Abstract
Thomas Aquinas was a scholastic theologian active in the thirteenth century, when scholars of the Latin West were assimilating the Aristotelian corpus (rendered into Latin by 1200). These writings and the Islamic-Judeo commentary tradition that accompanied their reception transformed every field of philosophical enquiry and reflected a worldview that led some medieval thinkers to assert that sound philosophical reasoning does on occasion contradict articles of faith and theological doctrine. Against this, Aquinas argued that faith and reason cannot contradict one another as both are from God. This famous synthesis helped to foster an intellectual culture that allowed for the development of Aristotelian empiricism alongside scholasticism’s deeply embedded, Platonic elements. Yet Aquinas was no mere apologist. Just as he produced numerous excellent commentaries on Aristotle, Aquinas likewise developed a metaphysics asserting a distinction between being and essence with respect to all entities save God. Joining to this distinction the medieval doctrine of the convertibility of transgeneric attributes of being (or transcendentals) such as goodness and truth, Aquinas develops a Christian Aristotelianism that informs his epistemology, natural theology, ethics, theory of natural law, philosophical psychology, and semiotics (treated in this entry). Aquinas’s proofs that God exists contend that contingent entities (for whom existence and essence are distinct) would not be were it not for the activity of God (the sole necessary entity, the one being for whom existence and essence are identical). Maximally existent, God is therefore maximally good (as goodness and being are convertible). Carrying this over to philosophical psychology, ethics, and natural law theory, Aquinas explains our free actions in terms of an innate desire for happiness, the chief human good, which desire is, at bottom, a desire for the beatific vision, in which the highest possible happiness is obtained. Aquinas’s semiotics then seeks to accommodate the meaning of theological discourse to its subject’s unique nature.
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Hall, A.W. (2020). Thomas Aquinas. In: Lagerlund, H. (eds) Encyclopedia of Medieval Philosophy. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1665-7_490
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