Analytical Thomism

Analytical Thomism
Name	Popularized by John Haldane in the 1990s
Antecedents	G. E. M. Anscombe, Peter Geach, and related analytic Aristotelian work
Doctrinal status	Philosophical school; no distinct ecclesial authority
Typical fields	Action, intention, virtue, mind, God, natural law

Analytical Thomism is the contemporary research program, named especially by John Haldane, that brings the tools of Anglophone analytic philosophy to the interpretation and development of Thomist theses in metaphysics, mind, ethics, and philosophy of religion. It is an academic current, not a Roman school and not a rival Magisterium.^[1]^[2]

Theological status: Theological synthesis

Overview

Analytical Thomism is a philosophical movement which promotes the interchange of ideas between the thought of Thomas Aquinas (including the philosophy carried on in relation to his thinking, called 'Thomism'), and modern analytic philosophy. It is a branch of analytic scholasticism that draws on other scholastic sources, especially John Duns Scotus.^[3]

Scottish philosopher John Haldane coined the term in the early 1990s, and has since been one of the movement's leading proponents. According to Haldane, "analytical Thomism involves the bringing into mutual relationship of the styles and preoccupations of recent English-speaking philosophy and the ideas and concerns shared by St. Thomas and his followers".^[4]

A name for a conversation

Analytical Thomism names a conversation rather than a religious institute. Philosophers trained in the analytic tradition—clarity of argument, attention to language, modal and action theory—read Aquinas as a living interlocutor instead of as a purely historical monument. Haldane's label gathered work already underway in the wake of Anscombe and Geach, who had used Aristotelian-Thomist resources against modern moral philosophy and Cartesian accounts of mind.^[5]

The current is largely Anglophone and university-based. It is not the Leonine seminary curriculum under a new title. Some participants are Catholics committed to the Common Doctor; others are philosophers who find particular Thomist theses true. The Church may welcome the first as a form of Catholic philosophy and the second as a possible preparation of the Gospel, without confusing either with an ecclesiastical school of the older type.

Typical questions

The program has been most fruitful where analytic philosophy already felt the poverty of its inheritance: intention and the human act, virtue and natural law, the philosophy of mind against dualism and materialism, and arguments concerning God and being. Thomas's accounts of action, practical reason, and hylomorphism become resources for present argument rather than museum labels.

The method's strength is precision. Its temptation is to recast Thomas as a contributor to a journal debate while losing sacred doctrine, the order of the Summa, and the contemplative end of theology. An analysis of intention that never reaches beatitude, or a philosophy of mind that never reaches the soul as form and as created, may be useful philosophy and still not be Thomism in Thomas's own sense.^[6]^[7]

Relation to other Thomisms

Analytical Thomists often share with existential Thomists a desire to escape later manuals, and with River Forest a respect for philosophy of nature, while using a different technical idiom. They are usually distant from transcendental starting points. None of these alliances is official. A single author may work in more than one idiom.

Because the current is recent, it has no commentatorial canon and no Roman congregation behind it. That youth is a reason for patience and for caution. Not every analytic reconstruction of a medieval thesis is historically Thomas, and not every historical objection refutes a sound analytic restatement of a truth Thomas also taught.

Catholic evaluation

Fides et Ratio asks Catholic philosophy to be rigorous, sapiential, and open to metaphysics. Analytical Thomism can meet that request when it serves truth rather than fashion. It cannot replace Scripture, the Fathers, or the scholastic formation still recommended for clergy. It is one instrument in English-speaking universities.

The Church has not adopted the name and has not censured it. Individual claims about God, the soul, or moral action remain subject to ordinary doctrinal judgment. Anscombe's Catholic moral philosophy, for example, has weight as philosophy and as the work of a faithful thinker; it is not a conciliar text. The same measure applies to the whole current.

History 19th century—World War

The modern revival of Aquinas's thought can be traced to the work of mid-19th Century thomists, such as Tommaso Maria Zigliara, Josef Kleutgen, Gaetano Sanseverino, and Giovanni Maria Cornoldi. This movement received an enormous impetus by Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Aeterni Patris of 1879. In the first half of the twentieth century, Edouard Hugon, Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Étienne Gilson, and Jacques Maritain, among others, carried on Leo's call for a Thomist revival.^[8] Gilson and Maritain in particular taught and lectured throughout Europe and North America, influencing a generation of English-speaking Catholic philosophers. Some of the latter then began to harmonize Thomism with broader contemporary philosophical trends.

Similarly, the Kraków Circle in Poland used mathematical logic in presenting Thomism, which the Circle judged to have "a structured body of propositions connected in meaning and subject matter, and linked by logical relations of compatibility and incompatibility, entailment, etc."^[9] The Circle has been said to be "the most significant expression of Catholic thought between the two World Wars".^[10]

Postwar philosophical reception of Aquinas

By the middle of the 20th century, Aquinas's thought came into dialogue with the analytical tradition through the work of G. E. M. Anscombe, Peter Geach, and Anthony Kenny. Anscombe was Ludwig Wittgenstein's student, and his successor at the University of Cambridge; she was married to Geach, himself an accomplished logician and philosopher of religion. Geach had converted to Roman Catholicism while studying at Oxford, Anscombe had converted before she came up, and both were instructed in the Faith in Oxford by the Dominican Richard Kehoe, who received them both into the Church before they met one another. Kenny, an erstwhile priest and former Catholic, became a prominent philosopher at the University of Oxford and an editor and executor of Wittgenstein's literary estate, and is still portrayed by some as a promoter of Aquinas (Paterson & Pugh, xiii-xxiii), though his denial of some basic Thomist doctrines (e.g. divine timelessness) casts doubt on this.

