Analytical Thomism: Traditions in Dialogue

Richard Cross

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Analytical Thomism: Traditions in Dialogue

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• Arts

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• Publié par: ovaqetyg
• Nombre de lectures: 77
• Langue: Français

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Ars Disputandi Volume7(2007) :1566–5399

Richard Cross   ,

Analytical Thomism:Traditions in Dialogue

Edited by Craig Paterson and Matthew S. Pugh

Aldershot: Ashgate,2006; xxiii+332£pp.; hb.55.00;: 0–7546–3438–8.

[1] The phrase ‘analytical Thomism’ was first coined by John Haldane in a lecture given at Notre Dame in1992, and since that time a number of collections have appeared under the same general heading:most notably, a1997number of The Monistyears on, this volume provides an assessment of the current state. Ten of analytic Thomism, including some critical voices both current and from back in1997. ForHaldane, as well qualified as anyone to specify the meaning of the phrase, ‘Thomism’ designates ‘ways of thinking that are in the spirit of Aquinas, or develop what he has to say’, and ‘analytic’ indicates the pursuit of ‘answers to a range of questions bya prioriexamination of intelligible structures’ (p.305); or as he puts it in theMonistissue, it ‘seeks to deploy the methods and ideas of twentiethcentury philosophy . . .in connection with the broad framework of ideas introduced by Aquinas’ (quoted here on pp.190–91, n.3and on p.215). By common consent, the list of major twentiethcentury philosophers who may reasonably be said to be to greater or lesser degrees analytical Thomists includes Elizabeth Anscombe, Peter Geach, and Anthony Kenny.Still, being ‘in the spirit of Aquinas’ and ‘developing what he has to say’ are not necessarily coextensive: it is possible to mine aspects of Aquinas’s thought while being highly dismissive of other areas of it (compare Kenny’s widely differing assessments of Aquinas’s philosophy of mind and of his metaphysics).The analytic Thomists collected in this volume are more minded to develop what Aquinas has to say, sometimes in very critical directions, than simply to adopt it wholesale, and this is all to the good. [2] It seems to me (contrary to a suggestion of the editors on p. xiii) that the ‘Thomist’ part of the description is rather harder to assess than the ‘analytical’ part, and coupling ‘Thomist’ with ‘analytic’ suggests to some commentators (gen uineThomists of the old school, those who think that Aquinas got more or less everything right and that later philosophy can simply be disregarded wholesale as a catalogue of errors deviating from thedoctor communis—perhaps we can call such thinkers ‘ostrichThomists’) something of the oxymoron:certain key claims of Aquinas’s are incompatible with the commitments of (any?)analytic philos ophy. AThomist is someone – they claim – who accepts certain key distinctive claims made by Aquinas:most notably, the real distinction between essence and

 c January 10,2007,Ars Disputandi. If you would like to cite this article, please do so as follows: Richard Cross, ‘Review of Analytical Thomism:Traditions in Dialogue,’Ars Disputandi[http://www.ArsDisputandi. org]7(2007), paragraph number.