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> ... 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 conf
by 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 agoThe clarity of St. Thomas is incomprehensible to anyone raised in postmodernism and not educated in philosophy.
- huetius 5y agoI’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.
- slumdev 5y agoPostmodernist suppositions regarding power and ideology include an implicit assumption that absolute truth doesn't exist. That used to be called relativism. It's ad hominem at scale -- an attack on the institutions that produced centuries of good work rather than an honest confrontation of the work itself.
- dang 5y agoPlease don't take HN threads into generic ideological tangents. The more generic they get, the more repetitive and tedious they are, and then they inevitably turn nasty. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=generic%20discussion%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=mind%20amuse%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html