than by others. [68]

In post-Galilean thought the most influential attack on the possibility of an objective proof for the existence of God was that proposed by Immanuel Kant. Although what Kant attacked was really the a priori "ontological proof" that Aquinas had also repudiated, it is still taken for granted by many authors that Kant showed that all theoretical demonstrations of God's existence are fallacious. Because of difficulties in finding plausible physical interpretations of experimentally successful mathematical models, many modern scientists have been influenced by Kantian idealism and often, without knowing it, have accepted some of its assumptions. Yet most scientists are convinced that science, properly researched, can attain a genuine though incomplete understanding of objective reality. Hence it is not necessary here to discuss such attacks on the validity of Meta-Science that presuppose an idealist epistemology, but only those that, like modern science, are based on a conviction that an objective understanding of reality confirmed by empirical observation is feasible.

Yet even though most practicing scientists are realists, Kantian Transcendental Idealism has succeeded in significantly coloring the foundational thinking of modern science. One of its chief effects has been the exclusive acceptance of the "hypothetical-deductive" method as the "scientific method." Kant held that our knowledge of the physical world consists in mental constructs (synthetic a priori propositions) that are both self-consistent and fitted to the data of sense experience. For him such knowledge can be certain because he thought these mental constructs are based on necessary categories innate to all human minds.[69] Modern science has largely abandoned the Kantian innate categories of explanation. In place of such innate categories it substitutes hypothetical mental constructs (theories, models) to be evaluated by how well a priori deductions from them can be fitted to the empirical data. Hence, since it is always possible that other theories may fit the data equally well or better, these theories can only be more or less probable. Logically speaking, true conclusions can be deduced from false premises although the reverse is not possible.

For Aristotle also much of natural science is only probable, [70] but science uses merely probable arguments as a dialectic that can guide research to the discovery of principles that are certain because they are intellectual insights based directly on sense experience. Thus the principle that "Nothing moves itself" is not a hypothesis having a degree of probability, but a certitude directly evident from an analysis of our basic sense experiences. Hence we can use the Principle Causality, "Nothing that changes can change itself" as a foundational principle of natural science that we are sure can never be validly contradicted by hypotheses however great their apparent probability.

A probable proposition no matter how highly probable cannot strictly contradict a truly certain proposition, while the reverse can occur and render the apparent high probability of a proposition null. For example, the theory of mechanical aether had a high degree of probability until the Michelson-Morley experiments in 1887 conclusively invalidated it and opened the way to Einstein's theory of special relativity.

Nevertheless, it is important to consider the principal hypotheses about cosmology that have or are likely to play a role in natural science so that their relation to the principle that "Nothing moves itself" and the demonstration based on it is correctly understood. Natural science is properly about changing things of which motion is the basic change and thus any system in motion has the property of time. Hence the chief alternative hypotheses are that (1) the universe as a system of bodies in motion is infinite in time, or (2) it is finite in time. The first of these hypotheses posits a "steady-state" universe in which there is at least some continuity of motion.

It was this first hypothesis that Aristotle adopted and on which he built his astronomy. He supposed that the basic natural and perpetual motion in the universe was the rotation of the outermost sphere of the fixed stars that coordinated the natural independent perpetual motions of the other celestial spheres containing the sun, moon, and planets. For these cyclical motions to be permanent the rotating spheres had to be free of any alterations in quantity or quality including changes resulting from friction.

Hence Aristotle was led to the hypothesis, eventually falsified by Galileo's telescopic observation of the sunspots, that the heavenly regions are composed of a form of matter subject to motion but not to any other kind of change.[71] This kind of matter or "aether," therefore would have to be fundamentally different from the alterable matter within the lunar sphere orbit surrounding and including the earth that is familiar to us. Galileo's falsification of this hypothesis of Aristotle, not his defense of Copernicus' heliocentrism, was the real "revolution" that initiated modern science. In fact Copernicus theory was not adequately verified until long after Galileo by the observation of the stellar parallax in 1838!

Aquinas held that Aristotle never intended to propose an eternal universe except as an hypothesis and argued that neither it or its opposite can ever be established by natural science. [72] If that motion depends ultimately on an immaterial First Cause, then that cause, unlimited as it is by any potentiality and existing as pure act, is infinite in power. It could make an eternal universe and keep it in motion forever. On the other hand, since the First Cause acts freely, [73] it is not necessary that it produce any particular universe among all the possible ones. Thus God could have created an eternal universe (though because of Biblical revelation and not of natural science Aquinas held that He did not) but this eternal universe would still manifest God's existence because it could not create itself or sustain itself in perpetual motion.

