Reading all of these different, contradictory philosophies of science was making my head swim, so I was pleased to see On Canons, a post on the First Things: On the Square blog by Edward T. Oakes. Oakes asks the following question:
The sheer fact that the canonical philosophers all disagree so radically with one another does lead to a further question: Since they can’t all be right, how do we determine who, if any, is right?
Oakes presents four options: (1) Skepticism: we can't get at the ultimate truth. (2) Pick and choose things from different philosophers. (3) View previous philosophies as building up an increasingly accurate description of reality. (4) Pick Saint Thomas Aquinas as the one who "more or less got everything right."
Oakes cites Etienne Gilson, who claimed that Aquinas got it right because of Christian revelation. He then offers the following:
That Thomas proved so successful in applying this method, using revelation to point out errors in the reasoning of past philosophers while keeping what was true in them, can be seen in the judgment of non-Thomist experts in ancient philosophy. The famous Aristotle scholar A.E. Taylor, for example, says that “the so-called Aristotelianism of Thomas is much more thoroughly thought out and coherent than what I may call the Aristotelianism of Aristotle. . . . By comparison with the Thomist synthesis of Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine, how comparatively incoherent and loose is Kant’s synthesis of Hume and Leibniz.”
Oakes offers plenty more about Aquinas and the challenge of defending his philosophy in an age where many believe that philosophy is not knowledge.
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