"So it is that sacred doctrine is a science because it proceeds from principles established by the light of a higher science, namely, the science of God and the blessed"
... is, technically, BS. And pretty much all of Aquinas follows this pattern. Which was very highly regarded back then, but now we know better.
You seem confident in that assertion. Care to elaborate, preferably with examples/arguments?
N.b., it's not the first time I've heard such a claim so boldly stated. Typically, dismissive attitudes toward Thomas are rooted in widespread misunderstanding about what he actually argued and on what basis. Feser, for example, recalls how he had held a caricaturish view of some of the most famous arguments Thomas put forth because those caricatures are what are often taught to students of philosophy nowadays, largely because the caricatures have become part of academic received wisdom, not necessarily because of some ill intent.
None of this is to say that Thomas is infallible, just that he is a great teacher. Arguments that rely on the science of his day, for example, may require revision, but his philosophical synthesis, for example, is, at the VERY least, very defensible.
That used to be called relativism.
It's ad hominem at scale -- an attack on the institutions that produced centuries of good work rather than an honest confrontation of the work itself.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
Aquinas is still highly regarded. Virtually every philosophy department in the Western world still teaches him.
Russell also misunderstands much of Thomas’s project in this quotation. To my knowledge, Thomas never claimed to be doing philosophy (at least not according to the modern understanding of it); most of his work is theology that happens to have philosophical implications. But as Thomas notes in the opening articles of the Summa Theologica, theology as a scientia takes divine revelation as its first principles and makes rational deductions on the basis of that deposit of revelation. Importantly, however, it pursues its ends using particularly theological methods and criteria, some of which overlap with philosophical methods and criteria, while others do not.
But the starting point of theology is Anselm’s “Credo ut intelligam,” not Descartes’s Cogito. To imagine that theology is just some poorly-conducted version of philosophy is fundamentally a category error.
?
"The Summa Contra Gentiles is meant as a philosophical work"
Anthony Kenny (Aquinas on Mind, 13)