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Chapter 4 ST. THOMAS, PHYSICS, AND THE PRINCIPLE OF METAPHYSICS One twentieth-century school of interpretation of St. Thomas’s philosophical doctrines, the “River Forest” School, holds that physics precedes metaphysics, not merely in the order of learning, but also as providing for metaphysics its proper subject of study, being as being.1 This it does by proving the existence of immaterial reality. Thomas’s commentaries on Aristotle, as well as his explicit description of intellectual development , run counter to this interpretation. I propose to show that here. The late Fr. James Weisheipl, surely representative of the School, in a paper published in 1976,2 was aiming to show the need for Aristotelian physics, also called “natural philosophy,” and to show that it has a congeniality with modern mathematical physics. He wished to distinguish it from both mathematical science and from metaphysics. He said: Such a natural philosophy is not only valid but even necessary for the philosophical understanding of nature itself. That is to say, there are realities in nature that are not accounted for by physico-mathematical abstraction, realities such as motion , time, causality, chance, substance, and change itself. The physicist needs mechanical causes, such as matter and force, but the nature of causality as such is beyond mathematics, where even final causality is out of place. Concepts such as potency and act, matter and form, substance and accident, quite useless to the modern physicist , are established in a realistic natural philosophy. The aforementioned concepts are not established in metaphysics, and in this connection it is important to stress the differences between metaphysics and natural philosophy and to indicate the nature and relationship of each.......[273, my italics] 1. On the School, cf. Benedict M. Ashley, O.P., “The River Forest School and the Philosophy of Nature Today,” in Philosophy and the God of Abraham, ed. R. James Long, Toronto , 1991: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, pp. 1–16. 2. Weisheipl, James, O.P., “Medieval Natural Philosophy and Modern Science,” in Nature and Motion in the Middle Ages, ed. William E. Carroll, Washington, D.C., 1985: The Catholic University of America Press, pp. 261–276 [originally published in Manuscripta 20 (1976), pp. 181–196, under the title: “The Relationship of Medieval Natural Philosophy 47 He says that metaphysics has been overloaded “with innumerable problems and areas of concern that rightly belong to the natural philosopher ,”3 and he continues: This is a perversion of metaphysics as understood by St. Thomas. [273] A very strong condemnation, but one which is justified if the charges are true. But are they? What sort of case does Weisheipl make in the essay under consideration? He says there are at least two reasons why metaphysics presupposes natural philosophy. The first is that it proves the existence of some nonmaterial being, and thus establishes the subject matter of a new science, namely the science of being as such. I will return to this later. The second reason is as follows: ......This is demanded by the nature of analogous concepts. Analogous concepts are not abstracted but constructed by [275] the human mind. The prime analogue of our concept of “being,” or “thing,” is the sensible, material, concrete reality of things around us. The moment we realize that there is at least one thing that is not sensible, material, and movable, we break into the realm of analogy. From that moment on, terms such as “thing,” “being,” “substance,” “cause,” and the like are no longer restricted to the material and sensible world. We thereby stretch and enlarge our earlier conceptions to make them include immaterial reality. Such are our analogous concepts of being, substance, potency, act, cause, and the like. Such terms are seen in metaphysics to be applicable beyond the realm of material and sensible realities. The prime analogue quoad nos of all these concepts is material, sensible, movable being, which is the realm of the natural philosopher. Thus, for St. Thomas, natural philosophy is prior quoad nos to metaphysics. Natural philosophy establishes by demonstration that there is some being which is not material. This negative judgment, or more properly, this judgment of separation , is the point of departure for a higher study, which can be called “first phi48 Form and Being to Modern Science: The Contribution of Thomas Aquinas to its Understanding”]. References are to the Carroll edition. 3. One cannot help but be struck by the difference between Fr. Weisheipl’s angle on things here, and that of Thomas Aquinas in, e.g...

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