Today Aristotle's model is unacceptable to natural science, not because of any certitude that the universe had a beginning in time, but because it seems highly probable that all matter is subject to the Second Law of Thermodynamics or Entropy that eliminates the notion of perpetual motion machines, since that is what a self-moved eternal universe would have to be. According to the Second Law of Themodynamics, although the total amount of energy in the universe is conserved, in each exchange of energy there is a decrease in its power to perform work, that is, an over all increase in entropy. Because of friction and other factors some of the energy is reduced to heat, the lowest form of energy. Hence the universe as a totality inevitably cools and will at last suffer "entropic doom" in which all ordered systems break down and only random motion at approximately absolute zero remains. According to quantum physics even at maximum entropy there will be random quantum fluctuations but the probability of these producing anything more interesting will also approach zero.

This outcome would take place even on the hypothesis (which the most recent data makes improbable) that the Big Crunch might finally reverse the expansion of space caused by the Big Bang. Even if that were to happen, the energy driving such cycles would gradually dissipate.[74] Against this hypothesis stands also the objection that a Big Crunch would eliminate all present structures and thus make it impossible for us ever to empirically verify the existence of the previous cycle. Nevertheless for some time the "steady-state" hypothesis in a form proposed in the last century by Fred Hoyle [75] seemed quite plausible. Yet it required a constant slow "creation" of matter and energy contrary to the conservation laws in order to maintain motion in a perpetual universe. Hoyle made no attempt to explain such "creation" by any cause that was part of the material universe. Thus even in his theory the need for an agent external to the universe required by the principle of "Nothing moves itself" would still hold. Hence the current trend of scientific thought favors the second alternative according to which the universe had a beginning before which no matter or energy and hence no time existed.

The Big Bang theory makes the universe only about 15 billion years old and in a state of constant expansion and as a whole subject to inevitably increasing entropy. In such a system increase of complexity even to the point of intelligent life is a possibility (but not a necessity, indeed it is of very low probability) in a local region of negative entropy (negentropy). Eventually, however, this local complexity must be smoothed out in the increasing entropy of the whole universe. This hypothesis, although it can by no means yet be said to be verified as certain, is supported by a great amount of evidence, especially the expansion of space shown by Hubble's discover of the recession of the galaxies from each other and then by the detection of the "background radiation" probably left by the Big Bang. If we accept this hypothesis then time and motion had a beginning and it becomes evident that, since it could not cause itself, that is must.have a cause that is not part of the material universe and indeed not material at all.

Scientists have responded to this puzzle chiefly in one of three ways. (1) Some have said that the universe is just a fact that science cannot explain; it "just happened." This is not very satisfactory if the task of science is to explain natural phenomena. (2) Some scientists therefore attempt to explain the origin of the universe by hypothesizing that in the beginning there was only a vacuum in which there were, as quantum theory predicts, random "quantum fluctuations" which developed into the Big Bang. To imagine that the universe arose from quantum fluctuations in nothing, however, is absurd, since natural laws do not have disembodied existence but are properties of matter. To posit a law of quantum dynamics according to which such quantum fluctuations must occur requires that this law be based on the observed properties of matter and energy and matter and energy are not nothing but just that changeable being whose initial existence demands to be somehow explained.

Stephen Hawking and James Hartle in 1980 proposed another cosmic model for a universe without a "singularity" or beginning in time yet having only a finite temporal past.[76] It was a mathematical model in which time, like space, would be "finite but unbounded." The chief difficulty with this theory, however, is that it treats time like a mathematical line all parts of which are actual, that exist simultaneously. But time is the measure of a motion by a more uniform motion, as it was defined above in the discussion of the categories. Since these are based on our foundational experiences presupposed to all other types of observation they are more certain than any mathematical physical theory. Hence it is contradictory to think of all parts of a motion and its temporal measurement as simultaneous like the parts of a line. [77] In the twenty years since the Hawking-Hartle theory was proposed it has received no empirical verification.

Thus the Big Bang model of a universe finite in time also logically demands that the universe as a system of bodies in motion be explained by the existence of an immaterial mover or movers that created matter and energy with the requisite initial conditions consistent with what we observe the universe to be today. Hence for modern science the demonstration of the existence of an Immaterial Unmoved Mover raises far less difficulties than did Aristotle's steady-state model. Therefore, modern science in no way undermines the validity of a Meta-Science of material and immaterial being. Instead when modern science is empirically grounded and properly thought through to its foundations so that natural science can be free from alien mechanistic or idealistic "philosophical" prejudices that have been imposed on it historically, it will magnificently provide the only firm rock on which a valid Meta-Science can be built.

Some who say that the scientific method necessarily excludes arguments that go beyond "naturalism", that is, materialism, raises a final epistemological objection to the foregoing. Others find in Bell's Theorem, which seems to show that action at distance occurs, proof that physical reality is fundamentally "non-local" and hence utterly different than the world as we ordinarily experience it. A discussion of these questions will be postponed until Chapter IX.

[3] Thus Leibnitz, Monadology, n. 45 writes, "Thus God alone (or the necessary Being) has this prerogative that He must necessarily exist, if He is possible. And as nothing can interfere with the possibility of that which involves no limits, no negation and consequently no contradiction, this [His possibility] is sufficient of itself to make known the existence of God a priori. We have thus proved it, through the reality of eternal truths. But a little while ago we proved it also a posteriori, since there exist contingent beings, which can have their final or sufficient reason only in the necessary Being, which has the reason of its existence in itself."

