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Analytical Thomism is a philosophical movement which promotes the interchange of ideas between the thought of Thomas Aquinas (including the philosophy carried on in relation to his thinking, called 'Thomism'), and modern analytic philosophy.
Scottish philosopher John Haldane first coined the term 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". [1]
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. [2] Gilson and Maritain in particular taught and lectured throughout Europe and North America, influencing a generation of English-speaking Catholic philosophers. Some of the latter then began to harmonize Thomism with broader contemporary philosophical trends.
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." [3] The Circle has been said to be "the most significant expression of Catholic thought between the two World Wars". [4]
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 (Paterson & Pugh, xiii-xxiii), 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.
Philosophers and theologians working in the intersection of Thomism and analytic philosophy include:
Analytic philosophy is a broad, contemporary movement or tradition within Western philosophy, especially anglophone philosophy, focused on analysis. Analytic philosophy is characterized by a clarity of prose; rigor in arguments; and making use of formal logic and mathematics, and, to a lesser degree, the natural sciences. It is further characterized by an interest in language and meaning known as the linguistic turn. It has developed several new branches of philosophy and logic, notably philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of science, modern predicate logic and mathematical logic.
Sir Anthony John Patrick Kenny is a British philosopher whose interests lie in the philosophy of mind, ancient and scholastic philosophy, the philosophy of religion, and the philosophy of Wittgenstein of whose literary estate he is an executor. With Peter Geach, he has made a significant contribution to analytical Thomism, a movement whose aim is to present the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas in the style of analytic philosophy. He is a former president of the British Academy and the Royal Institute of Philosophy. He has two sons, Charles James Kenny and Robert Alexander Kenny. He also has four grandchildren.
Peter Thomas Geach was a British philosopher who was Professor of Logic at the University of Leeds. His areas of interest were philosophical logic, ethics, history of philosophy, philosophy of religion and the theory of identity.
Ordinary language philosophy (OLP) is a philosophical methodology that sees traditional philosophical problems as rooted in misunderstandings philosophers develop by distorting or forgetting how words are ordinarily used to convey meaning in non-philosophical contexts. "Such 'philosophical' uses of language, on this view, create the very philosophical problems they are employed to solve."
Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe, usually cited as G. E. M. Anscombe or Elizabeth Anscombe, was a British analytic philosopher. She wrote on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, philosophical logic, philosophy of language, and ethics. She was a prominent figure of analytical Thomism, a Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford, and a professor of philosophy at the University of Cambridge.
Thomism is the philosophical and theological school which arose as a legacy of the work and thought of Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), the Dominican philosopher, theologian, and Doctor of the Church.
Józef Maria Bocheński or Innocentius Bochenski was a Polish Dominican, logician and philosopher.
John Mitchell Finnis is an Australian legal philosopher and jurist specializing in jurisprudence and the philosophy of law. He is an original interpreter of Aristotle and Aquinas, and counts Germain Grisez as a major influence and collaborator. He has made contributions to epistemology, metaphysics, and moral philosophy.
David Braine was a British analytic philosopher with interests in analytic philosophy of religion and metaphysics, who sought to marry the techniques and insights of analytical philosophy and phenomenology to the metaphysics of classical Thomism. His The Reality of Time and the Existence of God set out to prove the existence of God from the fact that the world enjoys continuity in time. He argued that nothing in the world could be the cause of this continuity, whence God came into the picture.
Aeterni Patris was an encyclical issued by Pope Leo XIII in August 1879. It was subtitled "On the Restoration of Christian Philosophy in Catholic Schools in the Spirit of the Angelic Doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas". The aim of the encyclical was to advance the revival of Scholastic philosophy.
John Francis Xavier Knasas is an American philosopher. He is a leading existential Thomist in the Neo-Thomist movement, best known for engaging such thinkers as Bernard Lonergan, Alasdair MacIntyre and Jeremy Wilkins in disputes over human cognition to affirm a Thomistic epistemology of direct realism and defending the thought of Jacques Maritain, Étienne Gilson and Fr. Joseph Owens. He holds the Bishop Wendelin J. Nold Endowed Chair as Professor of Philosophy at the Center for Thomistic Studies at the University of St. Thomas in Houston and earned his doctorate at the University of Toronto, under the direction of Fr. Joseph Owens.
The University of Cambridge was the birthplace of the 'Analytic' School of Philosophy in the early 20th century. The department is located in the Raised Faculty Building on the Sidgwick Site and is part of the Cambridge School of Arts and Humanities. The Faculty achieved the best possible results from The Times 2004 and the QAA Subject Review 2001 (24/24). In the UK as of 2020, it is ranked second by the Guardian, second by the Philosophical Gourmet Report, and fifth by the QS World University Rankings.
Joseph Maréchal, SJ was a Belgian Jesuit priest, philosopher, theologian and psychologist. He taught at the Higher Institute of Philosophy of the University of Leuven and was the founder of the school of thought called transcendental Thomism, which attempted to merge the theological and philosophical thought of St. Thomas Aquinas with that of Immanuel Kant.
Neo-scholasticism is a revival and development of medieval scholasticism in Catholic theology and philosophy which began in the second half of the 19th century.
Réginald Marie Garrigou-Lagrange was a French Dominican friar, philosopher and theologian. Garrigou-Lagrange was a neo-Thomist theologian, recognized along with Édouard Hugon and Martin Grabmann as distinguished theologians of the 20th century. As professor at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas, he taught dogmatic and spiritual theology in Rome from 1909 to 1959. There he wrote The Three Ages of the Interior Life in 1938.
John Joseph Haldane is a British philosopher, commentator and broadcaster. He is a former papal adviser to the Vatican. He is credited with coining the term 'analytical Thomism' and is himself a Thomist in the analytic tradition. Haldane is associated with The Veritas Forum and is the current chair of the Royal Institute of Philosophy.
Columba Ryan was a British priest of the Dominican Order and a philosophy teacher, university chaplain, and pastor. He was the brother of John Ryan, the British animator and cartoonist.
Giovanni Ventimiglia is a Swiss–Italian philosopher. He is full Professor of Philosophy at the University of Lucerne (Switzerland) and Vice Dean of its Faculty of Theology. He is director of the new Centre for Theology and Philosophy of Religions. Between 2017 and 2022, he was Visiting Professor of Medieval Philosophy in philosophy at the University of Italian Switzerland. He is (founding) President of the Reginaldus Foundation, Switzerland.
The Anscombe Bioethics Centre is a Catholic academic institute based in Oxford, which engages in scholarship, public debate, and education. Established in 1977, it is the oldest bioethical research institution in the United Kingdom.