Reality and Judgment according to St. Thomas

Description from Inside Flap

Man today is plagued by two great philosophical conflicts. First there is the debate between idealism and realism. Secondly, the conflict between the "new" learning, modern science, and the "old" learning, the age-old philosophia perennis.

This book shows how St. Thomas' realistic theory of judgment anticipated the modern critical problem and offered a refutation of idealism. It further shows how science for St. Thomas was both rigorous and real. Rigorous, because its judgments are universal and necessary; real, because they are judgments about the real world of existing things in experience.

In showing how the mind's contact with reality is achieved, not in simple apprehension, but in the act of judgment, the topic is treated in two parts: the phenomenology of judgment and the justification of the various categories of judgment. Father Hoenen makes it clear that for St. Thomas the mind does not make the content of its knowledge, but discovers the content in concrete experience. By a more exact reflection than that of Descartes, realism is established and the existential character of the Thomistic theory of judgment is developed.

In his study of this theory of judgment, in both its epistemological and psychological aspects, the author has gathered together all the pertinent texts.

Condition

Dustjacket rubbed, chipped, torn, and taped. Edgeworn with shelfwear and rubbing. Somewhat loose binding. Pages yellowed but clean.

From the collection of Father William Shipley, former member of the Philosophy Department at the University of San Diego. Front free-endpaper contains small inscription by previous owner.

Book Details

From the Library of Living Catholic Thought (Under the direction of the West Baden College faculty). Appendix by Charles Boyer, S.J. Translated by Henry F. Tiblier, S.J.

Original work in French language: "La théorie du jugement d'après St. Thomas d'Aquin" (Analecta Gregoriana, Vol. XXXIX, Series Facultatis Philosophicae—Sect. A, n. 3), published at Rome in 1946 by the Gregorian University Press, with an Appendix containing an article entitled, "The Meaning of a Text of St. Thomas: De veritate, Q. 1, a. 9," by Charles Boyer, S.J., of the Gregorian Universirty. This article originally appeared in the Gregorianum (V, 424–43).