|
 Philosopher
of the Month
March
2001 - Thomas
Aquinas
Jon
Phelan
St.Thomas
Aquinas (1225-1274) was born into a noble family near the small
town of Aquino which lies between Naples and Rome. He became a Dominican
friar in 1244 and was a heavyweight scholar in both senses of the
word. Weighing in at around twenty stone it is rumoured that this
doctor of the church worked at a desk specially designed to fit
around his corpulence. Despite a peripatetic life of preaching and
teaching, Aquinas penned over two million words of in-depth theology,
his best known works being the Summa contra Gentiles and
the Summa theologiae. A summa (summary) was a comprehensive
exposition of doctrine.
In
these works faith and reason are harmonised into a grand theologico-philosophical
system which inspired the medieval philosophical tradition known
as Thomism and which has been favoured by the Roman Catholic church
ever since. There are many areas of interest to philosophers in
Aquinas' writings, such as Aquinas' theory of knowledge, his analysis
of causality, his writings on God (the 'five ways' and the doctrine
of analogy) and his teleological theory of ethics. Each of these
is mentioned below but there are other areas worth exploring, for
example, the saint's comments on sex and gender.
Aquinas
made an important contribution to epistemology, recognising the
central part played by sense perception in human cognition. It is
through the senses that we first become acquainted with existent,
material things. St. Thomas held that the relation of dependence
of objects on something which transcends them is disclosed to the
observer through the contemplation of material things. Just as our
knowledge depends not on innate ideas but perceiving the material
world, the same material world is dependent on a productive agent
for its existence. Aquinas thought the proposition 'everything which
begins to exist through the agency of an already existent, extrinsic
thing' to be a fact beyond doubt.
In
the Summa theologiae Aquinas records his famous five ways
which seek to prove the existence of God from the facts of change,
causation, contingency, variation and purpose. These cosmological
and teleological arguments can be neatly expressed in syllogistic
form as below:
Way
1
1.
The world is in motion (motus).
2. All changes in the world are due to some prior cause.
3. There must be a prior cause for this entire sequence of changes,
i.e. God.
Way
2
1.
The world is a sequence of events.
2. Every event in the world has a cause.
3. There must be a cause for the entire sequence of events, i.e.
God.
Way
3
1.
The world might not have been.
2. Everything that exists in the world depends on some other thing
for its existence.
3. The world itself must depend upon some other thing for its existence,
i.e. God.
Way
4
1.
There are degrees of perfection in the world.
2. Things are more perfect the closer they approach the maximum.
3. There is a maximum perfection, i.e. God.
Way
5
1.
Each body has a natural tendency towards its goal.
2. All order requires a designer.
3. This end-directedness of natural bodies must have a designing
force behind it. Therefore each natural body has a designer i.e.
God.
Aquinas
devotes a further part of his philosophical writing to the problem
of religious language. He accepts that God-talk may be literal or
metaphorical but believes that in its literalness it is never univocal
or equivocal but analogical. That is to say a phrase such as 'God
is omnipotent, omniscient and compassionate' represents a relation
between what we mean by these terms and the divine nature. God's
nature corresponds and is in ratio to the significance behind these
terms, yet still literal in that it reveals to us something about
God.
Unlike
some of his contemporaries, Aquinas was sympathetic towards and
influenced by Aristotle to whom he customarily refers as 'the philosopher'.
In a similar vein to Aristotle, Aquinas formulates a teleological
theory of ethics known as natural law. Aquinas assumes that God
created the world, that the world reveals his purpose in creating
it and that the fulfillment of that purpose is the supreme good
to be sought: '[Natural law] is the participation of the human person
in the divine law of God.' Elsewhere he declares that natural law
is "nothing other than the light of understanding infused in
us by God whereby we see what is to be done and what is not to be
done.' This exercising of rational conscience has been at the forefront
of Roman Catholic teaching for centuries, though it is not the sum
total of it.
Aquinas'
theory of ethics, his writings on God and other metaphysical issues
provide a unique contribution to philosophical thought and led Anthony
Kenny to call him 'one of the dozen greatest philosophers of the
western world'.
Suggested
reading
Aquinas, F C Copleston (Penguin)
Aquinas, A Kenny (Oxford University Press Past Masters series)
The Thought of Thomas Aquinas, Brian Davies (Clarendon Press)
A
new philosopher of the month will be featured from April 1st 2001
Join
Our Café mailing list
To
receive *very* short messages, letting you know when the Café
has been updated, just fill in your email address below - and press
submit.
[If
you wish to unsubscribe from the mailing list, simply fill in your
subscriber email address, select "Unsubscribe", and press Submit.]
Previous
Philosophers of the Month
|
