Thomism [addendum]
The most important development in Thomism since the original entry has been increased interest in St. Thomas Aquinas among philosophers trained in the analytic tradition. The pioneer was Peter Geach, whose essay on "Aquinas" in Three Philosophers (1961) has proved to be seminal. Although often critical of what he takes to be Aquinas's positions, Anthony Kenny's numerous publications—covering such diverse philosophical topics as God, mind, and metaphysics—have been influential in making Aquinas more accessible.
The most comprehensive attempt to argue for the contemporary relevance of Aquinas to analytic philosophers is Eleonore Stump's wide-ranging Aquinas (2003). The emergence of philosophy of religion as a recognized discipline within analytical philosophy departments has generated greater interest in Aquinas among a wide variety of theists. Norman Kretzmann, in The Metaphysics of Theism (1997) and The Metaphysics of Creation (1999), has argued that Aquinas's natural theology as developed in the first three books of the Summa contra gentiles is the richest and most impressive resource for the development of a contemporary theistic metaphysics. David Burrell has repeatedly argued, especially in Freedom and Creation in Three Traditions(1993), that Aquinas is an important resource for philosophy of religion in an ecumenical spirit as modeled on Aquinas's own dialogue with Muslim and Jewish interlocutors.
Interest in Aquinas has also flourished in ethics. Alasdair MacIntyre, in Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry (1990), argues for the rational superiority of the Thomistic moral tradition to the failed legacy of the Enlightenment project and the incoherence of Friedrich Nietzsche's genealogy of morals, provoking a large body of secondary literature.
Thomists have traditionally sought to extract from Aquinas a natural-law ethic that could provide the foundation for arguments with those who do not share similar theological commitments. John Finnis's work, especially in Natural Law and Natural Rights (1980), is the most influential attempt to articulate a Thomistic theory of natural law that is more attractive to those who accept the modern starting point of individual natural rights. Finnis's argument that the first principles of practical reason indicate a number of irreducible and incommensurable goods as integral to human fulfillment has been criticized by other Thomists (for example, Russell Hittinger) on the grounds that it is incompatible with Aquinas's claim that the contemplation of God is constitutive of human flourishing.
It should be noted that Thomists trained in a more classically historical approach to Aquinas have made notable recent contributions. The works of John F. Wippel and W. Norris Clarke in metaphysics are especially important. In noting this other strain within Thomism, we come to the abiding tension between traditional fidelity to the central commitments of Aquinas and the development of insights that can engage contemporary problems and modes of discourse. In the previous generation of Thomists, the battle was over whether Aquinas could be brought into dialogue with post-Kantian German philosophy; now the focus has shifted to analytic philosophy. Traditional Thomists worry that analytic readings of Aquinas distort his thought, through both the failure to understand it in its original context and the imposition of foreign metaphysical and epistemological dogmas. More analytically-minded Thomists worry that traditional approaches to Aquinas render his thought irrelevant.
Enlightenment; Macintyre, Alasdair; Natural Law; Neo-Kantianism; Nietzsche, Friedrich; Thomas Aquinas, St.
Bibliography
Davies, Brian. The Thought of Thomas Aquinas. London: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Kerr, Fergus. After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism. London: Blackwell, 2002.
Kretzmann, Norman, and Eleonore Stump, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press 1993.
Shanley, Brian J. The Thomist Tradition. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer, 2002.
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