Aquinas

Three clicks away from John Michael Greer's blog I found Edward Feser and his blog. Feser isn't someone I'd likely read past the first paragraph, owing firstly to his material and secondly to his polemic style, but the first post I read on his blog caught my attention. In it Feser made an analogy between the history of philosophy and the Godfather trilogy of movies. Suppose you knew someone who has seen half of the first Godfather movie, none of the second, and the third fifteen times. How would that person's opinion of the trilogy compare to someone who's seen all three movies? Answer: their opinion would be skewed. Not only would they know little about the first two movies and what made those movies great, but they'd probably be confused about many parts in the third movie as well, despite having seen the third movie many times.

So it goes with philosophy. Western philosophy divides into three eras: the classical era of the Greeks and Romans, the medieval era of the Scholastics and of classical theism, and the modern era consisting of a hodgepodge of poorly written nonsense. And yet most people's knowledge of philosophy is as warped as the previous paragraph's Godfather fan's knowledge of the Godfather trilogy: most people's understanding of philosophy includes a little about the classics, little beyond a caricature of the medieval period, and a whole lot of the modern period, usually starting with Descartes and I think therefore I am. And so it goes that we should stop re-watching the third movie and get busy learning what makes the first two movies masterpieces.

Feser's analogy sold me: I ought to learn more about medieval philosophy. Years ago in college I took two philosophy classes, one a generic intro and the other an ethics class (which gave me more questions than answers), and from those courses, as well as my ongoing interest in loving wisdom, I can't say I know more than a shadow of what was going on in the minds of learned Europeans one thousand years ago. Feser's academic specialization is St. Thomas Aquinas (13th century, in case you're wondering), who is to classical theists as Adam Smith is to modern free-market supporters: often cited, rarely read. But Feser has made a career out of Aquinas, and he knows his topic—or purports to know, for I'm in no position to judge. He's written a few books, and he says that few people really know what Aquinas is all about. Aquinas has never been refuted, only neglected. If only more people watched the first two Godfather movies in whole, we'd realize how special classical theism is.

The book I'm reading is titled simply Aquinas. It's a beginner's guide and fulfills one of my requirements for reading about other religions: it's short, just around 200 pages. I was pleased to discover the book is also clear and mostly devoid of clutter. What will follow on Mondays here at JEC for the next few weeks are my thoughts and impressions of the book's content.

Metaphysics, briefly

Feser begins with a chapter on metaphysics, that quagmire of a topic useful for transforming conversations from evocative to provocative. I'm halfway through the chapter, which makes up nearly a third of the book, so I can't conclude on the matter just yet, but so far Aquinas's metaphysical framework looks much the same as the classical ones I learned in school—mainly, the Forms.

I admit to never making much sense of Platonic and Aristotelian forms while in school and learning only enough lingo to get by on exams. In his book Feser makes something clear that would have helped me as a student: the primary difference between Plato's forms and Aristotle's forms is that Plato's forms existed as real things in a heavenly realm of forms, whereas Aristotle's forms are merely the yin to the yang of tangible matter. Take as an example my touring bicycle. It comprises matter by way of steel, rubber, aluminum, plastic, cork, and so on, and its form is of bicycle-ness. According to Plato, you could destroy the matter and the bicycle-ness still exists, somewhere out there, but Aristotle—and Aquinas, who takes Aristotle's side—argues that if you destroy the matter then you've destroyed the bicycle-ness, too.

In addition to the forms, there's the duality between actuality and potency, and there are the four causes. Actuality and potency pertain to an object's properties: actuality being the set of properties the object has, and potency being the set of properties the object may attain through change. The four causes then explain change. The first two causes, the material cause and the formal causes, are matter and form restated. The other two causes are the efficient cause and the final cause. The efficient cause transforms a potential property into a actual property, and the final cause is the teleological end, or purpose, of a change.

I'm rushing the descriptions of these concepts because I expect most people will skip past them no matter what I write, with maybe one person interested enough to read about them elsewhere. So far Feser's book reads much like any other I'd expect to see in an intro philosophy course, so I'll wait at least another week before giving any commentary.