tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2472139466585018053.post1660276853030182713..comments2024-03-11T04:11:06.487-04:00Comments on The Smithy: NostalgiaLee Faberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00476833516234522602noreply@blogger.comBlogger11125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2472139466585018053.post-56701203409993707322010-02-05T19:44:49.082-05:002010-02-05T19:44:49.082-05:00I consider myself a Thomist not because I agree wi...<i>I consider myself a Thomist not because I agree with everything Thomas says, but because when I have a question that needs answering, Thomas' writings are the first to which I turn.</i><br /><br />This is very interesting, because it seems to confirm what I've argued before, namely that a lot of Thomas' superiority is pedagogical. It's so much easier to find things in his writings, and then to understand what he's getting at pretty quickly, that it makes perfect sense to go to him first. I frequently do myself.Michael Sullivanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11191322302191384384noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2472139466585018053.post-4732874261981762492010-02-05T16:51:56.700-05:002010-02-05T16:51:56.700-05:00Michael, I appreciate this post. I was sitting at...Michael, I appreciate this post. I was sitting at the lunch table with a pair of Thomists a few months ago, and they were convinced that if one called himself a Thomist, he must agree with every major insight of Thomas' system. I argued that this was silly, and that the terms are a lot more flexible than they made them out to be. Your example is case and point: Scotus did not create a vast synthesis like Thomas did, which would mean--according to my interlocutors--there are no Scotists!<br /><br />I consider myself a Thomist not because I agree with everything Thomas says, but because when I have a question that needs answering, Thomas' writings are the first to which I turn. Labels are good things, but I cannot see how they could ever be used as rigidly as my interlocutors did.Paul Hamiltonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09178984741678168432noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2472139466585018053.post-86221431114140847312010-02-02T22:41:12.002-05:002010-02-02T22:41:12.002-05:00Faber,
I have no opinion about the "future o...Faber,<br /><br />I have no opinion about the "future of scholasticism", except that if what Rosemann wants happens then scholasticism will be dead. What you and I do is scholasticism; whether it has a future is another story.<br /><br /><i>De wulf thought (at one point) that there was just one undifferentiated mass known as scholasticism, with just a few minor unimportant differences.</i><br /><br />Well, that certainly not what I'm advocating. What I'm saying is that one can be a scholastic without wholly identifying oneself with a particular school or thinker. People doing so may well have vast differences in their metaphysical commitments. Surely Bonaventure and Ockham were both scholastics, and even, in some sense, in the same "school", but it would be silly to say that they had in common one undifferentiated mass of doctrine, with a few minor unimportant differences.Michael Sullivanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11191322302191384384noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2472139466585018053.post-85201594195021751732010-02-02T22:35:53.609-05:002010-02-02T22:35:53.609-05:00I'm glad you've returned to your previous ...<i> I'm glad you've returned to your previous level of eloquence!</i><br /><br />Oh, had it been falling off?<br /><br />As for the St Thomas anecdote, I tend to think it should be interpreted in conjunction with the other one, in which the corpus on the crucifix says to him while in prayer, "Thomas, you have written well of me", etc.Michael Sullivanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11191322302191384384noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2472139466585018053.post-57255808521396869152010-02-02T16:13:29.320-05:002010-02-02T16:13:29.320-05:00"I'm pretty much in agreement here. St. T..."I'm pretty much in agreement here. St. Thomas was not building Thomism; he was doing Philosophy, as he found it in the Philosopher, under the guidance of the Christian faith, as part of the work of Sacred Teaching. Ditto with Bl. John. Of course, because they were teachers they did try to boil it down in a systematic way -- Aquinas usually more than Scotus, because the bulk of Aquinas's works consists of textbooks of one sort or another. But it is one thing to take a Teacher; it is another to follow a script. And I think it's often the case that people claim to do the first but end up doing the latter."