Thomism

Lore & Background

Scottish philosopher John Haldane coined the term 'Analytical Thomism' in the early 1990s, and has since been one of the movement's leading proponents. According to Haldane, 'analytical Thomism involves the bringing into mutual relationship of the styles and preoccupations of recent English-speaking philosophy and the ideas and concerns shared by St. Thomas and his followers'. The modern revival of Aquinas's thought can be traced to the work of mid-19th Century thomists, such as Tommaso Maria Zigliara, Josef Kleutgen, Gaetano Sanseverino, and Giovanni Maria Cornoldi. This movement received an enormous impetus by Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Aeterni Patris of 1879. In the first half of the twentieth century, Edouard Hugon, Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Étienne Gilson, and Jacques Maritain, among others, carried on Leo's call for a Thomist revival. Gilson and Maritain in particular taught and lectured throughout Europe and North America, influencing a generation of English-speaking Catholic philosophers. Similarly, the Kraków Circle in Poland used mathematical logic in presenting Thomism, which the Circle judged to have 'a structured body of propositions connected in meaning and subject matter, and linked by logical relations of compatibility and incompatibility, entailment, etc.' The Circle has been said to be 'the most significant expression of Catholic thought between the two World Wars'.

Reader's Guide

By the middle of the 20th century, Aquinas's thought came into dialogue with the analytical tradition through the work of G. E. M. Anscombe, Peter Geach, and Anthony Kenny. Anscombe was Ludwig Wittgenstein's student, and his successor at the University of Cambridge; she was married to Geach, himself an accomplished logician and philosopher of religion. Geach had converted to Roman Catholicism while studying at Oxford, Anscombe had converted before she came up, and both were instructed in the Faith in Oxford by the Dominican Richard Kehoe, who received them both into the Church before they met one another. Kenny, an erstwhile priest and former Catholic, became a prominent philosopher at the University of Oxford and an editor and executor of Wittgenstein's literary estate, and is still portrayed by some as a promoter of Aquinas, though his denial of some basic Thomist doctrines (e.g. divine timelessness) casts doubt on this. Anscombe, and other Aristotelians such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Philippa Foot, Mortimer Adler, and John Finnis, can largely be credited with the revival of 'virtue ethics' in analytic moral theory and 'natural law theory' in jurisprudence. Both movements draw significantly upon Aquinas.

Did You Know?

• Scottish philosopher John Haldane coined the term 'Analytical Thomism' in the early 1990s.
• The Kraków Circle in Poland used mathematical logic in presenting Thomism, and has been called 'the most significant expression of Catholic thought between the two World Wars'.
• G. E. M. Anscombe was Ludwig Wittgenstein's student and his successor at the University of Cambridge.
• Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Aeterni Patris of 1879 gave enormous impetus to the Thomist revival.
• Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mortimer Adler, and John Finnis helped revive 'virtue ethics' in analytic moral theory and 'natural law theory' in jurisprudence.