Scholastic Thomism, neo-scholastic Thomism, existential Thomism, analytical Thomism, phenomenological Thomism, transcendental Thomism, ressourcement Thomism, Cracow Circle Thomism, River Forest Thomism...
Sometimes things just get too complicated for the simple trailer Thomist. Just when I think I've found a congenial precursor -- Rahner -- come to find out he's already yesterday's nous. In a book I read yesterday called Principles of Catholic Theology, White tells me I'm fifty years behind the times:
The theological anthropology of Karl Rahner that greatly influenced the life of the Church in the 1970s presumed a kind of normative modern European intellectual consensus in the academy and the Church that no longer exists today.
He claims that this consensus "has perished in the flames of postmodernism," but then again, what hasn't? Postmodernism is the fire it pretends to extinguish, the pneumatological disease it pretends to cure. If it doesn't come straight from hell, nothing does. It is the Voice of the Abyss, a universal acid, and not the good kind.
Both this book and the one mentioned in the previous post give far too much weight to contemporary approaches to philosophy, when philosophy as such should be absolutely impervious to such trends and fashions. Harumph.
White also cites "the rise of analytic philosophy and the return of scientific positivism," as if these have anything to do with the perennial philosophy, timeless truth, and irony-clad wisdom of the Raccoon.
I see that Edward Feser has a series of posts breaking it all down, but not simply enough for the trailer Thomist.
Far from being liberated by postmodernity, White goes on to say that today's students
suffer acutely from the lack of any normative philosophical orientation or basic unified intellectual formation at all. Typically they are offered no unifying account of reality that spans across the diversity of their intellectual disciplines. And indeed, where could they procure one?
Besides here at One Cosmos?
Students often long for some way to make sense of the unity of philosophical experience, so as to see how the world might have some analyzable, overarching meaning.
Do they? Harumph. Besides, who cares what students think? Isn't their very purpose in life to STFU and listen?
We can begin by stipulating that there is One Cosmos, which bats away a host of contenders for the One Philosophy, since the latter (philosophy) must be ordered to the former (cosmos). I'm a simple man, so I begin with O and (¶), the rest being commentary.
Simple but not simplistic, for the space between intelligence and intelligibility is an infinitely evolving one; O is Absolute Being, while (¶) is the transcendental subject, and between them the party never stops. We exist in the tension between immanence and transcendence, or time and eternity, and that's just the way it is. Voegelin:
Eternal being realizes itself in time.
So there. Nor does eternal being "wait for philosophy in order to realize itself," since it never stops happening. History itself "is the process in which eternal being realizes itself in time."
The locus of this realization is the philosopher, the "lover of wisdom" who "opens his soul to its irruption."
There is no philosophy without philosophers, namely without men whose soul responds to eternal being.
All those other guys? Not philosophers. And all those other philosophies? Not philosophy.
Harumph. Details to follow...
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