More than a year ago, I wrote some articles on the relationship between Thomistic existentialism and Jamesian pragmatism as developed by William James himself and further developed in recent years by two neuroscientists, Gerald Edelman and Walter J. Freeman. There is a great overlap between Thomistic existentialism and Jamesian pragmatism in the initial steps of responding to our environments and trying to make greater sense of those environments. There is a major difference in the assumption of any Thomist that there is something to be made greater sense of, a rational something that serves God’s purposes. As you perceive more, you come to understand a greater whole which has objective existence, a world. Eventually, you might even come to perceive and understand a still greater whole, all of Creation.
This process of perception and understanding starts with our immediate environments. Following Einstein, we can now perceive a physical universe, unified and coherent and complete, but that universe can be seen as raional in a fuller only with a trust in the goodness of it all, a trust that has to rest upon a faith in an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-trusting Creator. With that faith, the physical universe becomes what I call a world, unified and coherent and complete in a greater sense as it is directed to the purposes of the Creator.
This trust in the goodness of what lies around us explains the Thomistic denial of epistemology as a philosophical enterprise. A follower of the empirical and existential methods of St. Thomas has to have faith that things are true. This means he has to accept that perceptions of things can be used to form legitimate and true knowledge without any epistemological angst. I’ve extended this faith with the further claim that truths are thing-like, and this is a faith that rests upon the belief that all contingent beings are manifestations of particular thoughts which God freely chose for Creation. It’s not a Pollyanna faith that we can trust our immediate perceptions or our intuitions. A system of thought based upon Thomistic principles can certainly recognize the legitimacy of epistemology if it’s seen as an empirical study of man’s problems in acquiring valid and unbiased information from the world.
I discuss the good and bad in pragmatism as developed by William James and his followers in these articles: What is Mind?: Pragmatism and Thomistic Existentialism and What is Mind?: More on Pragmatism and Thomistic Existentialism.