<br /><br /><br />I wonder if this might perhaps be why, among many other obvious reasons of course (e.g., speculative thought concerning the Infinite and the Celestial), that the Golden Legend has Thomas declaring that all his works concerning theology and philosophy were but straw.<br /><br /><br /><br />"The rules are subject to change and no given set of safety apparatus can be adequate."<br /><br />Michael: Don't you mean 'apparati' (or something like that)? By the way, good writing here! I'm glad you've returned to your previous level of eloquence!<br /><br />Also, my thanks to Mr. (Dr.?) Faber for the provided excerpts. Some more good food for thought there with respect to what once was the noble art of Scholasticism.onus probandinoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2472139466585018053.post-54553359920125247652010-02-02T15:42:53.069-05:002010-02-02T15:42:53.069-05:00i was addressing a point you made that you weren&#...i was addressing a point you made that you weren't one of these systems, just a scholastic. Rosemann's article, indeed which I neglected to give context for, is about the future of Scholasticism. So I took it as a rival account of the future of S. For more or less the same reason, I took you to be following de Wulf in advocating "scholasticism" as opposed to thomism or scotism. But it is a stretch...De wulf thought (at one point) that there was just one undifferentiated mass known as scholasticism, with just a few minor unimportant differences.Lee Faberhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00476833516234522602noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2472139466585018053.post-21440777065385049192010-02-02T15:16:51.896-05:002010-02-02T15:16:51.896-05:00Faber, I have to admit I don't quite see what ...Faber, I have to admit I don't quite see what you mean by <i> I see you are trying to rekindle the 19th century De wulf historiograpy</i>. I didn't think I was doing that at all.<br /><br />As for the quote, hmm, I'm not sure what I make of it and I'm also not quite sure why you think it's relevant here. Of course I would deny Rosemann's claims that scholasticism is "ahistorical" if that means "not aware of its own history or the history of philosophy" - that seems demonstrably false. Also I would insist that there is indeed no episteme of history, given the Aristotelian conditions of science, but that this does not involve an indifference to the existence or significance of contingent facts. And I would deny of course 1) that metaphysical truth is temporally conditioned, and 2) that the good old-time metaphysics is "no longer credible" just because a lot of moderns have turned against it, and 3) that it's possible or reasonable to do good metaphysics without notions like substance and being.<br /><br />But, again, I'm not sure that I know what your point is exactly.Michael Sullivanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11191322302191384384noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2472139466585018053.post-10960995482193372762010-02-02T14:55:09.815-05:002010-02-02T14:55:09.815-05:00...Scholastic thought, therefore, needs to be save......Scholastic thought, therefore, needs to be saved from itself, as it were, with regard to the question of history, not only because Scholasticism needs the historical dimension in order to be able to funciion as an authentic expression of the Christian tradition; Scholastic thought must aslo not close itself off from teh one of the main insifhts of modern philsoiphy since Hegel: the insight that truth is inextricably connected with time. After Hegel, aNietzsche, Heiddegger, but especially after Foucault's detailed analysses of the ways in which truth, reality and human identity are constituted in defferent historical epochs - after these develoopments what its critics now call teh metaphysics of presence' has lost its credibility. The most compelling contemorary Christian thinkers do not attempt to evade this insight; rather - like Jean-luc marion, for instance - they endevoiur to revive metaphysical enquiry wityhout recourse to the otions of substance and being, which are so closely connected with the Aristotelian, static vision of reality. The traditins of Christian neo-platonism and negative theology appear to be better suited to meet the challenges of our post-metaphysical age." <br /><br />From Philip Rosemann, "The future of Scholastic Thought," p. 265-266 (in"The Irish contribution to European Scholastic Thought")Lee Faberhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00476833516234522602noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2472139466585018053.post-34347889566495887362010-02-02T14:51:09.696-05:002010-02-02T14:51:09.696-05:00Michael, I see you are trying to rekindle the 19th...Michael, I see you are trying to rekindle the 19th century De wulf historiograpy...as to the possibility of just being scholastic, what