2001/07/01 by Wayne J. Hankey
Arts and Humanities · #Epistemology #Intuition #Medieval Philosophy and Theology #Medieval and Classical Philosophy #Metaphysics #Orthodoxy #Philosophy #Reinterpretation #Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought #Theology
paper · doi:10.1111/1468-2265.00162
crossref issued 2001/07/01 · crossref published 2001/07/01 · crossref published-print 2001/07/01 · openalex publication_date 2001/07/01 · crossref published-online 2002/12/16 · crossref created 2003/03/12 · crossref deposited 2023/09/11 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21 · crossref indexed 2026/07/27
In Truth in Aquinas Catherine Pickstock and John Milbank continue Radical Orthodoxy's ‘reinterpretation’ of the history of philosophy and theology by evaluating philosophy as metaphysics so that ‘metaphysics collapses into sacra doctrina ’ in Thomas Aquinas. Their strategy for saving Aquinas from Heideggerian ‘onto‐theology’ is the opposite of that Jean‐Luc Marion who in ‘Saint Thomas d'Aquin et l'onto‐théo‐logie’ keeps philosophy and metaphysics distinct from sacred teaching. The article examines some of the questions involved by reconsidering the nature of philosophy as textual commentary in late Antiquity and in the Middle Ages. It goes on to examine what Aquinas means by ‘the truth of things’, and concludes by looking at how he treats the aspects of metaphysics and the relation of metaphysics and sacra doctrina . Hankey judges that Marion is right on this question. The author suggests that what is involved with Milbank and Pickstock is not a reinterpretation of Aquinas. What they have written depends on mistakes and misrepresentations of basic points in his teaching, e.g, participation, intellectual intuition and abstractions, God's being and his existence in things, with the result that Thomas looks more like Descartes or Spinoza than himself.