A Not-So-Elementary Christian Metaphysics by Peter A. Redpath

Author:Peter A. Redpath
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: En Route Books and Media
Published: 2015-10-27T13:09:01+00:00

Chapter 7

Conclusion

1. What I did in the previous six chapters of this book, and why

I devoted the previous six chapters of Volume One of this study chiefly to recovering our understanding of the nature and Western history of philosophy and science from the ancient Greeks up to St. Thomas. I did so because, without a proper grasp of the nature of philosophy and science, and their history in the West up to, and subsequent to, Aquinas, ending the separation between wisdom and science is not possible.

The separation between wisdom and science that started centuries ago is a root cause of the subsequent separation among wisdom, philosophy, and science that presently exists in the West. This separation, however, first started with attempts made by early medieval Jewish and Christian thinkers to separate wisdom from philosophy and to reduce the whole of wisdom to revealed theology. The separation was facilitated by the fact that the understanding of philosophy’s nature that had prevailed among leading thinkers of antiquity like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus did not take a foothold during the Christian middle ages. Instead, a distorted understanding of philosophy that confounded this subject with one or more of the liberal arts and revealed theology tended to dominate the middle ages up until the time of St. Thomas.

Within the preceding chapters of this book, I think I have been able, more or less, to restore the proper understanding of philosophy’s, science’s, nature as the ancient Greeks and St. Thomas conceived this study. What remains for me to do now in this book is to show how, after the death of St. Thomas, by (1) depersonalizing philosophy and (2) reducing philosophical activity to systematic logic, Western intellectuals increasingly attempted to dismantle the unity of philosophy, science, and wisdom that St. Thomas had restored. By doing these things, they prepared the ground for René Descartes to reduce all truth, science, philosophy, and wisdom to an act of will-power, Jean-Jacques Rousseau to reduce metaphysics to a utopian-socialist hermeneutic for reading history, and later thinkers to identify all science with mathematical physics. The last thing I must do is to give a summary of what more needs to be done completely to reunite wisdom to science, philosophy, in the West.

2. The separation of philosophy, science, and wisdom after the death of St. Thomas

While the separation between philosophy and science proximately started with René Descartes in the seventeenth century, the remote intellectual foundation for this separation happened at the tail end of the middle ages in the work of William of Ockham (b. 1287; d. 1347). More remotely it goes back to the teaching of double truth held by Latin Averroists, not Averroes, within the faculty of Liberal Arts at the University of Paris during the thirteenth century.

As Armand A. Maurer has noted, the understanding of philosophy as a “body or system of knowledge” originated in the thought of the nominalists of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. “Its chief theoretician and popularizer,” Maurer said, “was William of Ockham.

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