Volume 69, Issue 2, December 2015
Curtis L. Hancock
Pages 233-259
The One and the Many
The Ontology of Science in Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas
If contemporary philosophers of science could transcend the skepticism that seems to have become obligatory in modern epistemologies, they could restore a comprehensive vision of science that would be a boon to science and scientific education. Science is not mere knowledge. Science is knowledge of something that is necessary and universal because its causes are understood. This was Aristotle’s conception of science (epistēmē), a conception which includes knowledge of substances and the first ontological principles of things. St. Thomas Aquinas refined this understanding of science in a way that, perhaps surprisingly, has escaped the notice of many Thomists, especially the way St. Thomas understands physical substance to be a generic universal grounding necessary relations for some of its accidents. The recovery of Aristotle’s and St. Thomas’s conception of science would in no way threaten contemporary empirical science. Instead, it would explain how empirical science complements the ontology of science.