Lyceum & Book Club - Week 11 - Lecture Notes on Thomas Aquinas

From philosophy basics.com

Thomism is a Medieval school of philosophy that arose specifically as a legacy of the work and thought of the 13th Century philosopher and theologian St. Thomas Aquinas. His "Summa Theologica" is often considered second only to the Bible in importance to the Roman Catholic Church, and arguably one of the most influential philosophies of all time.

Aquinas worked to create a philosophical system which integrated Christian doctrine with elements taken from Aristotelianism, augmenting the Neo-Platonic view of philosophy (which, after St. Augustine, had become tremendously influential among medieval philosophers), with insights drawn from Aristotle. He was instrumental in moving the focus of Scholastic philosophy away from Plato and towards Aristotle.

He was greatly influenced by his reading of earlier and contemporaneous Islamic philosophers, especially the works of Avicenna, Al-Ghazali (1058 - 1111), and Averroes (although he explicitly rejected Averroes' primary conclusions and themes). He also drew on the works of the prominent medieval Jewish philosophers Avicebron (1021 - 1058) and Maimonides, and in turn he influenced later Jewish philosophy.

Aquinas taught that both faith and reason discover truth (conflict between them being impossible since they both originate in God), and that reason can, in principle, lead the mind to God. He offered five proofs for the existence of God, including the Cosmological Argument (based on Aristotle's concept of the "unmoved mover") and the Teleological Argument (which is similar to the modern idea of "intelligent design").

The Dominican religious order, of which Aquinas was a member, quickly adopted his ideas as an official philosophy of the order, and the Dominicans always remained his most ardent supporters, through to the 16th Century. The Franciscan order, on the other hand, including John Duns Scotus, Henry of Ghent (c. 1217 - 1293) and Giles of Rome (c. 1243 - 1316), vehemently opposed Thomism. Some of his theses were condemned in 1277 by the important ecclesiastical authorities of Paris and Oxford, although this condemnation was revoked after Aquinas was canonized in 1323.

In the late 19th Century, Pope Leo XIII (1810 - 1903) attempted a revival of Thomism (Neo-Thomism), emphasizing the ethical parts of Thomism, and this held sway as the dominant philosophy of the Roman Catholic Church until the Second Vatican Council in 1962, and remains a vibrant and challenging school of philosophy even today.

More on Aquinas:

Aquinas in 90 minutes