Anscombe, and other Aristotelians such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Philippa Foot, Mortimer Adler, and John Finnis, can largely be credited with the revival of "virtue ethics" in analytic moral theory and "natural law theory" in jurisprudence. Both movements draw significantly upon Aquinas.

Notable analytical Thomists

Philosophers and theologians working in the intersection of Thomism and analytic philosophy include:

Mortimer Adler (1902–2001): Columbia University, University of Chicago, Center for the Study of the Great Ideas
Robert Alspaugh: St. Anselm's Abbey School
G. E. M. Anscombe (1919–2001): University of Oxford, University of Cambridge
David Braine (1940–2017): University of Aberdeen
Christopher Bobier: Central Michigan University
Jeffrey Brower: Calvin College, Purdue University
David Burrell (1933–2023): University of Notre Dame
John C. Cahalan: independent
Brian Davies (1951–): University of Oxford, Fordham University
Gabriele De Anna: University of Padua University of Udine, University of Cambridge, University of Bamberg
Edward Feser (1968–): Pasadena City College
John Finnis (1940–): University of Oxford, University of Notre Dame
Peter Geach (1916–2013): University of Birmingham, University of Leeds
Michał Głowala: University of Wrocław
John Haldane (1954–): University of St Andrews, Georgetown University, Baylor University
Simon Hewitt: University of Leeds
Jonathan Jacobs: Colgate University, John Jay College of Criminal Justice
Andrew Jaeger: University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Benedictine College
Fergus Kerr (1931–2025): University of Oxford
Gyula Klima (1956–): Yale University, University of Notre Dame, Fordham University
Robert C. Koons (1957–): University of Texas at Austin
Norman Kretzmann (1928–1998): Cornell University
John R. T. Lamont: University of Manitoba, University of Oxford, Catholic Institute of Sydney, University of Notre Dame Australia, Campion College, Australian Catholic University
Anthony J. Lisska (1940–2022): Denison University
Alasdair MacIntyre (1929–2025): Brandeis University, Boston University, Wellesley College, Vanderbilt University, University of Notre Dame, Duke University
James Madden: Benedictine College
Bruce D. Marshall (1955–): St. Olaf College, Southern Methodist University
William Marshner (1943–): Christendom College
Christopher Martin: University of St. Thomas (Texas)
Herbert McCabe (1926–2001): University of Oxford
Sandra L. Menssen: University of St. Thomas (Minnesota)
Cyrille Michon (1963–): Paris-Sorbonne University, Nantes University
Mark C. Murphy (1968–): Georgetown University
John P. O'Callaghan: Creighton University, University of Portland, University of Notre Dame, Pontifical Academy of Saint Thomas Aquinas
Robert Pasnau: Saint Joseph's University, University of Colorado Boulder
Craig Paterson: Saint Louis University, Providence College, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi Christian University
Roger Pouivet: University of Lorraine
Alexander Pruss (1973–): Georgetown University, Baylor University
Matthew S. Pugh (20th century–2015): Ohio Dominican College, The Ohio State University, University of St. Thomas (Texas), Providence College
Eleonore Stump (1947–): Oberlin College, Cornell University, Virginia Tech, University of Notre Dame, Saint Louis University
Stanislav Sousedík (1931–): Charles University
Michael Staron: Saint Anselm's Abbey School
Thomas D. Sullivan: University of St. Thomas (Minnesota)
Denys Turner (1942–): University of Bristol, University of Birmingham, University of Cambridge, Yale University
Michael Thompson: University of California, Los Angeles, University of Pittsburgh
T. Adam Van Wart: Ave Maria University
Giovanni Ventimiglia (1964–): Faculty of Theology of Lugano, Aristotle College, University of Lucerne

References

Back to citation John Paul II, Fides et Ratio — Encyclical on faith and reason, Aquinas as a model of Christian philosophy, and legitimate philosophical plurality under the Magisterium.
Back to citation Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Donum Veritatis — Instruction on the ecclesial vocation of the theologian, distinguishing research, schools of thought, and the Magisterium.
Back to citation "Studia Neoaristotelica: A Journal of Analytic Scholasticism".
Back to citation Haldane 2004, p. xii.
Back to citation Catechism of the Catholic Church, 36–43 and 159 — Authoritative teaching on natural knowledge of God, analogical language, and the harmony of faith and reason.
Back to citation John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor — Encyclical on the moral law, the object of the human act, and the continuing service of Thomist moral theology to Catholic teaching.
Back to citation Pius XI, Studiorum Ducem — Encyclical on Aquinas as Common Doctor, the harmony of faith and reason, and the Church's continuing commendation of his doctrine and method.
Back to citation Paterson & Pugh 2006, pp. xiii–xxiii.
Back to citation Simons 2003, pp. 281–297.
Back to citation Murawski 2014, pp. 359–376.

Bibliography

Sources

Haldane, John (2004). Faithful Reason: essays Catholic and Philosophical. London and New York: Routledge.

Murawski, Roman (2014). "Cracow Circle and Its Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics". Axiomathes. 25 (3): 359–376. doi:10.1007/s10516-014-9256-5. ISSN 1122-1151.

Paterson, Craig; Pugh, Matthew S., eds. (2006). "Introduction" (PDF). Analytical Thomism: Traditions in Dialogue. Aldershot and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-05-26.

Simons, Peter (2003). "Bocheński and Balance: System and History in Analytic Philosophy". Studies in East European Thought. 55 (4): 281–297. doi:10.1023/A:1025344204927. hdl:2262/61823. ISSN 0925-9392. S2CID 142830603., reprinted in Edgar Morscher, Otto Neumaier, and Peter Simons (2011), Ein Philosoph mit "Bodenhaftung": Zu Leben und Werk von Joseph M. Bocheński, Sankt Augustin: Academia, pp. 61-79.