American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

Volume 83, Issue 2, Spring 2009

In the Twilight of Neothomism, a Call for a New Beginning—A Return in Philosophy to the Idea of Progress by Deepening Insight Rather than by Substitution
A Review of The Way toward Wisdom

With a few exceptions, the relation of modern science to medieval natural philosophy is a question that has been largely shunned in the Neothomistic era, in favor of a preoccupation with establishing a “realist metaphysics” that has no need for science in the modern sense nor, for that matter, any need for natural philosophy either. Fr. Ashley’s work confronts this narrow preoccupation head-on, arguing that, in the view of St. Thomas himself, there can be no human wisdom which leaves aside scientific development. Ashley even goes so far as to point the way to the possible development of philosophy beyond the terms of the realist / idealist framework in which Neothomism had its say.