I hope that William James was his usual good-natured and tolerant self when he wrote:
[T]he scholastic philosophy … is only common sense grown pedantic. [The Meaning of Truth, page 44 of the Dover reprint edition]
He’s right, in general, but it’s sad that Catholic neo-scholastics in recent centuries seem to be pedantic without having all the common sense. In particular, so-called natural law theory seems often to be laws derived from nature as understood in ancient or Medieval times and raised to the level of some sort of pseudo-metaphysics.
Scholastic thought, including the Thomistic branch, was an outgrowth of what I would call the worldview of St. Augustine of Hippo, as is nearly all Western Christian thought since 500AD — at least until Descartes and Kant idealized and dogmatized views of empirical reality. This basic form of Western Christian thought is given a label such as `methodical realism’ and could be said to have been completed, to the extent possible in his historical period, by St. Thomas Aquinas. I’m working on an update of Thomistic thought, assuming that `methodical realism’ is common sense conditioned to Christian understandings of God’s self-revelations and to His ways of speaking to us regarding more contingent matters and His ways of dealing with us on a variety of matters.
As is true of some modern philosophies, such as Jamesian pragmatism, methodical realism — most especially in its Thomistic form or in the form I’m developing — starts with responses to what lies around us. We start with an active form of common sense, broadening that sense to cover more and more of our local environments and then maybe extending to some coverage of the earth and then on to the universe and maybe on to Creation where I consider Creation to include the truths of mathematics and metaphysics as accessible to human beings. All the while, we Christians use our beliefs to discipline our ways of responding and our ways of understanding what results.
I’m going to give some sound-bites to give a general impression of my way of thought — this entry can be considered an introduction for those who haven’t been following the development of my worldview or an overview for those who have.
Things are true. [St. Thomas Aquinas]
Things are true and truths are thing-like. [Loyd Fueston]
Even transcendental truths pass through those things which are human sensory organs and brains leading those absolute truths to be deformed and truncated to a thing-like form, leading to an ongoing need to restate those transcendental truths to accord with the latest understandings of things and contingent truths. [Loyd Fueston’s update of an insight of John Henry Newman]
The truth emerges in time through a communal process. [Carroll Quigley]
Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be; why, then, should we desire to be deceived. [Bishop Joseph Butler]
Take the above quotes as starting points for lines of thought or even dreamy contemplations. And always remember what Newton once said:
I keep the subject of my inquiry constantly before me, and wait till the first dawning opens gradually, by little and little, into a full and clear light. [Sir Isaac Newton]
And don’t let your mind rigidify around any understanding you develop, that is, don’t let your common sense become pedantry.