Angry Atheists and Anti-Theists

[Belacqua]

There is only a small class of people who think they are incapable of doing philosophy all that well. Thus they proceed very carefully when they try. There is a name for these people: philosophers. These are the only guys who could ever suck at philosophy; everyone else is great at it.

I like this a lot! 

It seems so easy, as long as we don't really know what we're doing.....

I know you appreciate him, Belequa, because he kept intellectualism alive in an age when the candle of wisdom the ancients lit for us was nearly extinguished. 

Aquinas was a great philosopher by any measure. He did important work in just about every field of philosophy, from aesthetics to epistemology to ethics. Some of this is long out-moded, of course, but a lot is still fascinating to work on. If people knew it better and engaged with it fairly, they would see that. 

Somehow it's got to the point where most people today who say "Aquinas' philosophy" are talking only about the Five Ways. As if that was the only thing he ever wrote. Plus it is very rare to see a non-straw-man version of the Five Ways discussed outside of the most obscure specialist literature. They are treated as a number of things which Thomas never ever intended them to be. It's kind of like the famous "angels dancing on the head of a pin" example. That problem was never used in theological debate, and was made up much later simply to ridicule people for saying something they never said. (Thomas does discuss the difference between extension and location, and gives angels as an example, in order to differentiate these important categories.) 

We also have to be careful about the common view of intellectual history, in which the wonderful rational Greeks and Romans were held underwater and drowned by the evil Christians, who were defeated in their turn after a thousand years of Dark Ages by super-hero Francis Bacon and the Enlightenment Avengers. Or something like that. Scholarship on the so-called Dark Ages, and how much intellectual activity there was, and how much of it was opposed by officialdom, shows that the popular view is about as accurate as George Washington chopping down the cherry tree.