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It has been said that the quickest way to get a question answered online is to prominently post the wrong answer. I feel like this was Aquinas's role in the dev

It has been said that the quickest way to get a question answered online is to prominently post the wrong answer. I feel like this was Aquinas's role in the development of western philosophy.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
unmole 5y ago
I don't follow. Can you elaborate?
- 52-6F-62 5y ago
  Not OP, but from what I understand Aquinas seems to have had a fixed lens he allowed himself to view the world through and seemingly based the fundamentals of his philosophy on. Not even Aristotle could be properly studied without a Christian lens. He's generally viewed as a net positive since Christiandom ruled the western world and Aquinas reconciled some Aristotelian and Neoplatonic views with the Catholic Church ("Nothing comes from nothing", "cause and effect", etc) But to Aquinas, those Neoplatonists from whom he derived his cosmology and philosophy were nothing better than pagans lining up to be burned in the good lord's holy fires—even though they figured the same thing about the way things appear to work.
  - alentist 5y ago
    > a fixed lens he allowed himself to view the world through That's true of any philosopher. > to Aquinas, those Neoplatonists from whom he derived his cosmology and philosophy were nothing better than pagans Ahistorical nonsense. https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com//mobile/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199589371.001.0001/acprof-9780199589371-chapter-4 https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com//mobile/view/1... https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvqsf13g https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvqsf13g
    - danielam 5y ago
      Specifically, I'd add that Aquinas had enormous regard for Aristotle and the pagan philosophers, to the point that he referred to Aristotle with the honorific "the Philosopher".
      - mdiesel 5y ago
        The Name of the Rose is a great read, that to me summarises the relationship nicely.
      - 52-6F-62 5y ago
        I'd be wary of misinterpreting endearment as honorific. Morally, he couldn't exalt a Pagan. He only brought himself to say that they essentially "weren't all bad", and beautifully illustrated. He was right, of course, about them—but ultimately he looked down upon them from a moral and ethical standpoint.
        wolverine876 5y ago
        The Medieval church's philosophy was called Neoplatonism, after Plato, a 'pagan'. IIRC, they would have loved to have Aristotle's works too, and they were finally discovered in the time of Aquinas.
        52-6F-62 5y ago
        Common cosmological and philosophical threads run through all religions, but some tenets of Neoplatonism and related Hermetic mystical foundations made their way into Catholicism through two means: early Christian cults and sects before an organized central church ruled on all tenets, and later through Augustine and Aquinas saying "these guys aren't so bad, they figured out why we know there's a god at all and now we can prove it". Neoplatonism well predates the church. It's beautiful, though.
        lambdaphagy 5y ago
        Aquinas acknowledged heavy philosophical debts to Maimonides and Averroes while critiquing them in particulars. And as for the theology, I don't see how you get "looked down on" from: https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q10 https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q10. To say that Aquinas "looked down on" pagans seems like an almost maximally uncharitable summary of the man's actual views. Where are you seeing this?
  - xamuel 5y ago
    >Aquinas reconciled some Aristotelian and Neoplatonic views with the Catholic Church I wonder if you might be mistaking Aquinas for Augustine? Augustine introduced huge amounts of Neoplatonism into Christianity very early---little more than a century after the original Neoplatonist, Plotinus himself. It's also worth noting that Plotinus was a disciple of the mysterious Ammonius Saccas, one of whose other disciples was none other than Origen, a very influential early Christian writer (albeit later considered a heretic).
    - wolverine876 5y ago
      My understanding, which was never great and is imperfectly recalled: Augustine was the foundation of Neoplatonism in the Medieval church, which was it's guiding philosophy (to some great extent) for centuries. The works of Aristotle were lost to them. They knew of Aristotle but didn't have his writings. Around the time of Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle's works were rediscovered, having been preserved in the Muslim world. Aquinas' great task was reconciling them with the existing church.
      - xamuel 5y ago
        Augustine does explicitly reference Aristotle's "Categories" in his Confessions, I believe. Not sure what other material of Aristotle's was available to Augustine, I'm not a scholar on the subject. Of course, even to us today, many of Aristotle's works are STILL lost, so...