[28] Expositio super librum Boethii De Trinitate, ed. Bruno Decker,. Questions 5 and 6 are translated by Armand Mauer as The Division and Methods of the Sciences, Chapter 2, qq. 5 and 6, a.1. It was composed about 1257-1259 a little before the Summa Contra Gentiles and is contemporary with the disputed questions De Veritate generally considered to exhibit St. Thomas' mature epistemology.[28] On the dating, see James A. Weisheipl, O.P., Friar Thomas D'Aquino. pp. 136f., 381f.; and Jean-Pierre Torrell, O.P., Saint Thomas Aquinas, op. cit. p. 345. Note that the contrast between the via inventionis by which principles are discovered and the via resolutionis by which they are applied in demonstration is not identical with that between the via resolutionis that analyzes a whole into its parts and. the via compositionis that again synthesizes these parts.

[30] In VI Meta, lect 1, n. 1170; also III, lect. 4, n. 398 and XI, lect 7, n. 2267. On this Dewan comments, "Aristotle there in fact says nothing about discoveries made by natural science�he saying that physics would be metaphysics if there were no separate entity. It is not said that physics discovers the existence of a separate entity. What certainly could be said is that, until they discover the existence of separate entity, the thinkers who do it, though they are metaphysicians, might not be able to distinguish themselves from physicists" (p. 553). He also remarks, "A thinker who does not draw the erroneous conclusion that all beings are bodies might well recognize that he was doing something different from the physicists even before he has succeeded in concluding to existence of separate entity." (p. 554, note 11).

[31] Dewan says, "If we find, in the treatments pertaining to physical science, some approach from the viewpoint of being, this will be, not properly physical science�, but a case of the physicists taking on the role of the metaphysician. Along these lines, Thomas tells us that the geometer proves his own principles by taking on the role of the metaphysician" (p. 557; in note 18). He supports this by quoting Aquinas, "For no science proves its own principles...He [Aristotle] says 'according as it is geometry' since it happens in some science that the principles of that science are proved in so much as that science assumes what is proper to another science, as geometry proves its own principles according as it assumes the form of , i.e., metaphysics." But a Meta-Science (if it has been shown to be valid) demonstrates the principles of the particular sciences only by deciding whether they pertain to all Being (ens commune), not only the subject of some special science. We teach geometry to children for whom, Aquinas says In Eth. VI, lect. 7, that metaphysics may not be taught. Dewan also quotes Aquinas In Met. IV, lect 1, on Aristotle c. 1 (1003a28-32) that early philosophers were seeking the highest causes and suggests that these Pre-Socratics, although they did not recognize the existence of immaterial things, were already metaphyisicians not natural scientists." But did they think these highest causes were immaterial?

[31] Dewan's states his position most precisely the second part of his article: "Thomas on the Formation of the Educated Mind" where he quotes the beautiful text In Eth. VI, lect. 5, n. 1181 that shows why metaphysics is the architectonic science (the very point to which the present book is dedicated) and says, "As that one is wise in some art is most sure in that act, so the science that is wisdom in most absolute sense is the most certain among all the sciences, in that it attains to the first principles of [all] beings which in themselves are most knowable, although some of them, namely immaterial [beings] are less known quoad nos. But the most universal principles are also most known quoad nos, as they are what pertains to Being as Being, whose cognition pertains to wisdom, as is said in Metaphysics IV, 6-8, In Met. Lect 7, nn.700-719. On this Dewan says (p.558), "Though some of these principles are less known to us than other things, nevertheless this claim is well founded, inasmuch as the most universal principles, pertaining to being as being, are both best known in themselves and best known to us [my italics] And these pertain to metaphysics. Obviously, if the first principles, as first known, were at first limited to corporeal being as corporeal, they would not be known as they pertain to metaphysics. Thomas sees the principles, precisely as known first of all and to all, as having the properly metaphysical character. This does not make the beginner a finished metaphysician, but it does mean that the principles of metaphysics are precisely those very first-known principles, not some newly constructed conception of being resulting from the study of physics. If we did not start with metaphysical principles, no particular science would ever provide them." On the contrary, I understand Aquinas as meaning that certain first principles such as that of Non-Contradiction and of Causality are first and best known to us in natural science in a restricted and hypothetical form as true for our actual universe. In their universal and necessary form, however, they are known meta-scientifically as applying to all Being material and immaterial.

THE WAY TOWARD WISDOM
An Interdisciplinary, Intercultural Introduction to Metaphysics

Chapter V: The Existence and Essence of Meta-Science

THE WAY TOWARD WISDOMAn Interdisciplinary, Intercultural Introduction to Metaphysics

Chapter V: The Existence and Essence of Meta-Science

THE WAY TOWARD WISDOM
An Interdisciplinary, Intercultural Introduction to Metaphysics