Analytical Thomism is aphilosophical movement which promotes the interchange of ideas between the thought ofThomas Aquinas (including the philosophy carried on in relation to his thinking, called 'Thomism'), and modernanalytic philosophy. It is a branch of analytic scholasticism that draws on other scholastic sources, esp. John Duns Scotus.[1]
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".[2]
The modern revival of Aquinas's thought can be traced to the work of mid-19th Century thomists, such asTommaso Maria Zigliara,Josef Kleutgen,Gaetano Sanseverino, andGiovanni Maria Cornoldi. This movement received an enormous impetus byPope Leo XIII'sencyclicalAeterni Patris of 1879. In the first half of the twentieth century,Edouard Hugon,Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange,Étienne Gilson, andJacques Maritain, among others, carried on Leo's call for a Thomist revival.[3] Gilson and Maritain in particular taught and lectured throughout Europe and North America, influencing a generation of English-speakingCatholic philosophers. Some of the latter then began to harmonize Thomism with broader contemporary philosophical trends.
Similarly, theKraków Circle in Poland usedmathematical 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."[4] The Circle has been said to be "the most significant expression of Catholic thought between the two World Wars".[5]
By the middle of the 20th century, Aquinas's thought came into dialogue with the analytical tradition through the work ofG. E. M. Anscombe,Peter Geach, andAnthony Kenny. Anscombe wasLudwig Wittgenstein's student, and his successor at theUniversity of Cambridge; she was married to Geach, himself an accomplished logician andphilosopher 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 theDominican 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 theUniversity 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 otherAristotelians such asAlasdair MacIntyre,Philippa Foot,Mortimer Adler, andJohn Finnis, can largely be credited with the revival of "virtue ethics" inanalytic moral theory and "natural law theory" injurisprudence. Both movements draw significantly upon Aquinas.
Philosophers and theologians working in the intersection of Thomism and analytic philosophy include:
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