    - AquinasCoder 5y ago
      It's fair to say Augustine did more reconciling with Neoplatonism. Aquinas did some. I think Aquinas was more wary of relying too heavily upon a philosophy that he saw as incomplete. Even "the philosopher" could not provide a comprehensive framework for Christian philosophy. When Neoplatonism was useful, he would take parts here and there, but he was under no illusion that Neoplatonism provided a sufficient framework for understanding the world. The early Italian renaissance philosophers were far more taken with Plato and the Neoplatonists. Marsilio Ficino, for example, probably went too far trying to reconcile parts that were (arguably) fundamentally incompatible with Christianity.
- trasz 5y ago
  To put it bluntly: this... "So it is that sacred doctrine is a science because it proceeds from principles established by the light of a higher science, namely, the science of God and the blessed" ... is, technically, BS. And pretty much all of Aquinas follows this pattern. Which was very highly regarded back then, but now we know better.
  - danielam 5y ago
    > ... is, technically, BS. And pretty much all of Aquinas follows this pattern. Which was very highly regarded back then, but now we know better. You seem confident in that assertion. Care to elaborate, preferably with examples/arguments? N.b., it's not the first time I've heard such a claim so boldly stated. Typically, dismissive attitudes toward Thomas are rooted in widespread misunderstanding about what he actually argued and on what basis. Feser, for example, recalls how he had held a caricaturish view of some of the most famous arguments Thomas put forth because those caricatures are what are often taught to students of philosophy nowadays, largely because the caricatures have become part of academic received wisdom, not necessarily because of some ill intent. None of this is to say that Thomas is infallible, just that he is a great teacher. Arguments that rely on the science of his day, for example, may require revision, but his philosophical synthesis, for example, is, at the VERY least, very defensible.
    - slumdev 5y ago
      The clarity of St. Thomas is incomprehensible to anyone raised in postmodernism and not educated in philosophy.
      - huetius 5y ago
        I’m not sure that’s true. There is a certain strand in postmodernist/critical thought that, by consistently seeking to unmask power, recovers the perennial, “religious” questions. Some examples might include Horkheimer’s later works, Simone Weil, or Habermas, who famously had an encounter with Pope Benedict XVI (then, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger) that caused him to reevaluate a lot of his views towards religious thought. I think Aquinas is also pretty accessible to the dedicated novice. Maybe you mean positivist instead of postmodernist? In that case, yeah, I’d agree.
- benpbenp 5y ago
  It is a joke based on Aquinas' style of answering questions. He begins with a handful of "objections" that take the opposite position to the one he eventually lands on. To take a random example, "Whether a man is bound to give thanks to every benefactor?" (https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q106.A3 https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q106.A3)
  - throw0101a 5y ago
    > It is a joke based on Aquinas' style of answering questions. This wasn't particular to Aquinas, but fairly common among Scholastics: * https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/41999/what-is-the-style-of-writing-used-in-the-summa-theologica-called https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/41999/what-is-th... In some ways you're trying to steel man (as opposed to straw man) the opposing arguments. It was a reflection of the oral debating style used in universities at the time.
    - guerrilla 5y ago
      Strange that that answer doesn't include the fact that they were heavily influenced by Aristotle (who had just been rediscovered by Europeans) who explicitely recommended doing this.
  - gjm11 5y ago
    My reading of the joke was that it wasn't about Aquinas's question/answers/objections/resolution style, but just suggesting that Aquinas got a lot of things wrong but got them wrong very clearly, making him a useful person to argue against in order to develop better answers to his questions.
    - guerrilla 5y ago
      I read it that way. He was so methodical and echaustive (as well as orthodox in many ways) that he became the perfect starting point to rebel against.
- handrous 5y ago
  He wrote a lot about a variety of Big Topics in philosophy and theology, often getting things quite wrong, sometimes subtly, sometimes... less subtly. This has prompted much commentary, refutation, and further development toward better arguments.
  - danielam 5y ago
    Please see my comment to trasz.