do you make of this:<br /><br />"...This is, I believe, how the scholastic tradition has always seen its task. It is because of this self-understanding that scholastic thought created a large array of intellectual practices aimed at synthesis: collentions of 'sentences' dsitinctions in the meaning of words to uncover nuances in the taching of important texts, disputations and quaestiones to allow for the consideration of the different sides of particular issues, concordances and indices to catalogue intellectual material, diagrams to sketch the outline of systems, and summae to offer comprehensive doctrinal syntheses. Not all these intellectual practices will play a role in the future of scholastic thought: quaestiones and summae, for example, are no longer current as literary genres. In order to remian fiathful to its Herkunft, however, Schoalstic thought will always be animated by the dynamism of synthesis, endeavorouring to grow in contstructive dialgoe with oteher ways to approach the one truth. From the concordist apsect of Schoasltic thought, if follows immediately that Scholasticism should have a strong sense of history: since there is a difference between finite truth and the truth itself in its fullness - a tension that cannot be comapletely reconciled in this life - all synthesis always remains perfectible and hence provisional. [...]this is not the occasion to enter into a detailed discussion of the reasons for the ahistorical nature of much of Scholastic thought. It makes sense to assume, though, that the influence of the static, essentialist world-view of ancient Greece played a role in this congealing of the intellectual expression of Christianity. Aristotle, in particular, deliberately excluded history from the domain of episteme, becaue for him, science had to deal with necessary causes, not contingent evens. Aristotle's world consequently, was a world of essences, which, ultimately, could not change at all. [...] in teh final analysis, any changte is a process in which an essential core perpetuates itself.Lee Faberhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00476833516234522602noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2472139466585018053.post-6748446289912498042010-02-02T14:30:31.803-05:002010-02-02T14:30:31.803-05:00Thanks for this comment. I appreciate the informat...Thanks for this comment. I appreciate the information about Eclecticism, which, if I knew anything about it, I'd forgotten.<br /><br /><i>Thomiventurscotism sounds like an extreme sport. </i><br /><br />That's good! I'd like to imagine that Thomiventurscotism:philosophy::Calvinball:outdoor sports. The rules are subject to change and no given set of safety apparatus can be adequate.Michael Sullivanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11191322302191384384noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2472139466585018053.post-76240958506301396792010-02-02T14:10:18.742-05:002010-02-02T14:10:18.742-05:00I suspect that there's an echo of Eclecticism ...I suspect that there's an echo of Eclecticism in the mention of eclecticism here. That is, any properly educated French philosopher of the period would have known something of Victor Cousin, who advocated Eclecticism, capital E, which was explicitly put forward in order to create a third way between 'renouncing the independence of philosophy and returning to the Middle Ages' and 'continuing the circle of mutually-destroying systems' but "to reject no system and to accept none entirely, to neglect this element and to take that, to select in all what appears to be true and good, and consequently everlasting". As he interpreted it, all systems are sort-of true, no systems are wholly true, we can't generally invent new positions (just different combinations of old ones) and we have to accept all positions to a limited extent. If this is in the back of his mind, Maritain is claiming that Thomism allows assimilation and synthesis of prior insights without syncretism and patchwork. That's true, I think -- but it's not exclusive to following St. Thomas.<br /><br />I'm pretty much in agreement here. St. Thomas was not building Thomism; he was doing Philosophy, as he found it in the Philosopher, under the guidance of the Christian faith, as part of the work of Sacred Teaching. Ditto with Bl. John. Of course, because they were teachers they did try to boil it down in a systematic way -- Aquinas usually more than Scotus, because the bulk of Aquinas's works consists of textbooks of one sort or another. But it is one thing to take a Teacher; it is another to follow a script. And I think it's often the case that people claim to do the first but end up doing the latter.<br /><br />Thomiventurscotism sounds like an extreme sport.Brandonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06698839146562734910noreply@blogger.com