> Which was very highly regarded back then, but now we know better.
Aquinas is still highly regarded. Virtually every philosophy department in the Western world still teaches him.
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.
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"The Summa Contra Gentiles is meant as a philosophical work"
Anthony Kenny (Aquinas on Mind, 13)