    - handrous 5y ago
      Fair enough, I admit my take is an (the indefinite article, to be clear) orthodox, but meme-y and not especially "deep" one.

It has been said that the quickest way to get a question answered online is to prominently post the wrong answer. I feel like this was Aquinas's role in the development of western philosophy.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

unmole 5y ago

I don't follow. Can you elaborate?

52-6F-62 5y ago
Not OP, but from what I understand Aquinas seems to have had a fixed lens he allowed himself to view the world through and seemingly based the fundamentals of his philosophy on. Not even Aristotle could be properly studied without a Christian lens. He's generally viewed as a net positive since Christiandom ruled the western world and Aquinas reconciled some Aristotelian and Neoplatonic views with the Catholic Church ("Nothing comes from nothing", "cause and effect", etc) But to Aquinas, those Neoplatonists from whom he derived his cosmology and philosophy were nothing better than pagans lining up to be burned in the good lord's holy fires—even though they figured the same thing about the way things appear to work.
- alentist 5y ago
  > a fixed lens he allowed himself to view the world through That's true of any philosopher. > to Aquinas, those Neoplatonists from whom he derived his cosmology and philosophy were nothing better than pagans Ahistorical nonsense. https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com//mobile/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199589371.001.0001/acprof-9780199589371-chapter-4 https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com//mobile/view/1... https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvqsf13g https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvqsf13g
  - danielam 5y ago
    Specifically, I'd add that Aquinas had enormous regard for Aristotle and the pagan philosophers, to the point that he referred to Aristotle with the honorific "the Philosopher".
    - mdiesel 5y ago
      The Name of the Rose is a great read, that to me summarises the relationship nicely.
    - 52-6F-62 5y ago
      I'd be wary of misinterpreting endearment as honorific. Morally, he couldn't exalt a Pagan. He only brought himself to say that they essentially "weren't all bad", and beautifully illustrated. He was right, of course, about them—but ultimately he looked down upon them from a moral and ethical standpoint.
      - wolverine876 5y ago
        The Medieval church's philosophy was called Neoplatonism, after Plato, a 'pagan'. IIRC, they would have loved to have Aristotle's works too, and they were finally discovered in the time of Aquinas.
        52-6F-62 5y ago
        Common cosmological and philosophical threads run through all religions, but some tenets of Neoplatonism and related Hermetic mystical foundations made their way into Catholicism through two means: early Christian cults and sects before an organized central church ruled on all tenets, and later through Augustine and Aquinas saying "these guys aren't so bad, they figured out why we know there's a god at all and now we can prove it". Neoplatonism well predates the church. It's beautiful, though.
      - lambdaphagy 5y ago
        Aquinas acknowledged heavy philosophical debts to Maimonides and Averroes while critiquing them in particulars. And as for the theology, I don't see how you get "looked down on" from: https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q10 https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q10. To say that Aquinas "looked down on" pagans seems like an almost maximally uncharitable summary of the man's actual views. Where are you seeing this?
- xamuel 5y ago
  >Aquinas reconciled some Aristotelian and Neoplatonic views with the Catholic Church I wonder if you might be mistaking Aquinas for Augustine? Augustine introduced huge amounts of Neoplatonism into Christianity very early---little more than a century after the original Neoplatonist, Plotinus himself. It's also worth noting that Plotinus was a disciple of the mysterious Ammonius Saccas, one of whose other disciples was none other than Origen, a very influential early Christian writer (albeit later considered a heretic).
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    My understanding, which was never great and is imperfectly recalled: Augustine was the foundation of Neoplatonism in the Medieval church, which was it's guiding philosophy (to some great extent) for centuries. The works of Aristotle were lost to them. They knew of Aristotle but didn't have his writings. Around the time of Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle's works were rediscovered, having been preserved in the Muslim world. Aquinas' great task was reconciling them with the existing church.
    - xamuel 5y ago
      Augustine does explicitly reference Aristotle's "Categories" in his Confessions, I believe. Not sure what other material of Aristotle's was available to Augustine, I'm not a scholar on the subject. Of course, even to us today, many of Aristotle's works are STILL lost, so...
