One is the perspective of Greek philosophy, which answers the questions of the nature of things and their knowability in terms of an eternal and necessary world of inhering forms or natures that determine why things are the way they are, and why they behave as they do. Lee sets the problem of the scientific nature of theology in the context of a battle of two very different perspectives. The reason for the introduction becomes clear as one moves through the work. Once into the work, however, I found the analysis perceptive and its language in keeping with the medieval thinkers under discussion. Similarly, the Heideggerian language of the introduction did not make me optimistic about what might be done with the medieval sources. Philosophers may do this a discipline does not. I admit to being disturbed at the beginning of the work by encountering such phrases as "philosophy set for itself the challenge. Lee's agenda is essentially philosophical, and the story of the battle over the scientific nature of theology is the occasion for exploring how various thinkers, Ockham in particular, dealt with a fundamental philosophical issue. Lee's approach is both ontological and epistemological: what do we know, and how do we come to know it. Moreover, Lee reshapes the problem in terms of the importance of existing singulars in relation to the question of the ground of being, or rational ground. Moody suggested in his seminal article on empiricism and metaphysics in The Philosophical Review (1958). That reading makes Aquinas the radical when viewed in light of earlier and later approaches, somewhat along the lines that E. Lee takes Ockham as his focus (privileges the medieval outcome, if you will) and interprets the thirteenth century in light of the fourteenth. Viewed that way, it is Thomas who was ultimately successful (at least in some circles) and Ockham who was a destructive radical. Lee's work shows that there is, indeed, more.įor one thing, the story is usually told from the standpoint of the almost- successful synthesis under Aquinas, which received renewed life under the revivals of Thomism in the early modern period as well as the nineteenth century. For others, the entire enterprise was flawed from the outset, and the scientific rigor of the fourteenth-century thinkers who abandoned it, or restricted it, is to be applauded.Ĭonsidering the attention this topic has received across the last century, from Etienne Gilson's Reason and Revelation and Erwin Panofsky's Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism to recent treatments by Steven Marrone and Stephen Dumont, one wonders what more can be said on the subject. For Neo- Thomists who wish to reestablish a Christian philosophy in the modern world, the late-medieval ending of this story was an unfortunate loss of courage and insight. It is a story that finds a place in every course on medieval thought or philosophy. The traditional account covers the early attempts in the first half of the thirteenth century, culminating in the Thomistic synthesis, and then its gradual dissolution under the skeptical impact of Nominalist thought in the fourteenth century. Under the impact of Aristotle's notion of demonstrative knowledge and what constituted "scientific" proof, attempts were made to establish the demonstrable character of revealed truth and the compatibility of Christian revelation with Aristotelian science - an enterprise usually described as the synthesis of faith and reason, or more simply as Christian metaphysics. It studies the question of the scientific nature of theology from Robert Grosseteste in the early thirteenth century, through Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham, to Marsilius of Inghen and Pierre d'Ailly in the late fourteenth century. Richard Lee's book has a deceptively specific focus.
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