  - AquinasCoder 5y ago
    It's fair to say Augustine did more reconciling with Neoplatonism. Aquinas did some. I think Aquinas was more wary of relying too heavily upon a philosophy that he saw as incomplete. Even "the philosopher" could not provide a comprehensive framework for Christian philosophy. When Neoplatonism was useful, he would take parts here and there, but he was under no illusion that Neoplatonism provided a sufficient framework for understanding the world. The early Italian renaissance philosophers were far more taken with Plato and the Neoplatonists. Marsilio Ficino, for example, probably went too far trying to reconcile parts that were (arguably) fundamentally incompatible with Christianity.
trasz 5y ago
To put it bluntly: this... "So it is that sacred doctrine is a science because it proceeds from principles established by the light of a higher science, namely, the science of God and the blessed" ... is, technically, BS. And pretty much all of Aquinas follows this pattern. Which was very highly regarded back then, but now we know better.
- danielam 5y ago
  > ... is, technically, BS. And pretty much all of Aquinas follows this pattern. Which was very highly regarded back then, but now we know better. You seem confident in that assertion. Care to elaborate, preferably with examples/arguments? N.b., it's not the first time I've heard such a claim so boldly stated. Typically, dismissive attitudes toward Thomas are rooted in widespread misunderstanding about what he actually argued and on what basis. Feser, for example, recalls how he had held a caricaturish view of some of the most famous arguments Thomas put forth because those caricatures are what are often taught to students of philosophy nowadays, largely because the caricatures have become part of academic received wisdom, not necessarily because of some ill intent. None of this is to say that Thomas is infallible, just that he is a great teacher. Arguments that rely on the science of his day, for example, may require revision, but his philosophical synthesis, for example, is, at the VERY least, very defensible.
  - slumdev 5y ago
    The clarity of St. Thomas is incomprehensible to anyone raised in postmodernism and not educated in philosophy.
    - huetius 5y ago
      I’m not sure that’s true. There is a certain strand in postmodernist/critical thought that, by consistently seeking to unmask power, recovers the perennial, “religious” questions. Some examples might include Horkheimer’s later works, Simone Weil, or Habermas, who famously had an encounter with Pope Benedict XVI (then, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger) that caused him to reevaluate a lot of his views towards religious thought. I think Aquinas is also pretty accessible to the dedicated novice. Maybe you mean positivist instead of postmodernist? In that case, yeah, I’d agree.
benpbenp 5y ago
It is a joke based on Aquinas' style of answering questions. He begins with a handful of "objections" that take the opposite position to the one he eventually lands on. To take a random example, "Whether a man is bound to give thanks to every benefactor?" (https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q106.A3 https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q106.A3)
- throw0101a 5y ago
  > It is a joke based on Aquinas' style of answering questions. This wasn't particular to Aquinas, but fairly common among Scholastics: * https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/41999/what-is-the-style-of-writing-used-in-the-summa-theologica-called https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/41999/what-is-th... In some ways you're trying to steel man (as opposed to straw man) the opposing arguments. It was a reflection of the oral debating style used in universities at the time.
  - guerrilla 5y ago
    Strange that that answer doesn't include the fact that they were heavily influenced by Aristotle (who had just been rediscovered by Europeans) who explicitely recommended doing this.
- gjm11 5y ago
  My reading of the joke was that it wasn't about Aquinas's question/answers/objections/resolution style, but just suggesting that Aquinas got a lot of things wrong but got them wrong very clearly, making him a useful person to argue against in order to develop better answers to his questions.
  - guerrilla 5y ago
    I read it that way. He was so methodical and echaustive (as well as orthodox in many ways) that he became the perfect starting point to rebel against.
handrous 5y ago
He wrote a lot about a variety of Big Topics in philosophy and theology, often getting things quite wrong, sometimes subtly, sometimes... less subtly. This has prompted much commentary, refutation, and further development toward better arguments.
- danielam 5y ago
  Please see my comment to trasz.
  - handrous 5y ago
    Fair enough, I admit my take is an (the indefinite article, to be clear) orthodox, but meme-y and not especially "deep" one.